Market Forces

Chapter Forty

There were times over the next few weeks when Chris had to forcibly remind himself that this was his own life he was leading.

Partly it was the hotel. There was something insulated about living out of a box of high-class services long-term, something that felt like wearing thin rubber gloves. Household tasks he was used to performing himself happened distantly, almost invisibly. He put out his dirty laundry and it came back again pristine, as if cleaned by elves. Fresh towels, and little bottles of soap and shampoo appeared daily in the bathroom by a similar magic. He ordered food and it came to his door from a kitchen he never saw, or he fed himself in one of the hotel’s three internal restaurants. Either way, he was saved the tiny increments of physical and emotional effort involved in going outside to look for a place to eat.

At Shorn, he performed with a slightly numb, mechanical competence. The work piled up into account overload as Nick Makin’s abrupt departure took its toll on everyone. He cut a path through it like someone working through dense bush with a blunt machete. Focus ahead, swing, grab, clear and step, focus ahead, swing. Occasionally he sagged, but habit kept him on his feet.

The pellet wounds in his side healed, fading rapidly from actual pain to inconvenience to vague memory. Dreams of Carla stubbornly refused to follow the same path.

Covert reports came in from the NAME via Lopez. Barranco had taken his first dose of Shorn beneficence - three hundred Kalashnikovs plus ammunition, thirty of the Aerospatiale plane-killers, an even thousand King grenades, all brought ashore in the dead of night on some Pacific beach, courtesy of a privatised Epsilon-class Russian attack sub and her demobbed crew. The best international bulk-by-stealth couriers money could buy.

On the other side of the globe, Nakamura played Cambodia the way Vasvik had told him they would. Planning for the military coup lurched into motion. Chris had the relevant local tools to hand - he’d mustered them almost absently - days before the indesp intelligence came through. He pretended to study the reports, phoned through prearranged authorisation codes to Langley an hour later, sat and waited.

Explosions bloomed across Phnom Penh like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a whorehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled. Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he’d gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace - before they left, the rapid response crew Mike called had hosed down the bloody asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue analysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully massaged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.

The media did its job, rather better than anyone had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full-colour, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold. Comp Drivers In Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Zone Gangs Reap High Noon Whirlwind! Police Commend Shorn Heroes! Coverage went global, TV and the men’s magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs. Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity. One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were queuing up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.

Sign nothing, said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance. Yet.

Corporate police units went into the zones looking for associates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one knew anything worth telling. Arrests were made. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Shorn Leads Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Corporate Community! Drug Scum Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner! Safer Streets for Our Kids Promise Executives!

Ten days in, the original events surrounding Nick Makin’s death were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded, cowardly, drug-dealing masked killers.

Reality blurred out in hype.

Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce. Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab’s engine and offers of bizarre sexual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that some time soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Parana. Assam. Makin’s accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More,

He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.

In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.

Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there - about every third night, just so we stay sane about this, Chris - he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.

Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.

She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.

He hung up on her.

He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.

‘Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days - I just couldn’t blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.’

‘I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?’

‘You need to talk to her, man.’

‘That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?’

There was a long pause at the other end.

‘Got it.’ Mike said finally.

‘Good.’ Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.’

‘Yeah.’

“night, then.’

‘Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.’ There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.

Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.

‘Who was that?’

He gestured. ‘Ah, Mike. Work stuff.’

‘Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.’

‘Yeah, well. Cambodia.’

‘Anything I should know?’

He forced a grin. ‘A lot of stuff you’d like to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.’

She threw the towel at him.

‘I’ll get it out of you,’ she promised, advancing.

The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.

He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.

Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.

She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.

‘So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Can we go up to your room?’

‘No.’

She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.

‘Have you got someone up there?’

‘Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else. You fucking left me.’

‘So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?’

He swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.’

She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.

‘I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.’

‘Fair enough.’ He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. ‘What did you come for?’

‘To apologise.’

He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Go on then.’

She managed a smile. Shook her head. ‘You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?’

‘You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla. At two o’clock in the fucking morning. You’ve got some apologising to do.’

‘You called me a whore.’

‘And you called me.’ He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the row had stoked so high. ‘You said—‘

‘I said I couldn’t recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognise you any more.’

He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. ‘So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?’

‘I told you why I came.’

‘Yeah, to apologise. You’re not making a very good job of it.’

The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.’ He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. ‘No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.’

She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recognised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.

‘That’s not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘And you don’t want to be that man any more, Chris. You aren’t that man any more. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.’

‘This is crap, Carla.’

‘Is it?’

Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.

‘I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.’ She gestured at the hotel around them. ‘You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t just the job you do any more, that fucking tower you run your remote control wars from. It’s everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?’

She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windows of the bar to the street outside.

‘You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try and turn it around.’

She gave him a bright, brittle smile. ‘You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—‘

‘And where are you going to go?’ It came out ugly.

‘I’m going to stay with,’ she laughed a little. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with you any more. I’m going to stay in Tromso for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you’re paying.’

He shrugged. ‘Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?’

She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’

She turned to go. Paused and turned back.

‘Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit-job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.’

She walked away from him.

Chapter Forty-One

Liz Linshaw came over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.

They unplugged and lay apart.

‘Thanks,’ she said, staring at the ceiling.

‘Sorry.’ He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. ‘Come here.’

She pushed his head away. ‘Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.’

‘You don’t want to hear it.’

‘Yes I do.’

He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘Carla came to see me,’ he said finally.

‘Great.’ she sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. ‘Fucking great. You seeing her again?’

‘Told you you didn’t want to hear it.’

She looked down at him, angry. ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?’

‘Doubt it.’

He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.

‘Nice.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris stared off into a corner of the room. ‘Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.’

Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean, the way she knew that—‘

‘That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit-job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you very much.’

‘Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.’ He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. ‘Christ, you’re beautiful, that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit-job, wasn’t she.’

Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. ‘You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.’

‘No?’ A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. ‘So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?’

She stared at him. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?’

‘No, I did.’ Something in her face had changed. ‘Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.’

‘Liz, you fucking sent it to me.’

‘No, Chris. I didn’t.’

‘You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blonde bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?’

She sighed and sank back against the headboard. Her gaze rolled out to the middle distance. She seemed to curl into herself.

‘Donna’s Dominion,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry?’

‘Donna’s Dominion. That’s what it was called, that particular piece of classy erotic art. I was Donna Dread, gym training world dominatrix.’ She smiled without much mirth. ‘Pretty infantile stuff, huh?’

Chris gestured uncomfortably. He was pretty sure he was blushing. Liz Linshaw nodded.

‘Got you hard, though. Right?’

‘Uh.’ He looked away.

She sighed again. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Stuff’s made to get you hard. As a male, you’d be practically dysfunctional if it didn’t. Youthful tits are supposed to turn you on, and there you’ve got four of them on screen, all rubbing up against each other, and all blown up to hyper-real proportions. You might as well get embarrassed about four lines of uncut NAME powder keeping you awake all night. It’s just another drug, Chris. Refined, maxed-up, bang-on-the-nail sex-chemistry trigger dust.’ Another weary smile. ‘So you liked me, huh?’

He cleared his throat. ‘You, uh, were you really into, you know?’

‘Girls?’ She shrugged. ‘Not really, no. I mean, get someone licking your clit for you, that’s not unpleasant, whatever sex the person doing it is. Once you get used to the six or seven people watching you off camera, that is. And you’d be surprised how quickly you do get used to that. But no, I was never a try-out lesbian, not even a try-out bi. It’s pure theatre, Chris. Just a job. Oh, yeah, and if you stick to girl-on-girl, your health insurance premiums go way down. Less risk, less general wear and tear on the works.’

‘Why did you, I mean, how did you get into it?’

This time her smile seemed genuine. Her posture unwound. She shook her head, reached over the edge of the bed for her bag, and started going through it. ‘Well I wasn’t kidnapped into it by white slavers, if that’s what you mean.’

She found a bent and crumpled ready-rolled spliff, a lighter. Sat back against the headboard again and lit up. She coughed and waved little eddies in the sudden cloud of smoke.

‘You want some of this? No? Sure?’ She pulled down a lungful of smoke, held it for a moment and let go. She looked critically at the embered end of the spliff. ‘Thing is, you listen to some twisted evangelical fuck like Simeon Sands, you’d believe we are all sex slaves by any other name, kidnapped, trapped by drugs, victims of our own unclean, incest-aroused lust - I think guys like Sands like that one especially, you hear the way they trot it out. One hand on the pulpit, one hand below, eh.’ She grinned crookedly. ‘But it just ain’t so, Chris. I mean, it isn’t this other thing the industry wants to sell you either. You know, we’re all dripping wet sluts, just can’t wait to get our orifices stuffed. Forget that. You want clinical and jaded, go watch a porno shoot. It’s work, Chris, pure and simple. More or less professional, depending on who you’re working for, better or worse paid ditto. But no one ever put me under pressure to do stuff I wasn’t happy with, and no one tried to stop me when I quit.’

‘Do you think you were typical?’

Liz held down more smoke. Frowned, then let it up. Shook her head. ‘Globally? No. I heard a lot of nasty stories coming out of Costa Rica and Thailand. Still do. But you don’t need me to tell you about that, Chris. This is what you do for a living. Enterprise zones, political instability. Market forces, weak governmental structure, the poor get fucked. Literally, in this case.’

‘Oh, right.’ The casual way she’d said it stung, made him snappish. ‘So everyone you worked with was smiling and happy were they?’

She plumed smoke, looked at him quizzically.

‘No. Even in Copenhagen, you’ve got some fucked-up girls working the trade. That blonde I was with in Donna’s Dominion? Renata something, I think she was Polish. She had some strange ideas, and those tits were just insane. She had to go to three different plastics guys before she found one who’d give her those implants and then she had on-and-off post-op trouble the whole time. So, yeah who knows? Maybe old Simeon was right in her case. Turned on to pornographic filth because her father abused her as a child. But, to be honest, I think she just wasn’t very bright. Yeah, Chris, there are going to be women doing porn who were fucked up by abuse when they were kids, it makes sense. But most of the ones I worked with were just like me — uninhibited, maybe overly exhibitionistic media wannabes, marking time while they looked for their big break. I went out to Copenhagen, looking for work with the pirate ‘casters out of Christiania. I got into Danish porn instead. It was easier, there was a lot more of it about than pirate work, and it was better paid. It was a couple of years, it felt weird and different and maybe taught me a few things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise. And I saved a lot of money. End of story. And. Happy ending, yeah.’

‘But you need to smoke that stuff to talk about it.’

The quizzical look again. ‘Chris, you need to get a grip. You’re telling me you’ve really got some kind of moral problem with my career as a porn doll a decade ago? For a man who works in international finance, you’ve got some fucking nerve.’

‘I don’t have a problem with it. And I didn’t think you had a problem with what I do either.’ Spite gleamed through. ‘In fact, I thought it got you off’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What?’

‘Sure. You fucked Mike Bryant, now you’re fucking me. Spot the connection. Hey, I’m not complaining, Liz, but take a look at your own fucking motivations. This is textbook passenger-seat passion. Let’s be honest about it.’

She sat up abruptly, flicked ash off the spliff. ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, Chris. Let’s be honest. If you had a problem with me, you could have left me well alone.’

‘Left you alone?’ The injustice of it staggered him. It was like fighting with Carla, all over again. An opening well of curdled hurt. ‘You came on pretty fucking strong to me, as I recall. At Troy’s party. After the party, at Regime Change. You called me for that one.’

‘Oh, yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have sent me a copy of your wife’s flight times to Norway, then. Because you know Chris, as invitations go, that was pretty fucking blatant.’

Shock held him unstirring for a moment. She caught it, coiled back on the bed, face still tight with anger.

‘What?’

‘I. Liz, I didn’t send you anything.’

‘Right.’

‘No, fucking listen to me.’ He reached out for her with both hands. She gestured him away. Stared out of the window. ‘I didn’t send you that stuff. I didn’t even know Carla was going to Tromso until about an hour before you called me. I. Someone’s fucking with us, Liz.’

Her gaze tracked warily back to him. She didn’t turn her head. Her whole body was closed to him again, limbs folded defensively.

‘I’m not a drive-site groupie, Chris.’

‘Okay.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Okay, you’re not a drive-site groupie. Whatever you say. But I’m telling you, I never sent you those flight details. And you’re telling me you didn’t send me Donna’s Dominion. So. Someone’s fucking with us, right? It’s got to be that.’

And he got her back. Limb by limb, line by line, the softening stole through her. The place in Carla he could no longer reach, the point of reconciliation abraded by years of impact along the same emotional front. She opened a little, turned to face him. Nodded.

A tiny shard of hope spiked him, unlooked for. A prickle across the underside of each eye and a sudden surge in the empty space he’d excavated in his own chest.

This time. He promised himself silently. This one, this time, this woman. I will not fuck this one up.

But the hyena was still out there, still prowling in silhouette on the sunset horizon of his thoughts. And would not shut up.

Chapter Forty-Two

He got to work early, running on residual anger that still had no clear focus. The datadown rolled out its gathered screed of messages. Top of the line, Irena Renko, subject: need loading fast. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the name in the last week. Something snapped.

‘For fuck’s sake.’ He hit reply, and listened to the dial.

‘Da?’

‘Listen to me, you stupid fucking natasha. I do not need your whore’s services, now or ever. Just leave me the fuck alone.’

There was a pause, during which he nearly hung up. Then the accented voice came back, icy with controlled rage.

‘Just who fucking you think you are talking to? Fucking suit cowboy, think you will talk to me like this. I am Captain Irena Renko, commander of free sub freighter Kurt Cobain talking to you.’

‘I’m. Sorry?’

‘You should fucking be sorry. Fuck your mother! Four days I am here in Faslane, awaiting second loading. Four days! My crew drunk in Glasgow bars. What for you waste my time like this?’

‘I. Wait. The Cobain?’ Chris flailed across the desk and hit the datadown deck. Details fled up into a new window. ‘You’re loading for the NAME? Military hardware.’

‘No,’ purred the woman at the other end. ‘I am not loading, because I’m waiting four fucking days for cargo. Port Authority know nothing. I call Lopez, he also knows nothing. Normally, Cobain, she sails and fuck you all if this happens. But Lopez tells me, call you. You are sympathetic, he says. Not like other suits. Perhaps I have wrong man.’

‘No, no. Captain Renko, you have the right man. I, I apologise for my tone earlier. There’s a lot going on at this end.’

‘Well, at this end is nothing going on. No delivery, no data about delivery. And mooring charge is costing me—‘

‘Never mind the mooring charge. I’ll cover that, plus ten per cent for your inconvenience. Go get your crew, I’ll get back to you.’

He cut the connection and stared across the office. The marbled chess board gleamed back at him, pieces frozen in a pattern that hadn’t changed in weeks. He called Mike.

‘Yeah, Bryant.’

Mike, listen, we’ve got a problem.’

‘I’ll say. I would have called you earlier, but I didn’t see the Saab. Didn’t know you were in.’

‘It’s still at home. I haven’t been back for it yet.’ A chilly quiet back down the line. ‘Mike, I just heard from our couriers to Barranco.’

‘We haven’t got time to worry about the NAME right now, Chris. Didn’t you catch the news this morning? Fuck, last night even.’

‘No, last night I.’ I was kiss-and-make-up fucking your ex-mistress. ‘I went to bed early. Headache. And I’m coming from the hotel in cabs at the moment, I don’t get the radio either. What’s going on?’

‘Some fucking junior Langley aide just came down with a bad dose of conscience. He’s promised covert reports from the last two years to ScandiNet and FreeVid Montreal.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Yeah. What I said.’

‘Cambodia?’

‘We don’t know yet. This gutless wonder at Langley worked archive, so could be the Phnom Penh stuff is too recent to show up. But we can’t rely on that. There’s no telling what he’s going to give them.’

‘Can’t we just have the guy wiped?’

‘Oh, what do you think Langley are trying to do right now? Chris, he worked for them. He was on the inside. You don’t think he’s going to have covered himself? He’s grabbed the discs and gone underground.’

‘Okay, so get someone else, someone better than Langley. Special Air, or one of the Israeli contractors.’

‘Same applies, Chris. First they’ve got to find the fucker. And meanwhile ScandiNet and FreeVid are leaking this fucking stuff like vindaloo diarrhoea. We’re going to have the UN charter people all over us by end of the week at the outside.’

‘Well, look.’ Chris frowned. Something didn’t fit here. ‘Calm down. They don’t have any power of access. All they can do is make a noise. We fight them in the courts, the whole thing boils down to two years’ paperwork and legal wrangling. What are you getting so bent out of shape about?’

‘It’s bad for fucking business, alright. Leakage of any sort. Kind of publicity we don’t need.’

‘Yeah, well, speaking of bad for business, you’d better get onto your pal Sally Hunting. I’ve just had a Russian sub commander yelling at me because she’s been waiting four days at Faslane for a NAME shipment that hasn’t turned up.’

There was a beat of silence. ‘What?’

‘You heard. Barranco’s Mao sticks have gone walkabout. No one at Faslane can find them.’

‘That can’t be.’ There was an odd strain in the other man’s voice.

‘Can be. Is. Look, I’m going to ring Lopez in Panama. See if he knows anything. You get onto Sally, then call me back.’

Lopez wasn’t answering. Chris hung up and was about to try again when the datadown lit with an incoming video call from Philip Hamilton. He frowned again and picked up.

‘Yeah?’

Hamilton’s soft features resolved on the screen. ‘Ah. Chris. There you are.’

‘Yeah.’ Still the vague sense of something out of place. He’d had almost no dealings with the junior partner since he joined Shorn. Some of the Central American stuff he’d inherited from Makin brushed up against Hamilton’s accounts, but—

‘What can I do for you, Philip?’

‘Well, Chris.’ The junior partner’s tone was silky. ‘It’s more a case of what I can do for you, I think. You’ve no doubt heard about the Langley crisis.’

‘Yeah. Mike t—‘ He just stopped himself. ‘I was just talking to Mike about it. Archive material, they reckon. Suggests the Cambodia stuff might not be included.’

‘That’s correct.’ Hamilton nodded. His chins folded. ‘In fact, we just got confirmation. Good news for everybody. Louise will probably forward it down to you shortly. But, ah, it seems there is one covert operation that will crop up, and unfortunately it has your name on it. I’m talking about the action you took against Hernan Echevarria’s security forces in Medellin.’

Now the sense of wrongness was quick and jagged. Like the floor cracking apart under him.

He covered it with drawl. ‘Yeah. So?’

‘Well, I think under the circumstances, and given recent developments with the Echevarria regime, the best thing would probably be if you were removed from the NAME account, at least for the time being.’

Chris sat up. ‘You can’t fucking do that.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What developments are you talking about, Philip? Last I heard, the Echevarria regime was a corpse walking.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Hamilton fingered his jowls. ‘This also is new. Perhaps you’d better come along to the briefing this afternoon. I’d invited Mike, and assumed he could pass on detail to you later. But, yes, perhaps it’s better if you’re there. Main conference, two o’clock.’

Chris stared at him. ‘Right. I’ll be there.’

‘Marvellous.’ Hamilton beamed and cut the link. His face inked out, still smiling.

Chris tried Lopez again. Still nothing. He windowed up an indesp site he had the keys to and checked the Langley data. Nothing solid. The whistleblower’s face grinned out of an employee file thumbprint that was five years stale. He looked young and happy, and blissfully unaware of what his just-acquired job was going to do to him a few years down the road.

Because they’re going to fucking crucify you, son, Chris told the thumb-print silently. They’re going to take you apart for this.

The datadown chimed. Audio call from Mike. He grabbed it.

‘Talk to me, Mike. What’s going on.’

‘I don’t know, Chris. I wish I did. Sally says the order still went through, but it’s been diverted to some surface shipping contractor out of Southampton. Standard cross-Atlantic rate, she’s getting a cashback bonus for the difference in cost.’

‘Surface?’

‘I know, I know. I don’t get it either. It’s not like Barranco can wander into Barranquilla docks and just sign for it.’

‘That’s—‘ He stopped. Abruptly, the spinning chaos of the last ten minutes locked to a halt in his head. He saw the sense.

‘Mike, I’ll call you back.’

‘Wait, you—‘

He snapped the line across, sat staring at the datadown for a full thirty seconds while the sudden weight in his guts settled. Has to be, he knew. Fucking has to be. He felt physically sick with the knowledge.

He placed another call to Lopez, got the busy signal and fired an override down the connection. There was a brief electronic squabble on the line, as Shorn’s intrusion software fought with the Panama City net, then Lopez came through, still talking to someone else in furious Spanish.

‘—de puta, me tienen media hora esperando—‘

‘Joaquin, listen to me.’

‘Chris? Como has podido—‘ The Americas agent stopped as his language caught up with the change of call. ‘Listen, Chris, what are you fucking playing at over there?’

‘I don’t know, Joaquin, I don’t know. This shit only just landed on me, and I don’t know what it is. Talk to me, man. I’m blind here. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘What’s going on,’ said Lopez, rage spurting from every syllable, ‘is that you’ve sold me just like your fucking amigo Bryant. Arena challenge, Chris. That mean anything to you. I just got the word. Shorn-approved tender, I got some fucking favela-born sicario calling me out for a half per cent fee reduction. He’s twenty years old, Chris. Priority challenge, two weeks’ notice. Shorn-fucking-approved, man.’

‘Alright, listen.’ Chris felt the sudden clarity of drive time set in, the suspended icy seconds of adrenalin injection. ‘Joaquin, listen to me carefully. That’s not me. The tender, it’s not authorised by me. I’m going to fix it for you, it’s dead on the datadown. I promise you. You’ll never have to fight. Meantime—‘

‘Yeah, you say that. You said—‘

‘Joaquin, fucking listen to me. I got you out of Bogota in one piece, didn’t I? I told you, I look after my people. Now, I don’t have much time. I need you to get onto Barranco.’

‘You want me to fucking work for you while—‘

‘Fucking listen, I said.’ Whatever was in his voice must have got through. Lopez went quiet. ‘This is life or death, Joaquin. You get onto Barranco, and you tell him to stay away from that delivery beach next week. Tell him the rest of the arms aren’t coming, and most likely there’ll be an army death squad waiting for him instead. Tell him I’m under fire as much as he is, and it’ll take me time to sort it out. He’s got to fall back to safe ground, and stay there until he hears from me. Have you got that?’

‘Yeah.’ Lopez was suddenly calm, as if the same adrenalin shiver had crept down the line and touched him with its time-warping cold. ‘Got it. You’re in the arena too, huh?’

‘Yeah, looks that way.’ There was a finality about the way his own words sounded in his ears. ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘Chris.’

He held off the disconnect. ‘Yeah. Still here.’

‘Chris, listen to me. You going into the arena, you stab low, man. Stab low, where they won’t see it coming. And when you pull it out, you twist that fucker. Quadruples the wound. You got that?’

Chris nodded distantly. ‘I got it, Joaquin. Thanks.’

‘Hey, I’ll be praying for you, man.’

Philip Hamilton cut a surprisingly impressive figure in presentation. Somehow the softness of the man disappeared, became confident bulk and the resonance base for a rich baritone voice that gave his words a longevity way beyond the moment of their utterance. His evidence was compelling, it was set up that way, but more powerful was the echo of what he said in the minds of his listeners. Chris looked round the table and saw heads nodding, Mike Bryant’s included.

‘Thus we convert,’ Hamilton declared vibrantly, ‘the uncertainty of change, the certainty of post-land-reform unrest, and the probable budget deficit of the classic revolutionary regime, at a stroke, into a return to the profitable status quo we have enjoyed in the NAME for the last twenty years. It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that there is

really no question or choice here, only a course of action that common sense and market return dictate. Thank you.’

Applause rippled politely round the table. Murmured comments. Hamilton inclined his head and stood back a couple of steps. Louise Hewitt stood up.

‘I think that’s pretty clear, thank you, Philip, but if there are any questions, perhaps we could have them now?’

‘Yes.’ Jack Notley raised a hand with completely superfluous deference. Every exec in the room shut up on the instant, and pinned their gaze on the grizzled senior partner. Louise Hewitt folded herself back into her chair, and Philip Hamilton moved to take up the space she had left him. It was, Chris thought bitterly, choreographed tightly enough to be a Saturday Night Special dance act.

‘Yes, Jack.’

‘The Americans,’ said Notley with heavy emphasis that earned a sprinkling of laughter. The old man’s nationalist eccentricity was well known in the division. ‘We know from Mike here’s painstaking research that Echevarria junior has, shall we say, a predilection for our transatlantic cousins and they are, unfortunately, far closer to him, both geographically and culturally, than are we. I appreciate, Phil, that you’re factoring in Calders RapCap with the liaison work, and obviously, Martin Meldreck, well he believes in a free market about as much as Ronald Reagan did.’ More laughter, louder this time. ‘So the secondary contractors he brings in will be exclusively US firms. That much is clear. My question is, will this be enough? Will it hold off Conrad Rimshaw at Lloyd Paul, for example? Or the Saunders Group, or Gray Capital Solutions, or Moriarty Mills & Silver? Francisco Echevarria has had close dealings with all these gentlemen, or at least their Miami officers, at one time or another. Can we be confident he will not bring them into play as soon as a budget review fails to please him?’

Hear fucking hear, sleeted through Chris. Glad someone in this bunch of fucking sycophants spotted it.

Hamilton cleared his throat.

‘That’s a fair concern, Jack. I think it’s indicative that the firms you’ve just named, with the exception of the Saunders Group, are all fast, hungry players from the New York corner. Sure, they’ll all bear watching. But the point with Calders is that they have the US state department’s ear. That’s long-term relationship - in the case of Senator Barlow, we’re talking fifteen years, and there are others with ties almost as old. And of course, as you say, the secondary contractors Calders RapCap’s people will bring in should have their own lobby network in place. If we combine all that pull with the influence we have on our own Foreign Office here in London, I feel sure we’re in a position to repel any prospective boarders.’

He got the laughter too. He beamed round the table.

‘Any more questions?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got a question for you.’ Chris climbed to his feet, trembling slightly. He stared at Hamilton. ‘I’m curious as to why the fuck you’re throwing away a guaranteed regime change, with a leader who is guaranteed one hundred per cent proof against US involvement of any kind - in favour of this. Fucking. Carve up.’

Sudden slither of shock around the table. Gasps, shuffling, the shaking of wiser heads. At his side, Mike Bryant was looking up at him in disbelief.

‘Ah. Chris.’ Hamilton smiled briefly, like a comic to his audience just before the straight man gets it. ‘Now before you go and get Mike’s baseball bat, could I just point out that we’re trying for a non-violent model here.’

A couple of sniggers, but battened down. Officially, no one below partner level was supposed to know what had really happened to Hernan Echevarria. Nick Makin would have talked, Chris knew, he would have made sure word got out, but just how far they could all go along with Hamilton’s indiscretion was unclear. Once again, gazes sought Jack Notley for his reaction, but the senior partner’s features could have been pale granite.

‘You stupid fuck,’ said Chris clearly, and the silence that followed it was absolute. ‘Do you really think Vicente Barranco is going to be stopped by some pissant cokehead dressed up in his old man’s uniform? Do you really think he’ll just go away?’

He saw Louise Hewitt on her way to getting up. Saw Jack Notley lay a hand on her arm and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Philip Hamilton spotted the exchange as well, and his mouth contracted to almost anal proportions.

‘Might I remind you, Mr Faulkner, that you are talking to a partner. If you can’t show the proper respect in this meeting, I will have you removed. Do you understand me?’

Chris’s eyes widened slightly, and an unpleasant smile floated onto his face.

‘Try it,’ he said softly.

‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice cracked across the room. ‘If you have anything to contribute, I’d like you to contribute it now, and then sit down. This is a policy meeting, not the Royal Shakespeare Company.’

Chris nodded. ‘Alright.’ He looked round the room. ‘This is for the record. I know Vicente Barranco, and I’m telling you, if you try to fuck him over like this, he’ll fade back into the highlands like he has before and he’ll take the disenfranchised of the NAME with him by the thousand. And then, some day, maybe five years down the road, maybe next year, he’ll be back. He’ll be back, and he’ll do what we were going to ask him to do in the first place, and when he’s sitting in the Bogota parliament chamber, and Echevarria junior is facing a firing squad somewhere for crimes against humanity, we’ll find ourselves on the wrong fucking side. He’ll go to someone else, maybe Nakamura, maybe the Germans, and he will cut us out. No GDP percentage, no enterprise zone licences, no arms trade, no supply side contracts, no commodities angle, nothing. We’ll just have a roomful of angry Americans, and nothing to feed them with.’

More silence, glances up and down the table in search of where this was going. Chris jerked his chin at Hamilton and sat down.

Hamilton looked at Notley. The senior partner shrugged. Hamilton cleared his throat.

‘Well, Chris. Thank you for that, ah, academic insight. Of course, I appreciate you taking the time to come and give your view on an account you’re no longer working on, but let me just say, I think we can handle one disgruntled marquista and indeed there are already initiatives in place—‘

Chris grinned like a skull.

‘He won’t be there, Hamilton. I already called Lopez, told him to steer Barranco well clear of the beach. When the Cobain doesn’t show up, and junior’s pet thugs do, either they’ll find nothing, or better yet Barranco’ll catch them in an ambush and slaughter them. After that, he’ll fade like a fucking ghost.’

The room erupted before he finished. Uproar from the gathered ranks of execs, half of them on their feet, pointing and shouting, not all wholly opposed to Chris, it seemed, Hamilton yelling across the melee of voices, something about fucking professional misconduct, Notley bellowing for order. The door burst open and security rushed the room, wielding non-lethal weaponry. Louise Hewitt went to stop them, hands and voice raised to make herself understood above the noise.

In the midst of it all, Mike turned to Chris, face distorted with shock and anger. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he hissed.

It took ten minutes to clear the conference room, and even then security weren’t happy about leaving the partners with Chris. They’d heard their own set of rumours about the Echevarria incident.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Notley. ‘Really, Hermione. I appreciate your diligence, but we’re all colleagues here. Just tempers flaring, that’s all. A bit of misplaced road rage. Just keep a couple of your people outside the door, that’ll be fine.’

He ushered the guard captain out and closed the doors, then turned back to the table. In the places they had occupied when the room was filled, Chris, Mike, Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton sat staring at their respective patches of polished wood. Notley came back to the head of the table and stood looking at them.

‘Right,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s sort this out, shall we?’

Louise Hewitt made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t see anything to sort out, Jack. Faulkner’s just admitted to gross professional misconduct—‘

‘Yeah, that’s—‘

‘Chris, you will shut up,’ roared Notley. ‘You are not a partner, nor will you ever be if you cannot behave in a civilised fashion. Do as you’re told and be fucking quiet.’

‘Louise is right, Jack.’ Hamilton’s voice was soft and calm, at odds with the rage he’d shown earlier. He was back on comfortable ground. ‘Warning Barranco has endangered a delicate piece of policy restructuring. At a minimum, it’s cost us a possible bargaining chip with Echevarria. At worst, it’s given succour to a terrorist who could provide us with insurgency problems for the next decade.’

‘He was a freedom fighter last week,’ muttered Chris.

Louise Hewitt turned a look of distilled contempt on him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Chris,’ she said lightly. ‘Would it be fair to say that you’ve become political where the NAME is concerned? That you’ve been contaminated by local issues?’

Chris looked at Notley. ‘Am I allowed to answer that?’

‘Yes. But you’ll keep your tone civil, and show some respect, is that understood? This isn’t some basement fight club in the zones.’

‘Yes, I understand that.’ Chris jabbed a finger at Hamilton. ‘What I don’t understand is our junior partner’s system of communication. Until this morning, I had no idea either that I had been relieved of duty on the NAME account, or that we were reversing our established client relationship.’

‘Echevarria is the established—‘

‘Philip.’ Notley wagged a finger at the junior partner. ‘Let him finish.’

‘In fact,’ Chris saw the opening and accelerated into it. ‘The client change was news to me until this meeting, which wasn’t helpful. If I warned Barranco off, it was because I thought someone was running infiltration into the account—‘

‘Oh, please.’ Louise Hewitt pulled a face. ‘This is your job on the line, Chris. Surely you can do better than that.’

‘This morning, Louise, I received a direct call from the captain of the sub freighter we’re using to ship Barranco’s arms. She’s stuck in Faslane, waiting for freight that isn’t coming because this,’ Chris indicated Hamilton, ‘genius has had it rerouted to the NAME military. Only he didn’t think to inform me of the fact, so all I can assume is outside interference. I act accordingly, I protect our client as best I can. I get slammed for it, when the real problem here is a lack of top-down communication.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Hamilton angrily. He also had seen the loophole.

‘Am I, Philip?’ Chris turned to gesture at Mike Bryant. ‘Ask Mike. He’s been as much in the dark as I have, he knows all about the sub freighter call, because the two of us were both trying to work out what the fuck was going on this morning. Right, Mike?’

Bryant shifted in his seat. For the first time ever that Chris could remember, he looked uncomfortable.

Notley’s gaze sharpened. ‘Mike?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Sorry, Phil. Louise. Chris is right. You should have told us earlier.’

Hamilton leaned across the table, flushed. ‘Bryant, you knew —‘

‘I knew there was a policy meeting, and yeah, from the hints you dropped, I guessed the way it was going. But there was nothing solid, Phil. And nothing about the shipments. You know,’ a sideways glance at his friend, ‘I didn’t know what Chris was going to do, but I couldn’t tell him for sure what was going on either. I can see why he would have played it the way he did.’

The room was still. A glance crackled between Hamilton and Hewitt. No one spoke. Jack Notley steepled his fingers.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked quietly.

Louise Hewitt shrugged. ‘Only that what we’ve heard is a pack of lies designed to hide the fact that Chris has gone political on us.’

‘Anything constructive,’ asked Notley, still more softly.

‘Yes,’ said Chris, thinking of Lopez, tossed into the arena and up against a twenty-year-old blade sicario who’d be savage with favela poverty and sight of a way out. Thinking of Barranco, machine-gunned to death on a darkened beach, blood leaking into the sand under a shattering of glass shard stars. ‘I am not political. My reasons for backing Vicente Barranco have nothing to do with politics. And anyone who wants to call that into question can see me on the road.’

Chapter Forty-Three

‘You are a lying motherfucker, Chris.’ Mike Bryant paced back and forth in front of the BMW, furious. His feet crunched in the hard shoulder gravel. Off to one side, a breeze stirred the grass beside the motorway ramp. He stopped and jabbed a finger at Chris. ‘You have turned political, haven’t you. Fucking Barranco got to you, didn’t he?’

Chris leaned on the still warm hood of the car, arms folded. The orbital stretched away below them, deserted as far as the eye could see in both directions. After the confines of the Shorn block, the sky over them seemed enormous. They’d driven for less than an hour, but it felt as if they stood at the edge of the world.

‘Oh, give me a fucking break. You’re accusing me of politics. A week ago, Barranco was the horse to back. Now suddenly, he’s unprofitable? What is that, Mike? That’s not political?’

‘The numbers make sense,’ said Bryant.

‘The numbers?’ Chris came off the hood of the BMW, taut with rage. ‘The fucking numbers? That shit is made up, Mike. You can make the numbers tell you any fucking thing you want them to. What about the numbers that made sense for Barranco? What happened to them? What are we, economists all of a sudden? You want to draw me a fucking curve? It’s got nothing to do with reality, Mike. You know that’

Mike looked away. ‘That fact remains, Chris. You’re in way too close with Barranco. You’ve got to come off the account. Let Hamilton run with it, see what happens.’

‘Great. And meanwhile what happens to Joaquin Lopez?’

‘That’s not important!’ Bryant made fists, punched exasperatedly off into the wind. ‘Fuck Chris, pay attention, will you. You can’t get personal on this thing. It’s just business. Lopez has been undercut, that’s all there is to it. If this new guy can do the same work for a percentage point less commission, what the fuck are we doing still working with Lopez anyway?’

‘It’s a half per cent, Mike. And he’s a twenty-year-old sicario, straight out of the favelas. How do we know what he’ll do?’

‘If he’s hungry, he’ll do well. They always do.’

‘Oh, what the fuck are you talking about, Mike? You were at the briefing. This guy is cheap and aggressive, and that’s all we know. He could be fucking illiterate for all the background Hamilton’s shown us. This is a bad call, Mike. This isn’t business, it’s a fucking greed call. Can’t you see that?’

‘What I see, Chris, is that you’re cruising for a fall.’ Mike’s voice softened, but it was the gentle tug of a steel tow cable, taking up slack. He moved in, stood close. ‘I see why you’re acting like this, but it’s no good. You’re out of control. You’re unmanageable. And we can’t afford that, not in any of us. I’m sorry about what happened to your dad, really I am.’

Chris flinched away. Mike caught his arm.

‘No, I am. I’m sorry about the zones and your mum and everything that’s happened to you. But that’s the past, Chris, and it’s over. It doesn’t give you an excuse to fuck up everyone else’s life around here. Now I’m telling you, listen to me, Chris, I’m telling you, you’re off the NAME account. End of story. I’m the one that brought you aboard in the first place, and now I’m cutting you loose. It’s not like you haven’t got enough else to worry about. Fuck, Chris, why don’t you go home? Talk to Carla, sort your life out.’

Chris shoved him away, both palm-heels into the chest. For a flashpoint second, both men almost dropped into a karate stance.

‘I’ve told you before, Mike. I don’t need marital advice from you.’

‘Chris, you’re throwing away the best—‘

‘Shut the fuck up!’ The yell lashed out, fury etched with pain. ‘What do you know about it, Mike, what the fuck do you know about it?’

‘I know—‘

Chris cut across him savagely. ‘Try staying faithful to Suki for ten minutes, why don’t you? Try acting like a responsible father and husband for a change. Get your dick out of Sally Hunting and Liz Linshaw and whoever else you’re dipping it into these days. There. You enjoying this, Mike? Doesn’t feel good, does it?’

‘I’m not seeing Liz at the moment,’ said Mike quietly. ‘She’s got a lot of work on. And I haven’t fucked Sally Hunting in better than six years. You want to make sure of your facts before you start mouthing off.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

They stood twitchily, facing each other across one corner of the BMW’s hood. Very distantly, the sound came of a single vehicle on the orbital. Finally, Mike Bryant shrugged.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you want it. But what I said before stands. You’re off the NAME account, you’re—‘

His phone queeped for attention. He grimaced and fished it out, pressed it impatiently to his ear. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Out on the orbital, why? Yeah, he’s right here.’

He handed the phone to Chris.

‘Hewitt,’ he said.

Louise Hewitt sat behind her desk, hands spread on its surface as if she might find built-in weaponry there to blast Chris into grease on the carpet. Her tone was chilly.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re back from your picnic in the country. There are a couple of things we need to clear up.’

Chris waited.

‘Primarily, I’m concerned to get your files for the NAME transferred to Philip Hamilton’s desk as soon as electronically possible. He’ll need your Panama City contacts, the background data on Barranco, and any of the other insurgents you did work on for Hammett McColl.’ She offered him a thin smile. ‘Since we’re now back in the business of helping the regime flatten its opponents, anything you have will be of some value.’

‘Then maybe you should shut down the agency tender on Lopez. He knows the ground. That’s value, right there.’

She looked him up and down, like a specimen of something she’d thought was extinct. ‘Remarkable, Chris. Your capacity for inappropriate loyalty, I mean. Quite remarkable. However, I think we all agreed at the briefing that a clean break is essential. There’s no telling what inconvenient loyalties Lopez himself may have. Perhaps he has, uh, bonded with Vicente Barranco as strongly as you have. The man is, by all accounts, quite inspiring.’

Nothing. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

‘But I digress,’ Hewitt said smoothly. ‘In addition to the file transfer, I want you to prepare a formal statement of apology for your behaviour today. For posting on our intranet. First and foremost, that means an apology for your zone-mannered outburst in Philip’s briefing, but it’s not limited to that. There are other matters. I feel, and our senior partner concurs, that the apology had better also cover your failure to consult your colleagues before taking client-related decisions.’

‘Notley said that?’

The thin smile again. ‘He’s not on your side, Chris, whatever you think. Don’t make that mistake. Notley’s concerned wholly with the success of Shorn Conflict Investment, with maybe a side interest in waving the Union Jack when he gets the chance. Call it a hobby. That’s it, that’s the whole story. At the moment, he still thinks you’re a necessary component for the division to do well. Thus far, I’ve failed to persuade him otherwise, but I think, with your help today, he’s coming around. I told you once you’d disappoint him, and I think we’re closing on that.’

‘That’d make you happy, would it?’

‘What’d make me happy, Chris, is to take back our plastic from your lightly charred and broken corpse.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m unlikely to get that chance, of course. Policy doesn’t allow us to duel across partner-employee lines. But I will, I think, live to see you booted out of Shorn and back to the riverside slum existence you so eminently suit. I’ve told you before, and it’s becoming clearer by the day, you do not belong here.’

Oddly, the line made him grin. ‘Well, you’re not the only person who thinks that, Louise.’

It got him a sharp look, but Hewitt wasn’t biting.

‘Notley and I have also agreed that you’d better draft the apology to Philip’s specifications. A first draft by this evening. That’s a minimum requirement if you intend to continue with this firm. Philip’s in uplink conference right now, with Echevarria. But he’ll be done by six. Take it in for his approval then. You might like to add a verbal apology at the same time.’ She looked at him, grim amusement curled in the corner of her mouth. ‘A personal touch, say. A little bridge-building.’

He walked out, wordless. Louise Hewitt watched him go, and as the door slammed, the smile broadened on her lips.

It took him the walk to his own office to decide. Two flights of stairs and a corridor. He saw no one. He reached the door with his name on it, stood facing the metalled slab for ten seconds, and then turned away.

He was a dozen paces away and accelerating before it had properly dawned on him what he was going to do.

I look after my people.

He found his way almost absently, most of him thinking about Carla and how fucking delighted she’d be to see his life come tumbling down like this. The main door to the conference room was locked, but the entrance to the covert viewing chamber was on a code he knew. He let himself in. Peered through the gloom and the glass panel.

In the conference room, Philip Hamilton sat opposite a holo of Francisco Echevarria. The dictator’s son was dressed in his usual Susana Ingram splendour. He looked hard and implacable against Hamilton’s soft and light-suited untidiness.

‘—are aware that you have friends in Miami, and we have no desire to exclude them from the proceedings. You should certainly speak with Martin Meldreck at Calders, who will, I’m sure—‘

Enough. He coded himself through the connecting door, stood abruptly behind Hamilton. Echevarria’s eyes widened as he stepped inside the pick-up field of the holoscanner and he knew that in the chamber on the other side of the world he had appeared, like a ghost at the feast.

Hamilton turned around in his chair.

‘Faulkner.’ He wasn’t worried yet, just surprised. Anger edged his cultured tones. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, interrupting me with a client?’

Chris grinned down at him. ‘You wanted a statement from me.’

‘Yes. In due course. At the moment, I’m busy. You can—‘

Chris hit him. Open-handed, swinging from the shoulder. It took Hamilton across the side of the head and tipped him out of the chair.

‘First draft.’ Chris grabbed him up by the hair and hit him again in the face, this time with a fist. He felt the junior partner’s nose break. He punched him once more for security and let go. Hamilton slumped to the floor like a filled sack. He turned about, reached Francisco Echevarria with his eyes.

‘Hello, Paco.’ He got his breath back, straightened up the chair. ‘You don’t know me, do you? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the man who beat your father to death.’

Echevarria’s face tightened. ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy, man? You di’n kill my father.’

Chris settled into the chair. ‘No, I did. The terrorist stuff was something we set up to cover what really happened. The CE—, those guys, they went with the claim because it gives them prestige. Your father was a sick fuck, and anyone killing him could claim they’d done a good day’s work.’

‘You gonna fuckin’ die for that, man.’ The dictator’s son was staring at him, transfixed. ‘You gonna fuckin’ die .’

‘Oh, please. As I was saying, there’s no way the, that bunch, are well enough organised to do something like that on the streets of London and get away with it. So, as I said, I killed your old man. I beat him to death, in this very room, with a baseball bat. All part of a day’s work for the Shorn corporation. Check with Mike Bryant if you don’t believe me, I’m a colleague of his.’

Echevarria’s voice came out strangled. ‘You—‘

‘It’s what we do here, Paco. Neoliberal commercial management. Global mayhem, remote-control death and destruction. Market Forces in action. If you don’t like it—‘

Hamilton charged him from the side.

He had time to be impressed - fat fuck didn’t look like he had it in him -then the chair went over and the junior partner was on top of him, bloodied nose spattering down into his face, soft hands digging into the cords of his throat with surprising strength.

Chris wasted no time struggling. He got a grip on the little finger of Hamilton’s right hand, curled it back and snapped it. Hamilton yelped and let go. Chris came up from the floor like a hinge and punched the partner in the throat. Hamilton lurched back, just on his feet, clutching at the point of impact. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Echevarria was yelling in Spanish. Chris got to his feet, stalked towards Hamilton. The partner’s eyes widened. Chris threw a punch, Hamilton ducked and fended with a rusty boxing move, the other hand still at his throat. There wasn’t much strength in it, and he came up panting. Impatiently, Chris repeated the punch, snagged Hamilton’s wrist with an aikido hold he knew and jerked the partner off balance towards him. He punched low into the expansive gut, and as Hamilton spasmed, he grabbed him round the neck and yanked up and round.

It had the fury of the whole day behind it.

It snapped Hamilton’s neck.

Chris heard the muffled crack, and as the partner went limp in his grip, the rage drained out of him. He let go and Hamilton hit the floor. He turned back to Echevarria and the suited aides who were crowding into the holocast around him. They stared at him like frightened children.

He cleared his throat. ‘Now—‘

Something cold and jagged slapped him. He blinked and raised one arm to look at the mass of silvery wire mesh that had come out of nowhere and wrapped around his side. He was starting to turn to the door behind him, when the stungun web sparked and went off with a smell like scorching plastic. The jolt flung him hard against the table, where he clung for a moment, staring.

In the open doorway, Louise Hewitt stood with the stungun still levelled and watched him collapse.

The last thing he saw was her smile.

Chapter Forty-Four

The cell measured about three metres on a side, and smelled very faintly of fresh paint, thick pastel layers of which coated the walls. There was a comfortable steel frame bed against one such wall, a three-drawer desk under the window and an en suite bathroom capsule in one corner. Next to the capsule, plain white towels hung on a heated rack and next to that there was hanging space and boxed shelving for his clothes. The fixtures were good-quality wood and metal, and the window looked out over the river through glass that only betrayed its toughened qualities with the tiny red triangle logo in one corner. The whole place was no worse than some hotels Chris had seen on placement, and it was in considerably better condition than any of the rooms in Erik Nyquist’s Brundtland estate apartment.

As far as he could work out, he was the only person in the block.

Guest of honour, he thought vaguely as he went to sleep the second night. Full run of the facilities.

The truth was, the corporate police didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They’d taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren’t used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.

Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.

Say what?

Murder, they were saying, but hell, don’t these guys off each other on the road practically every month.

That’s different.

It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status somewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.

The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.

He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed officers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each meal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.

Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head. Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.

A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour’s exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well-cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled glass roof covering a third of the open space. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a glassed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.

When it became apparent he wasn’t leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarrassed.

‘We bill your firm,’ she admitted finally.

He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn’t have known what to say to anybody he knew.

Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn’t remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

He was asked if he wanted paper and pens and said yes, reflexively, then didn’t know what to do with them. He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton’s death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he’d written and start further back. When his first line read my father was murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and instituted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched.

He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn’t think of anything worth telling her.

The week ended. Another started.

Shorn came for him.

He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the glass roof. His escort had obligingly dragged a bench out from somewhere for him, and now he sat at one end of it and stared out at the curtain of rain falling a half metre away.

The plants, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.

The door to the quad snapped open and he flicked a surprised glance at his watch. He’d only been there twenty minutes. He looked up and saw Louise Hewitt standing there. It was the first time he’d seen her since she shot him with the stungun. He looked back at the rain.

‘Morning, Faulkner. Mind if I sit down?’

He stared down at his hands. ‘I guess they’ll stop me if I try to break your neck.’

‘Try to lay a fucking finger on me, and I’ll stop you myself,’ she said mildly. ‘You’re not the only one with karate training, you know.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’

He felt the bench shift slightly as she lowered herself onto it at the other end. They sat a metre apart. The rain fell through the silence, hissing softly.

‘Liz Linshaw says hi,’ Hewitt told him, finally.

It jerked his head around.

‘Well,’ she amended. ‘That’s paraphrase. Actually, she says, you fucking bitch, you can’t hold him without charges this long, I want to see him. She’s wrong about that, of course. We can hold you pretty much indefinitely.’

Chris looked away again, jaw set.

‘We don’t plan to, though. In fact, your release papers should come through some time tomorrow morning. You can go home, or back to that expensive hotel fucknest you’ve been maintaining. Want to know how come?’

He locked down the urge to ask, to give anything. It was hard to do. He was hungry for detail from outside, for anything to engage the frantically spinning wheels in his head.

‘So I’ll tell you anyway. Tomorrow’s Thursday, you should be out by lunchtime at worst. That gives you the best part of a day before you drive. We’ve posted for a Friday challenge, it’s traditional at Shorn. Gives everyone the weekend to get used to the result.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Hewitt?’ The insolence shrouded the question enough that he could justify breaking his silence. ‘What challenge?’

‘The partnership challenge. For Philip Hamilton’s post.’

He coughed a laugh. ‘I don’t want Hamilton’s fucking job.’

‘Oh yes, you do. In fact, you issued a formal notice of challenge just before you killed him. Citing unprofessional conduct over the NAME account, ironically enough.’ She reached into her jacket and produced a palm-pad. ‘I can show you it if you like.’

‘No thanks. I don’t know what shit you’re cooking up, Hewitt, but it won’t start. You know the policy, you told me yourself last week. No partner-employee crossover.’

‘Well, yes, granted your actions were unorthodox. But, as you know, our senior partner is a big fan of policy-making by precedent. He’s agreed that we can blur the distinction in this case. Apparently, he’s had you in mind for partner status for quite a while. You or Mike Bryant, of course.’

And then it all came crashing down on him, like a slum clearance he’d watched as a kid. Explosions ripping through what he thought was solid from one side to the other, clean straight lines of structure tipping, curtseying and dissolving into a chaos of tumbling rubble and dust while a huddled crowd watched. He couldn’t see the resulting wreckage clearly yet, but he sensed its outlines.

‘Mike won’t drive against me,’ he said without conviction.

Hewitt smiled. ‘Yes, he will. I’ve talked to him. More precisely, I’ve talked to him about equity, capital wealth, partner-safe status, professional versus unprofessional behaviour and the dangers of unmanageability. Oh, and the identity of your mystery hotel guest over the last couple of weeks.’

‘The fuck are you talking about?’ But as he said it, the sliding sense of despair was overwhelming, because he already knew.

‘Don’t be obtuse, Chris. I’ve got indesp microcam footage from Liz’s house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike’s face when he saw that stuff.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘No,’ she said almost kindly. ‘I’ve been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread’s little performance in the first place?’ She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. ‘Okay, Linshaw was already leaning pretty hard in your direction, she’s such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably still be grinding through the same stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.’

Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. ‘You set me up with Hamilton, didn’t you. You knew what I’d do.’

‘It seemed likely.’ Hewitt examined her nails modestly. ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez-Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and off we go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed . You really managed to fuck up beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Chris said distantly.

‘No, I do understand. You’re hooked on Barranco’s shiny new dream - actually, it’s a pretty grubby, old dream, but let’s leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.’

It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. ‘You’re wrong, Louise. Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is fucked. He’ll never touch Shorn again.’

‘Well, that remains to be seen. He’s a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant’s boot on it, well, who knows?’

He folded his arms. ‘I’m not doing it, Louise.’

‘Oh, yes you are.’ Her voice turned momentarily ugly. ‘Because if you don’t drive, then Phil Hamilton’s death is just murder, and you’ll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris. Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart’s. Either way is fine with me.’

She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.

‘And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you’re going under, you just remember Nick Makin.’

Chris looked at her, not really surprised. ‘Makin, huh?’

‘That’s right.’ She sat back again. ‘Makin.’

‘So I called it from the beginning. Your toy boy got bumped for me, and you sent him to kill me.’ He shook his head. ‘Him and his gangwit proxies. That was brave of you.’

‘There’s no sent about it, Chris. He hated you for free. If anything,’ she closed her mouth, looked away. She blinked. ‘If anything, I tried to talk him down because I knew it wasn’t necessary. I knew you’d fuck up sooner or later. And don’t talk to me about brave, Chris. Not with Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage. Not with the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands. You’re no fucking different to me in the end.’

‘No?’ He spotted the weak spot and stabbed at it. He mimicked her savagely. ‘Tried to talk him down? Come on, Louise, if you’d wanted to stop Makin, you could have. He wasn’t that strong. You let it happen because it suited the play. Tell yourself what you like in the wee small hours, but don’t try and sell that shit to me. In the end, he was just another pawn.’

‘Pawn. Ah, yes, the chess player.’ Her colour was hectic again, but her voice had evened out. ‘You know, I play a little chess myself, Chris. I never made a big splash about it, like some people, but I play. And it’s a very limited game. In the end, it’s just you and the other guy. That’s not a good model for what we do, Chris. Not a good model for life in general. Of course it’s very male, one-on-one combat, nice and simple. But it isn’t real. You need to upgrade, play something like AlphaMesh or Linkage. Something multi-sided, something with shifting alliances.’

‘Yeah, that sounds more like your speed.’

‘It’s the speed of the world, Chris. Look around you. See the chess players? Sure you do, they’re the stupid third-world fucks sending out their pawns to kill each other over a fifty-mile strip of desert or what colour pyjamas God likes to wear. We’re the AlphaMesh players, Chris. The investment houses, the consultants, the corporates. We shift, we change, we realign, and the game keeps flowing our way. We move around these horn-locked back-and-forth testosterone dickheads, we play them off against each other and they fucking pay us for the privilege.’

‘Thanks for the insight.’

‘Yeah well.’ She got up to go. ‘Here’s another one. When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens, just remember. You didn’t lose to him, you lost to me.’

Chapter Forty-Five

It rained on and off through the night and into the next morning. The last of the showers sputtered out as Chris was eating breakfast, and by the time he finished, the sky was brightening. His release order came through about an hour later. The meal tray detail turned up, looking unusually cheerful, and told him he could leave whenever he wanted. They’d brought his phone and wallet, a small black carry-all for his clothes, and the one who’d loaned him the books said he was welcome to keep anything he was still reading. Chris said he couldn’t possibly.

Outside, the city was still damp from the rain, and the air smelled rinsed. The weather had cleared the streets of people, leaving a forlorn Sunday feel on everything. A moisture-beaded Shorn limousine was waiting for him at the kerb, engine idling.

‘We’ll need to hurry, sir,’ the chauffeur told him. ‘The press release said four this afternoon, but you never know. Even the corporate cops have been known to leak. Always a price for drive data, eh?’

In the event, his cynicism proved unfounded. The drive to the hotel was uneventful, and the chauffeur left him alone. Only once, as his passenger was getting out, did the man’s professional lacquer crack. He waited until Chris started up the steps to the hotel, then climbed half out of the driver-side door and leaned across the roof of the limo.

‘Good luck, sir,’ he said.

Chris turned to look at him. ‘Not a Bryant fan, then?’ he asked, not quite steadily.

‘No, sir. Didn’t want to say anything before, in the car, in case you thought I was brown-nosing. But I’ll be watching you tomorrow, sir. Betting on you too.’

‘That’s. Very kind of you.’ The attempt at irony wavered away, unnoticed. ‘Any particular reason you’re not backing Bryant?’ Because he sure as fuck is a better driver than me.

The chauffeur shrugged. ‘Can’t bring myself to like the man. ‘course, you didn’t hear me say that, sir.’

‘Say what?’

The chauffeur grinned. ‘Like I said, sir. I’ll be watching.’

Chris watched him drive away, gripped by a powerful desire to exchange places with the man. Secure service job, preferential housing as likely as not. Modest means, a modest life and a probable future measured in decades, not days. Look at him, not a care in the fucking world.

Suddenly, he felt sick.

When he got up to his room, the sense of unreality was complete. The only visible change since he left for work the day he murdered Philip Hamilton was the absence of Liz Linshaw’s sleeping form curled into the bedclothes.

And the document pouch on the desk.

He ripped off the seals and skimmed through the paperwork -standard challenge documentation, agreement to waive normal legal protection, itemised rules and references to the 2041 (revised) corporate road charter. Duel envelope details, satellite blow-ups and recent road surface commentary from the relevant service providers. It was the M11 run, practically from his front door, down through the underpass and up over the vaulted section, the Gullet, across the north-eastern zones and down. The old favourite. No motorway changes, no ramps, just into the pipe and drive. Brutal, simple stuff.

In his jacket pocket, the mobile queeped. After ten days without the phone, it took him a moment to realise what it was. He took it out, identified a video call from Liz and accepted.

‘Chris.’ She stared out of the tiny screen at him, a little haggard around the eyes, he noticed, and couldn’t help being slightly flattered. ‘Thank Christ for that, you’re out.’

‘You must be paying a lot for your tips.’

Her smile was strained. ‘Tricks of the trade, Chris. Journalism, I mean. You know what’s happening, I take it.’

‘Yeah, I got a full briefing yesterday. Has Mike been in touch?’

‘Yeah.’ She winced. ‘Not a conversation I want to repeat.’

Chris tried to think of something vaguely intelligent to say. ‘I guess he was a lot more serious about you than he liked to show.’

‘Yeah, and about you too, Chris. That’s what really hurt, apparently. As far as I could make out between the expletives.’

‘Yeah, well.’

A long pause.

‘Chris, are you really going to—‘

‘I don’t really want to talk about it, Liz.’

‘No. Right.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

Again, the pitching sickness in his stomach. The sheer fucking disbelief at what was going to happen. A rising, swelling bubble of fear.

‘I, uh ...’

‘Fine. It’s okay, I understand.’

‘Good.’

The conversation fizzled for a few more seconds, then died. They said goodbyes that were almost formal, and he hung up.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the phone for a while. Finally, he called Mike.

‘Hello, Chris.’ There was a flatness in Bryant’s voice and eyes that told him everything he needed to know. He could have hung up there and then.

He gave it a shot.

‘Mike, you can’t be serious about this shit.’

‘What shit is that, Chris? The trail-of-bodies-in-Shorn-conference-chambers shit? The political-alignment-with-terrorists shit? Or did you mean the fuck-your-best-friend’s-woman shit?’

‘Hey. You’re married to Suki, not Liz.’

‘Do the words you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me sound familiar?’

‘Listen Mike, I’m coming in to the office. We’re going to talk about—‘

‘No, we’re not. I’m taking a half day today. Spending it with Suki, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

‘Then I’ll come and see you there.’

‘You do and I’ll kick your fucking teeth down your throat on the doorstep.’ Mike’s top lip drew back from his teeth. ‘You just stay where you are and fuck Liz a couple more times, while you’ve still got the chance. If you can get it up right now, that is.’

Chris snapped.

‘Ah, fuck you then. Asshole! I’ll see you on the fucking road!’

He hurled the phone across the room. It hit the wall and bounced, undamaged, to the floor.

He made one more call. Two, to be completely accurate, but when he called the house in Hawkspur Green, no one answered. He shrugged philosophically and dug Erik Nyquist’s number out of the phone’s memory. Leaking oil in a head-on collision. It could hardly hurt more than what he’d already swallowed.

The Norwegian was curiously gentle with him.

‘She’s not here, Chris,’ he said. ‘And honestly, even if she was, I doubt she’d talk to you.’

‘That’s fine, I uh, I understand. Uh, do you know if she’s gone home? To the house, I mean. I tried her there, not to talk to, only to warn her I’m coming, I mean.’ He heard the choppy stumbling of his own speech and stopped. He rubbed at his face, glad Erik didn’t have videophone capacity. ‘I’m going out to collect the Saab this afternoon. I didn’t want to surprise her, you know, if she didn’t want to, uh, to see me.’

‘She hasn’t gone to the house,’ said Nyquist, and Chris knew then she was there, maybe standing next to her father in the cramped, damp smelling confines of the hall, maybe off in the kitchen, back to it all, trying not to listen.

‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat of an unlooked-for obstruction. ‘Listen, Erik. Tell her. When you see her, I mean, tell her she needs to stay resident in the UK for the next six months. Otherwise, uh, the terms of my will are invalidated. You know, the share options and mortgage insurance on the house? If she’s gone, back to Norway, Shorn’ll get the lot. So, uh. Makes sense for her to stick around, you know.’

There was a lot of silence before Erik answered.

‘I’ll tell her,’ he said.

‘Great.’

More silence. Neither man seemed ready to hang up.

‘You’re going to drive then?’ Nyquist asked him finally.

Chris was relieved to find he could still manage a laugh. ‘Well, let’s just say the other options aren’t great.’

‘You can’t run?’

‘Shame on you, Erik. Run, from the filthy corporate monsters of Conflict Investment?’ He grew abruptly serious, fighting the up-bubbling fear. ‘There’s no way, Erik. They’ve got me checked, filed and monitored. That fucked-up system you’re always raging about? That system’ll be locked up against any move I try to make. Plastic selectively invalidated, corporate police checking ports and airports. To put not too fine a point to it, if I don’t roll out the wheels tomorrow, I’m a common criminal on my way to the jag gurney.’

Nyquist hesitated. ‘Can you beat him? Carla says—‘

‘I don’t know, Erik. Get back to me tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have an answer for you.’

The Norwegian chuckled dutifully. Chris felt his own face take up the echo. He was suddenly, almost tearfully thankful for the older man’s unhostile presence on the line. The instinctive male solidarity, the shoring up of his desperate bravado. He suddenly understood how badly he had failed to do the same thing for Erik at the crisis points in his father-in-law’s life. How he’d taken the Norwegian’s own cornered bravado at face value, failed to see it for what it was, berated him for it and cut him loose to suffer alone. With the realisation, something lodged in his throat.

‘From what I understand,’ Nyquist was saying, ‘we’ll all know by then. In fact we’ll all be watching you crack open the champagne. The networks have been ad-screaming about full coverage since yesterday. Sponsored by Pirelli and BMW, they say.’

Chris’s grin melted into a grimace. ‘So. No prizes for guessing who they think’s going to win, then.’

‘Almost worth beating him just to piss them off, huh?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He could feel another bubble of fear coming up. He cleared his throat again. ‘Listen, Erik. I’ve got to go. Things to do, you know. Got to get ready for all that publicity tomorrow. Interviews, fame, all that shit. It, uh, it isn’t easy being a driving hero.’

‘No,’ said Nyquist very gently. ‘I know.’

He signed the challenge documentation, got the hotel to courier it across to Shorn and sat waiting for receipt confirmation. He studied the route blow-ups and the surface reports with desultory attention, tried vaguely to imagine his way inside something resembling a strategy.

He could not focus on anything. He kept skittering off into daydreams. His thoughts slowed down, fragmented to useless shards.

He heard Carla’s voice.

Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

Hewitt’s voice.

When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you — when that happens—

He remembered Bryant’s driving. Bryant’s chess playing. Headlong, full on, joyous in its savagery.

Bryant and the car-jackers. The boom of the Nemex, the tumbling bodies.

Bryant and Griff Dixon. Implacable, precise.

Bryant and Marauder, daring the gangwit forward, grinning into the possibility of it.

Bryant on Crutched Friars, walking empty handed into the duel against five men with shotguns.

He stared at it all, behind the curtain of his closed eyes.

And heard Hewitt again.

Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range—while she was injured and trapped in wreckage—the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands—You’re no fucking different to me in the end.

He wondered if she was right.

Recoiled automatically as soon as he thought it.

Found himself lying face up on the bed an hour later, exploring the idea gingerly, like a broken bone or a gaping wound he didn’t dare look at directly.

Caught himself, finally, hoping it might be true.

Because, in the absence of the consuming hatred that had driven him after Edward Quain, he didn’t know what else he could summon to keep him alive tomorrow.

He had the cab leave him at the end of the drive.

It felt strange to walk up the gravel S-curve and see the house emerge gradually through the trees. Just being there felt odd enough - he hadn’t seen the place in weeks, and even then, before his life broke in half, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked from the road. One weekend, one evening, out with Carla in the village maybe. Back at the start of the summer. He couldn’t remember.

He reached the turning circle at the top, and the Saab was there, quiet and sequined with rain. He wondered if Carla had looked at it recently, wondered in fact when it had last been moved. He’d need to road-test it. Check it for—

A memory arrowed in past his defences - Carla under the Saab post test-drive, calling out questions about handling, while he stood with a whisky in his hand, watching her feet and answering. Warmth of shared knowledge, shared involvement.

He stared at the Saab, throat aching. The urge to get in and drive somewhere was overwhelming. He stood for a full twenty seconds, like a starving man faced with a large animal that he might just conceivably be able to kill with his bare hands and eat raw. He only moved when the straps on his bags began to cut deep enough into his palms to be painful.

Not yet.

He dumped the bags at the front door while he fished the recog tab from his pocket and showed it to the lock. Shouldered the door aside and moved across the threshold. Inside was cold with the lack of recent occupancy and everything had the skin-thin unfamiliarity of return home after long absence. He stood in the lounge, bags dropped once more at his feet, and Carla’s departure came and hit him like a hard slap across the mouth.

She’d taken very little, but the holes it had left felt like wounds. The green onyx woman-form she’d bought in Cape Town was gone from its place by the phone deck. Two blunt little metal stubs protruded from a suddenly naked patch of wall where the flattened and engraved Volvo cylinder head from her mechanic’s graduation had once hung. On the mantelpiece, something else was gone, like a pulled tooth, he couldn’t remember what it was. The framed photos of her friends and family on the window ledge had been weeded out from others of Chris and Carla or Chris alone, and the remaining crop looked stranded on the white wood like yachts run aground. The bookshelves were devastated, the bulk of their occupants gone, the rest fallen flat or leaning forlornly together in corners.

He had no stomach for the rest of the house.

He unpacked his bag across the sofa, slung the Nemex and his recently acquired Remington into an armchair. The sight of the weapons brought him up short. He’d never brought the Nemex inside before this, he realised. Even when they went to the Brundtland that fucking night, he’d had to get it from the glove compartment of the Saab. It felt as alien now, perched on the soft leather of the armchair, as the absences where Carla had taken things away. It felt, in an odd way, like an absence of its own.

He picked up the shotgun, because it delayed the time when he’d have to go upstairs to the bedroom. He pumped the action a couple of times, deriving a thin satisfaction from the powder-dry clack-clack that it made. He lost himself in the mechanism for a while, put the thing to his shoulder and tracked around the room like a child playing at war, pausing and firing on the spaces Carla had left and, finally, on the image of himself in the hall entrance mirror. He stared for a long time at the man who stood there, lowered the Remington for a moment to get a better look, then pumped the action rapidly, threw the shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger again.

He went out to the car.

Later, as evening was falling, he parked again and went back into the house for the second time. With darkness shading in outside and the lights on, the blank absence of things and Carla seemed less brutal.

He’d already eaten. He locked the door and went straight up to the bedroom. Carla had taken her scrubbed granite analogue clock from the bedside table and the only other time-piece in the room was on the dressing table, an old Casio digital alarm they’d bought together at some antique auction years back. Chris lay in the dark for a long time staring at its steady green numerals, watching the seconds of his life turn over, watching as the last minutes of the day counted down to zero and the new morning of the duel began.

He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t see the point.

Chapter Forty-Six

They were talking about him as he turned on the TV.

‘—for a driver of that rank. It’s not really what you expect, is it, Liz?’

‘I think that depends, Ron.’ She was resplendent in a figure-hugging black scoop-necked jersey, light make-up, hair pinned carelessly up. Looking at her made him ache. ‘It’s true Faulkner’s form since Quain has been variable, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I know from interviewing him myself that he simply doesn’t see blanket savagery as an asset.’

‘Whereas Mike Bryant does.’

‘Well, again, I think you’re simplifying. Mike’s form is more consistent, more conservative you might say, and yes, he certainly isn’t afraid to go foot to the floor when it counts. But he’s not cast in the same thug mould as, say, someone like Yeo at Mariner Sketch or some of the imported drivers we’ve got from Eastern Europe. That’s savagery as a default setting. That’s not Bryant at all.’

‘You know them both quite well.’

She made a modest gesture. ‘Mike Bryant was one of the main sources for my book, The New Asphalt Warriors. And I’ve been working with Chris Faulkner, among other drivers, on a follow-up. I hate to plug so blatantly, but—‘

‘No, no. Please.’

Mannered laughter.

‘Well, then. It’s called Reflections on Asphalt - Behind the Driver Mask, and it should, my workload permitting, be out some time in the New Year.’ She grinned professionally into the camera. ‘It’ll be a great read, I promise.’

‘I’m sure it will.’ Face to camera. Pause, and. Cue. ‘So now, let’s go over to our live-coverage crew at the Harlow helideck. Sanjeev, can you hear me?’

‘Loud and clear, Ron.’ The inset screen sprang up. Maximised. Windswept backdrop, rotors and the location anchor sweeping dishevelled hair out of his eyes as he spoke.

‘So what’s the weather like up there?’

‘Uh, looks as if the rain’s still holding off, Ron. Maybe even some chance of sun later on, the forecast people tell me.’

‘Good driving conditions, then?’

‘Yes, it looks like it. Of course, we won’t be allowed over the envelope until twenty minutes or so after the duel ends, but I’m told the roads have more or less dried out. And with the summer repairs on this stretch completed well ahead of schedule, this promises to be—‘

He told the TV to sleep, finished his coffee and left the espresso cup standing on the phone deck. Brief existential shiver as he looked at it and realised it would still be there tonight, untouched, whatever happened on the road today. Wherever its owner was.

He shook off the chill and settled his jacket on his shoulders. In the hall mirror, he put on his tie with a languid, frictionless calm that was just the right side of panic. His hands, he noted, were trembling slightly, but he couldn’t decide if it was fear or caffeine. He’d dosed himself pretty heavily.

He finished the tie, looked at himself in the mirror for what seemed like a long time, checked for keys and wallet, and went out to the car. He pulled the door of the house closed and breathed in, hard. The morning air was still and damp in his lungs.

Gravel crunched to his left.

‘Chris.’

He spun, clawing at the shoulder holster. The Nemex came out.

Truls Vasvik stood at the edge of the house, hands spread at waist height. He smiled, a little forcedly.

‘Don’t shoot me. I’m here to help.’

Chris put up the Nemex. ‘You’re a little late for that.’

‘Not at all. This is what I believe you English guys call the nick of time.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Chris shoved the Nemex back into the shoulder holster, spoiling the blunt gesture a little as the gun failed to clip in. He pushed a couple more times, then left it. Clicked the car key with his other hand and the Saab’s lights winked at him as the alarms disabled. He stepped towards it.

‘Wait. Chris, wait a minute.’ Vasvik moved to block him, hands still held placatory at his sides. ‘Think this through. Bryant’s going to kill you out there.’

‘Could be.’

‘And - what? That’s it? The great macho sulk? Kill me and be done with it. See if I fucking care. What does that achieve, Chris?’

‘I don’t expect you to understand.’

‘Chris, I can get you out of here.’ The ombudsman pointed. ‘Back that way, through the woods. I’ve got a three-man team back there and a covered van. Sealed unit, medical waste documentation. It’ll get us through the tunnel without checks. You get your million dollars, you get the job. All you’ve got to do is come with me.’

Out of nowhere, Chris found he could grin. The discovery made his eyes prickle, and put a ball of sudden, savage joy in the pit of his stomach.

‘You’ve not been keeping up on current events, Truls,’ he said. ‘I’m globally famous these days. My face is right up there with Tony Carpenter and Inez Zequina. Everybody knows who I am. What kind of ombudsman is that going to make me?’

‘Chris, that isn’t important. We can—‘

‘What are you going to do then, give me a new face?’

‘If necessary. But—‘

‘And the million dollars, well.’ Chris tutted regretfully. ‘That just isn’t such a lot of money any more, Truls. I’m up for junior partner. That’s equity. Capital wealth. Several millions, plus benefits.’

‘Or cremation later today.’

Chris nodded. ‘There’s a risk of that. But you know what, Truls. The thing you guys will never understand. That risk is what it’s all about. Risk is what makes winning worth it.’

‘You aren’t going to win, Chris.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ll see if I can live up to it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—‘

He stepped forward. Vasvik stayed where he was. Their faces were a handsbreadth apart. Eyes locked.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, Chris.’ The ombudsman’s voice was low and taut. ‘You think this is going to pay off what you’ve done to Carla, and everybody else? Don’t be a fucking child. Being dead doesn’t solve anything. You’ve got to live if you’re going to make a difference.’

Chris grinned again. ‘Well, that’s about as good a defence of cowardice as I’ve ever heard. I guess you need that, working where you do.’

He saw the flare in Vasvik’s eyes.

‘Yeah, that’s it, Truls. Back the fuck off. Go file a report or something. You came and asked, and I turned you down.’

‘You’re a fool, Chris. You’ve pissed away your marriage, pissed all over your wife—‘

The Nemex came out again, smoother this time, and he jammed it under Vasvik’s chin.

‘Hey. That’s my fucking business.’

The ombudsman smiled with one corner of his mouth. He went on talking as if the Nemex wasn’t there. ‘—and now you’re going to piss your life away too. Just to make Carla Nyquist cry over your corpse.’

Through gritted teeth. ‘I told you—‘

‘And she will.’ Vasvik saw the change in his face, and reached up for the Nemex. He curled his fingers around the barrel and pushed it away.

His eyes were icy with disgust. ‘Yeah. She’ll cry for the next ten years of her fucking life over you, Chris. But then, she would have done that anyway. Whatever happened. Whether you were dead like you’re going to be, or just dead inside like you already are.’

Chris gave him a fixed little smile and stowed the Nemex again.

‘Get out of my way.’

‘My pleasure.’

Vasvik stood aside and watched him climb into the Saab. The engine awoke with a rumble like distant thunder. Chris closed the door and put the car in gear. As he let out the clutch and the Saab began to crawl forward, something in the ombudsman’s face made him crank down the window.

‘Oh, yeah, Vasvik. Speaking of millions, I forgot. You heard they’re going to make a movie about me?’

‘Yeah.’ The Norwegian nodded sombrely. ‘I heard. Make a great ending if you and Bryant managed to kill each other both.’

Gravel crunched under the wheels. ‘Fuck you.’

‘No, really. I’d go and see it.’

He hit the turn for the ramp going too fast, ignored the bounce and accelerated down onto the motorway. Vasvik’s offer was gone, like Vasvik himself, like conscious long-term thought, bundled up and flung out behind him, flapping on the road in the rearview. Over and out of reach. There was only the road ahead and his hold on the car around him. The Saab snarled throatily to itself as he picked up the centre lane and flipped on the comset.

‘Driver Control.’

‘This is Chris Faulkner, driver clearance 260B354R.’ His voice was even in his own ears. He felt a quickening of the joy in the pit of his stomach. He felt armoured. ‘Inbound on M11 for partnership challenge. I’m looking for the duel envelope.’

There was a brief pause. He wondered suddenly if any of the same crew that had worked the gangwit car-jack fiasco were on today.

‘Got you, Faulkner. You’re about twenty kilometres off the northern edge. We will advise when you breach. Leave the channel open.’

‘Traffic?’

‘Executive traffic has been disallowed until nine-thirty. You have two automated bulk transporters currently inbound within the envelope, moderate loads, and maintenance vehicles at junction eleven. Please note that collateral damage to said vehicles is not permitted within the duel protocol.’

‘Noted. So where’s Bryant, then?’

Another pause. You could hear the outrage.

‘That information is classified under duel protocol. Please do not request it again.’

‘Noted. The sense-of-humour failure, I mean.’

‘Please also note that selective jamming is in effect within the envelope. You will be unable to receive outside transmissions other than our own.’

‘Thank you, Driver Control. I have done this before a couple of times.’

He settled into his speed. The overgrown margins of the motorway flashed past on either side in a bumpy green blur. The asphalt fed thrumming under his wheels and fled in his wake. The sense of power grew, feeding off the caffeine and adrenalin. Dying suddenly seemed a long way off, a ridiculous rumour he didn’t believe, something he wouldn’t get round to.

Reality was the road.

He hit the duel envelope, tore through it at a hundred and sixty. Driver Control squawked the fact, whole seconds late. Peripheral glimpses of huddled vehicles on the bridge and ramps. Police lights, news crew vans and a rising boil of activity as the Saab slammed past them. He thought he felt the lenses of the cameras swing hungrily to follow.

No, you’ve just had way too much coffee.

A slightly hysterical laugh sat behind the thought. He forced it down and watched the hurrying perspective of the road, keyed up for the evening-blue flash of Mike’s BMW. His speed sank to a more cautious hundred and thirty. The ghost of strategy floated up behind his eyes. Retained knowledge of the route from the blow-ups, sense of how Bryant drove.

Bryant! He grinned wolfishly. Folded away his misgivings, gave in to the pure hot flow of too-fucking-late-now.

Come on, you motherfucker. I took Liz off you, now let’s see about that pretty blue car. Let’s see about your plastic.

Lopez. Barranco. The men and women in the gunship-tortured highlands of the NAME. But most of all Bryant, Bryant and his craven fucking, keep-the-rain-off-me need for Hewitt and Notley and all the rest of it.

He mapped the faces over - Bryant into Quain. Just another murderous fucking suit. Just another—

The Saab hammered down towards junction ten. The first of the automated transporters blew up in his vision, nailed to the centre lane. Chime from the proximity alert, as he swung the Saab out and past. Gut-deep satisfaction as the car swayed and then straightened out under his hands. The high metal wall slid away on his left and he swung back in.

The road ahead—

Impact!

He was still swimming in the warm gutswirl of car control. Flash of twilight blue in one wing mirror, metallic screech of impact from the rear. Jolt of the crash, the seatbelt webbing grip across his chest. He braked instinctively, remembered the transporter and slewed the Saab hard right. The automated vehicle’s collision alert split the air, blaring banshee outrage above and behind him. He didn’t have time to see if it had braked. Mike Bryant’s BMW shot past on the left, shedding speed and hauling across to stay with the Saab. Forcing the duel, right here, right now, right under the grille of the transporter.

He swam the blind spot, Chris knew numbly. Shadowed the automated vehicle from the front until he spotted Chris in the depths of the wing-mirror, falling back on the left as Chris overtook right, timing it on instinct, pinning the Saab’s blind spot as it emerged ahead of the transporter, getting up close for the ram—

Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

He’s harder and faster than you—

Chris saw the BMW coming side-on and hauled over savagely. The two cars met with a shriek. Flayed paint and sparks in the crushed air between. Counterforce tried to push them apart again. Chris kept the clinch, steering against the other car so the grating scream ran on like nails down a blackboard. Bryant rode it, forcing him back and closer to the central reservation. The BMW’s greater weight was telling, the plan loomed massively clear. Side impact at this speed would smash the barrier down but not clear it. The wreckage would kick the Saab into the air like a toy.

Options.

Behind them somewhere, the automated transporter came on, an unknown quantity Chris didn’t have time to look for.

Desperation crept out, flicker-tongued in his guts.

He floored the accelerator, but the BMW’s nose already had him blocked. Bryant had locked with careful malice, a half metre ahead of neck-and-neck, enough to cut off any escape forward. Now, through both side windows, he looked over at Chris and ripped a cocked thumb across his own throat. He was grinning. The crash barrier—

Chris hit the brakes with everything he had.

The Saab staggered. Jerked free of the sparking, sandpapering fury on its left flank. There was time for a flash glimpse of the transporter coming up and he hauled hard left across Mike’s rear, across the centre lane and out of the automated vehicle’s path. Another blaring of machine rage and the transporter thundered past on his right cutting off vision of the BMW and what it was doing. Chris gritted curses and let them both go. Junction eight. His speed bled down to an unsteady ninety. Adrenalin reaction sloshed in his guts.

He caught a distant glimpse of the BMW disappearing down the incline towards the underpass.

It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was coming. He had about a minute, he reckoned. After that— After that, somewhere down in the gloom of the tunnel, Mike Bryant would have executed his one-hundred-and-eighty degree crash-stop turn, would be barrelling back up the road towards him for the head-to-head chicken.

That old number. The Mike Bryant profile - fearless, headlong, savage. Conservative to the end.

Chris built speed. Cranked his nerves back up to drive tension. He passed the transporter again. Head buzzing with calculation.

Two outcomes for this. The head-to-head kills the duel, one way or another. Saab or BMW out of the game, turned too hard, too late and tumbled, into the path of the long-suffering transporter maybe, or maybe both cars, clipped against each other, tossed effortlessly apart with kinetic energy raging off at all angles, looking to shed itself in impact and flame. Or—

Or we both make it, and you’re south, up and into the Gullet, no way to fight but slow down and let him ram you off into space like Hewitt did to Page, or try for the turn, a hundred and eighty screaming degrees on a vaulted highway only two lanes across.

He thought of this. He thought it out. Three-stage play, the crash barrier, the head-to-head, the end game in the Gullet. And he knows you can’t make that turn. The BMW bloomed in the road ahead. Up out of the tunnel ramp. Very fast.

He had time for a glance at the speedo, saw a hundred and something insane, doubled it in his head for Bryant’s share of the speed, saw the BMW’s armoured snout coming at him, rock steady and directly ahead—

He’s harder and faster than you— —and yelled, and hauled hard right.

The BMW flinched fragments of a second later. Flashed past. Was gone.

Chris floored the accelerator and the Saab dived for the tunnel. Again, he had a minute at best. Not the time he needed, he’d have to make some more. The tunnel flew past in the hollow roar of the Saab’s echoed passing. Up, out of the gloom and into sudden, watery sunlight. The Gullet flung itself down at him like a massive asphalt loading ramp. He rose to meet it, took the first curve at the very edges of his driving ability.

Felt his heart stumble as the Saab palpably gathered enough sideways momentum to skid. He dared not brake, there wasn’t time. He needed the straight at speed. He unhinged the angle of the turn a miserly couple of degrees, slewed back across the double lane, fishtailing, muttering imprecations to the car. The Saab came back to him. He picked up the long rise-and-fall of the straight and ran for the next curve.

Almost to the end of the gut-tickling swoop, almost on the curve, he choked off his speed and threw the Saab into a shrieking, gibbering handbrake turn.

For one very long moment, he thought he’d fucked up. Thought he’d lose a tyre and then the car and plunge with it through the crash barrier into the zones below. The car slithered, tripped drunkenly across a badly mended pothole, screamed protest and tyre smoke he could suddenly smell—

And stopped.

Not the hundred and eighty. Just a ninety-degree sprawl across both lanes, blocking the Gullet like a bone in the throat.

Back along the straight, the BMW came over the rise.

He grabbed the shotgun from the passenger side footwell, threw open the driver side door and tumbled out of the car. Found his feet, found the BMW and cranked the action of the tactical pump.

Curiously, now that the situation was drawn, everything seemed very quiet. The Saab had stalled out in the turn, and the BMW’s engine noise seemed almost inaudible past the distant ocean roar of his own pulse in his ears. The wind came and tugged at his hair, but gently. The sprawl of cordoned zone housing below seemed to be holding its breath.

He let Bryant come on for another second, then put the first shot into the driver-side half of the windscreen.

The familiar boom - he’d done a solid hour down in the armoury firing ranges, a final tuning of his earlier unexpected love affair with the long gun.

The BMW’s windscreen cratered and crazed. He saw the splinter lines.

No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle. The parchment-dry conclusion of the legal board of inquiry after the Nakamura playoff. No substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. Provided these directives are adhered to—

Bryant’s windscreen was armoured glass. Even with the state-of-the-art vehicle shredder load the armourer had shown him, care of Heckler and Koch - the roadblock ammunition of choice for all your urban enforcement needs - even with that, at this range there’d be no substantial destruction.

He pumped the action, fired again. The spider-webbed screen resplintered, almost to opaque.

It was pushing the envelope, pushing it the way Jones and Nakamura had done, pushing it the way Notley liked.

The BMW came on. Behind the ruined screen, Bryant had to be almost blind. Chris pumped in another round, ran sideways to get the angle. Went after the leading tyre.

The shotgun kicked. The tyre blew into shreds.

No substantial—

The BMW slewed violently across the road, brakes shrieking protest, scorching rubber into the road and the wind.

Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts.

In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works.

The BMW careered past him, ploughed through the crash barrier and plunged over. It took less than a pair of seconds. Chris had time for one glimpse through the side window, Mike still fighting the wheel for control, then the big car was gone, and there was only the ragged gap in the barrier to mark its passing.

Breath held.

A flat, oddly undramatic metallic crump from below. Then nothing.

Done. Won. Finished.

Emptied out.

Nothing.

It coursed through him like current, that nothing. Emptiness, building to ecstasy. He threw back his head and screamed at the sky. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get it all out. He screamed until his throat felt ripped and his lungs locked up on empty. Until he gagged, finally, to a halt.

It wasn’t enough.

Echoes rippled out across the cityscape below, chasing each other off towards the cluster of glass and steel towers on the skyline.

Overhead, even the clouds seemed to hurry away from the sound.

Behind them, the sky was a flawless, vacant blue. Against all the odds, it was going to be a beautiful day.

Chapter Forty-Seven

You bring back their plastic.

Stranded atop the marching pillars of the Gullet, listening to his own pulse and the echo of his screams, Chris heard Hewitt’s words with hallucinatory clarity. It was as if the woman was standing next to him in the wind.

You go in and you finish the job. If you can, you bring back their plastic.

He peered down on the zone sprawl below. As far as he could tell, the BMW seemed to have fallen through the roof of a decaying commercial unit. He scanned the surroundings in both directions and spotted his access point. Fifty metres further along the Gullet, a caged staircase wound down around one of the concrete support pillars and came out at the end of a shabby residential street. It looked as if there might be a foot passage through from the street to the commercial units. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes.

He jogged slowly along the road to the top of the staircase. There was an ancient padlock on the rusting iron cagework. He levelled the shotgun, remembered the jagged vehicle-shredder load and thought better of it. He reached for the Nemex and found an empty holster.

Fuck.

He remembered the way the gun had refused to clip in while he talked to Vasvik. Remembered tumbling out of the Saab with the shotgun. He looked back along the road to where the car was slewed. No sign of anything on the asphalt, but it could have skittered away under the belly of the vehicle. Or fallen while he was still inside.

Well, that’s it. You can’t get down. Have to leave it for the clean-up squad. Not like they’ll take long to get here.

The relief gusted through him. Duel etiquette forbade outside approach for a regulation fifteen minutes, except in medical emergencies. But they’d reel the situation in on satellite blow-up, see the way it had played out and be here pretty soon. All he had to do was sit at the edge of the road and wait.

But he knew what Hewitt would say. Knew how the whisper would run among the junior analysts on the floor below. Yeah, sure, Faulkner’s some natty driver. But the way I heard it, no stones when it comes to the consequences. Too soft to pick a corpse’s pocket.

Fuck it.

He locked on the Remington’s safety, reversed the weapon and pounded at the rusted lock until it gave. Dull clank of metal on metal. Orange flakes of rust scattered around his feet. The lock snapped and hung, severed. He levered the cage door open and picked his way down the steps.

At the bottom, it was the same story. Another grilled iron door, another rusted lock, this time on the inside, as if a retreating army had fought a rearguard action out of the zones and up onto the highway. Weeds had grown up to shoulder height on the other side of the grille, effectively hiding the bottom of the staircase from outside view. From the inside, you could barely see the twinned row of black brick-terraced housing beyond. Chris craned his neck and stared through the nodding heads of the weeds, listening, trying to get some sense of whether there was anybody nearby.

Nothing stirred.

He started hammering at the lock. Slipped a couple of times, scraped his hand on the rusting iron. It was hard to manoeuvre the shotgun in the confines of the cage, hard to get a working angle. When he finally stepped out through the weeds, he was sweating and sticky inside his suit.

The street beyond was empty.

He scanned the frontages - the only motion was the flap of plastic sheeting over a broken upper window. A wrecked and rusted Landrover, one of the late models modified to burn alcohol, was beached on its axles about twenty metres down the street. It was skeletal, stripped of everything that would come off, the frame scorched molotov-cocktail black where rust had not yet crept in. He spotted the passageway a couple of houses beyond on the left and moved cautiously out into the street. Unrepaired potholes gaped in the cracked asphalt, some of them wide enough to take the whole front end of the Saab.

He moved a couple of steps at a time, painfully aware of the windows looking down on either side, pausing to listen every two metres. Belatedly, he remembered the Remington’s safety and thumbed it off. Pumped out the last spent shell. The harsh metal noise it made shattered the quiet.

Suit and shotgun, he reasoned nervously. It ought to keep the flies off long enough.

He swung wide around the burnt-out Landrover, feeling slightly ridiculous as he covered the angles. He cleared the corner of the passageway. Moved down past high brick walls topped with broken glass. Detritus crunched under his feet. The passage came to an end amidst shallow mounds of weed-grown rubble and a clutch of leaf-canopied trees. He climbed the first mound with difficulty, burying his Argentine leather shoes to the ankle in little avalanches of sliding soil. From the top he saw the corrugated metal side of the commercial unit and a loading bay door, rusted open on empty square metreage beyond. In the gloom he could make out half of the BMW lying on its back. A qualified relief at his own navigational skills seeped—

Motion.

He whipped around, finger tightening on the Remington’s trigger.

And snatched it away again, as if the metal was hot. On the down slope of the next mound, two children around four or five years old were playing a game with the slaughtered limbs and torsos of plastic dolls. They froze when they saw him, then scrambled to their feet and started shouting.

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit! Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit!’

He shook his head, lowered the shotgun and wiped a hand across his mouth. This close, the vehicle-shredder load would have—

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-SHIT!’ Elfin faces distorted with the force of the chant.

A woman’s voice came from one of the houses, raised and harsh with anxiety. The children vectored in on it, looked at each other for a moment that was almost comical, and then darted away like spooked animals. They scrambled across the mounds of rubble and through a hole in a wall he hadn’t seen. He was left looking at the plastic carnage of dismembered dolls.

Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck Louise Hewitt and her fucking plastic.

But he went on, over the rubble mounds, up to the loading bay door and through.

Inside, it was cold. Water dripped ceaselessly from the girder-laced roof and puddled along the lines of unevenly-laid concrete flooring. The BMW lay under the hole it had made, nose to the floor with the weight of engine and armour, back end in the air. There was a faint hissing from the front, and steam curled out through a gap where the hood had crushed out of true. Otherwise, it looked remarkably undamaged. The armouring had stood up.

Chris moved crab-wise to the driver-side door, hesitated a moment and then hooked it open. Bryant tumbled out like a bundle of unwashed clothes. Suit bloodied, eyes closed and mouth open. One arm trailed across the floor at an impossible angle to the rest of the body.

Nausea. The rising tide of delayed reaction from the duel. Chris pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and knelt beside the body. He stowed the shotgun under his arm and flapped back one side of Bryant’s jacket. The wallet gleamed gold-cornered from the inside pocket. He took it between thumb and forefinger and tugged it free. Flipped it open. The photo of Suki and Ariana smiled up at him opposite Mike’s racked plastic.

A hand closed around his leg.

Chris almost vomited with the shock. The shotgun clattered across the floor. He stumbled away from the car, broke the grip and saw. Bryant was still alive, eyes wide and staring up out of his inverted face. His good arm made feeble motions. His mouth opened and closed silently, like a landed fish. It was impossible to tell if he recognised Chris or not.

You go in and you finish the job. You don’t take them to the hospital afterwards.

He remembered Bryant’s gesture as the two cars ground against each other - the cocked thumb ripping across the throat. The grin. His mouth tightened and he picked up the Remington again.

You don’t take them to the hospital, Chris.

You finish the job.

He stepped back and raised the weapon. Bryant saw it and flailed desperately about on the concrete. A broken moaning came out of his mouth. It looked as if he was trying to bring his working arm up to his shoulder holster and the Nemex, but he didn’t have the strength. Chris clamped his mouth tighter, took another step back and levelled the shotgun. Jagged motion, quick, before he could give it thought. He’d stopped breathing.

Finish the fucking job, Chris.

He squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

No click, no detonation, no kick. No spray of blood and tissue. The trigger gave soggily through half the pull and stuck. Chris pulled harder. Still nothing. He worked the action and jacked a perfectly good unfired shell out into the air. It hit the concrete and rolled away, cheerful cherry red.

Mike’s face, pleading up at him.

Squeezed again. Nothing.

‘Fuck.’ It gritted out of him, as if he was afraid to be overheard in the empty warehouse. It still seemed to echo off the walls. ‘Fuck, fuck!’

The padlocks - hammering at the padlocks until they snapped and came loose. He remembered the savagery he’d brought to the action, the haphazard angles he’d been forced to use in the cage at the bottom of the stairs.

He’d jammed the mechanism, jolted something, maybe broken something inside, irretrievably.

He stood looking at Mike Bryant. Wiped his mouth and swallowed.

Finish it. Fucking finish it.

He stalked closer, staring fascinated into the other man’s eyes. Bryant gaped up at him, twitching. He made noises that sounded like the name Chris, the word please.

For some reason, it was enough.

‘Fuck you, Mike,’ he said quickly. ‘You had your chance.’

He turned the injured man’s head with one foot, reversed the Remington and jammed the butt of the weapon into Bryant’s exposed throat. Leaned his full weight on the gun.

‘Fuck you, Mike!’ Now he was spitting it, bent over and glaring into Bryant’s face. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, all of you suited fuckers!’

It seemed to take forever.

At first Bryant only made choking sounds. Then, from somewhere, he found strength to get his undamaged arm up and grab the Remington around the trigger guard.

Chris kicked the hand away and stood on it. He was panting.

Mike’s choking sounds grew frantic. He twisted his head against the concrete. He curled his trapped fingers around the edges of Chris’s shoe, nails clawing at the Argentine leather.

Chris leaned harder. Tears sprang out in his eyes and streamed down his face. He lifted his foot and stamped down hard on Mike’s hand. He heard the dry snap as one of the fingers broke. He leaned harder. His whole weight lifting on the braced shotgun, taking his body almost off the floor.

Something crunched. Mike stopped moving.

Afterwards, Chris could barely get himself upright. It was as if the shotgun had suddenly become indispensable, as if he’d been afflicted with a sudden muscular disease. He limped back from the corpse, trembling so violently his teeth chattered. He made less than a dozen steps. He bent suddenly double and, finally, threw up. A thin helping of vomit and bile - he’d barely eaten that morning, but what he had came up. He dropped to his knees in a puddle, retching.

The sound of boots through the wet.

He looked up, only vaguely interested, and saw the men. Big, blocky forms in the filtering light from outside, like knights in armour from some mediaeval fantasy.

He blinked to clear his eyes.

There were nine of them, dressed in the cordoned zone gangwit ensemble. Cheap, grimed clothes, loose canvas trousers, bulky padded jackets, shaven heads and workboots. Hands held crowbars, wrenches, sawn-off pool cues and a variety of other items too jagged to identify. Faces were scarred with streetfight souvenirs. Eyes watchful on the scene they’d just interrupted.

He got unsteadily to his feet. One of the men stepped forward. He was near two metres tall, heavily muscled under a sleeveless T-shirt scrawled red with the legend I am the Minister for the Redistribution of Health. The lettering was splattered to make it look bloody. His face was scarred from the corner of the left eye and down the cheek. It gave him an oddly mournful look.

‘Finished, have you? Is he dead?’

Chris blinked and coughed.

‘Who are you?’ he asked harshly.

‘Who are we?’ Laughter rasped out, first from one throat, then building to a rattling echo off the metal roof. It died out as abruptly. The gangwit spokesman was swinging a short black-enamelled prybar softly and repeatedly into his left palm. His gaze seemed welded to Chris, playing up and down the clothes, the hair, the shotgun. He smiled and the scar tissue tugged at his face. ‘Who are we? We’re the fucking dispossessed, mate. That’s who we are.’

There was no laughter to follow this time. The men had tautened, waiting for the leash to slip. Chris suppressed another cough and lifted the Remington as convincingly as he could manage.

‘That’s close enough. The police are on their way, and there’s nothing to see here.’

‘Yeah?’ The spokesman for the group gestured at the BMW and Mike Bryant’s corpse. ‘From what we’ve seen so far, I beg to differ. This is prime time. Mr Faulkner.’

Chris pumped the action on the Remington.

‘Alright, I said that’s close enough.’

Mistake.

The unspent shell leapt in the air, hit the concrete and rolled towards the other man. For a moment, they both looked down at it. Then the gangwit looked back up at Chris and shook his head.

‘See, that’s a perfectly good round, mate. And to judge by your manner of execution back there a moment ago, I’d say—‘

Chris flung the shotgun in his face and ran.

Back to the upturned BMW and Mike Bryant’s corpse. He heard booted feet behind him, more than one pair. The gangwit’s voice rang exasperated above the clatter.

‘Well don’t fucking stand there. Get him!’

He dived and landed on Mike in a kind of embrace. Scrabbled under the jacket, felt the butt of the Nemex in his hand. Proximity sense told him the first of his pursuers was almost on him. Shadows blocked out the light. The smell of old leather and cheap aftershave swamped him. A hand grabbed at his jacket.

He rolled free and came up with Mike’s gun almost touching the gangwit’s chest. He saw the man’s eyes widen. A pool cue smashed down on his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger.

The Nemex thundered. The shot kicked the man off his feet and back across the concrete. He crumpled and lay still.

‘Toby!’ It was a howl of anguish. The gangwit spokesman. ‘Fucking zek-tiv piece of shit!’

The second gangwit was two paces behind his fallen comrade, but the gun brought him to a dead halt. The others were converging, but now they stopped and began to back away, left and right. Chris got himself upright, grinning fiercely.

‘That’s right, back the fuck off.’

Something black whipped through the air and hit him a numbing blow across the elbow. The Nemex went off, firing wide into the concrete floor. Chris clutched at his arm and tried to bring the gun to bear as the spokesman, leaping in after the hurled prybar, hit him from the right. Below the elbow, his muscles were water. He snapped off a panic shot. It went wide. The gangwit snarled a grin and grabbed the arm, twisting. Chris felt his hand spasm open. The Nemex spun away, splashing into a puddle. He threw a punch left-handed and saw his opponent ride it with a streetfighter’s impatient grunt. Desperate, he reached and grappled. The Minister for the Redistribution of Health punched him in the chest with shattering force. He collapsed backwards, fending weakly, tripping on Mike’s corpse. The gangwit let him go, let him fall against the body of the upturned BMW and turned to scoop up his prybar. Stalked forward, still grinning. Chris saw the attack coming and rolled weakly left, along the BMW’s flank. The crowbar arced down and clawed a long dint in the twilight-blue bodywork where he’d been. The metal screeched. Chris came off the car yelling, delivered a hooking left-handed punch to the Minister’s temple. The gangwit threw up a block that didn’t quite cover and staggered slightly with the impact. He grunted again, shook his head and whipped the crowbar round. Chris caught it across the side of the head.

Multi-coloured light rang in his skull. The ceiling waltzed by overhead. He reeled and fell. Something snagged his arm, he looked muzzily and saw the Minister had him, was holding him up. Comfortably.

‘Fucking piece of shit driver,’ the man was yelling in his face. ‘Come into the fucking zones with your suit, will you?’

The crowbar slammed into his ribs. He screamed like a baby and twisted. There were others around him, holding him up for the spokesman, cuffing him back and forth across the head.

‘Come into the fucking zones, will you? Hold him.’

Another blow, another rolling tide of numbness. He thought he felt a rib crack this time. He yelled, but weakly. The grip on his arm let go and he slumped into a ring of supporting grasps. He saw a fist coming, heavy with dull metal rings. It split his vision apart, sent shards of it spinning away against a roaring darkness. He felt part of his face tear, felt blood streaming down into his collar.

‘Show you what we think of—‘ the Minister was telling him between blows, but the rest was carried away on the roar in an opening tunnel of darkness.

Oddly, in the bottom of it all, he heard Carla.

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

Her hands on him. She was smiling. For some reason he couldn’t pin down, he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

I’m. Already sliding headlong into the dark. Not going anywhere.

But he was.

And a sound like distant thunder.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Driver Control helicopters held the sky over the vaulted highway where Chris Faulkner had slewed the Saab to its shrieking sideways halt. Bright sunlight winked off underslung camera lenses and the clustered barrels of the gatlings. At a prudent distance beyond, news crew aircraft circled like sharks waiting for something to give up and die. There were police vehicles scattered up and down the stretch, equipment set up and armed figures hurrying about. Louise Hewitt stood talking to a ranking tactical-force officer and her mobile at the same time. She looked up and shielded her face as a new, twilight-blue helicopter drifted in through the black-and-green Driver Control machines and settled to the asphalt, twenty metres away. Jack Notley climbed down from the cabin, settled his suit a little more firmly on his shoulders in the gale of the rotors and strode towards her.

‘I’ll call you back,’ she told the phone, and snapped it shut. ‘And Captain, if you could just give me a moment.’

The officer saw who was coming and stepped back. Notley reached Hewitt and stared at her. ‘Well?’

‘I expect you’ve heard.’

‘That’s why I’m here.’ Notley looked grim. ‘What have you got?’

Hewitt shrugged and nodded towards the crane and winch system at the edge of the Gullet. ‘We put in the tacs. Apparently they’re bringing them both up now. Not a pretty sight, is what I was told.’

Notley looked away, up and down the stretch of highway. ‘Four miles,’ he said. ‘Four miles from where Page went off. You realise that?’

‘Four?’ Hewitt frowned. ‘Oh, miles, that’s what, about six kilometres? Yeah, probably about that. And not far from where Barnes learnt to fly, come to that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Exciting stretch of road.’

The winch whined into action. Both partners turned to watch as it brought up a sheet-covered stretcher. Tactical-force corporate police swarmed around the load, swinging it in and lowering it gently to the road. The covering was white and blood had soaked through in small patches. A medic crouched, turned back the sheet and winced visibly. The winch swung back down. They watched the cable unwind.

‘Going to be a lot of questions,’ observed Hewitt when it stopped. ‘Lot of precedent to be hammered out.’

Notley grunted. ‘Good. Kind of thing that keeps us sharp.’

‘Keeps the lawyers sharp, you mean. They’re going to be arguing this one back and forth for months at our expense.’

‘While we go ahead and get on with doing things anyway.’

‘Ethics after the event.’ Hewitt offered him a crooked smile. ‘My favourite kind.’

Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘Are there any other sort?’

The winch swung up again. More activity, another stretcher settling to the asphalt. More blood stains on white.

‘Not in this world.’

‘I’m glad—‘

Amidst the weaving of the tactical-force uniforms, commotion. Uniforms milling. And Chris Faulkner, climbing off the stretcher like the living dead. Pushing his way clear. A ragged cheer floated over him like a banner.

Hewitt froze.

Notley blinked.

Then the senior partner was striding rapidly towards the new arrival, a grin broadening on his face. He only faltered as he got closer and saw the damage. Chris’s face was a mask of blood and bruising. One eye swollen almost shut, ribbons of torn flesh around the mouth and both cheeks ripped, blood from a nose that looked broken. The way he moved under the abused and bloodied suit screamed cracked ribs.

‘Chris! Jesus fuck, you’re alive. I thought. You had me worried for a moment there. Congratulations!’

Chris stared at him. Stared past him, like the zombie he so closely resembled. Notley grabbed his shoulders.

‘You’ve done it, Chris. You won. You’re a partner at thirty-three years old. Fucking unprecedented. Congratulations! You know what this means?’

Chris looked sideways at him. Focused.

‘What does it mean?’ he whispered.

‘What does it mean?’ Notley was almost burbling. ‘Chris, it means you’re at the top. From here on up, there’s nothing you can’t do. Nothing. Welcome aboard.’

He thrust out his hand. Chris looked down at it as if the gesture didn’t make sense. He made a coughing noise that it took Notley a moment to realise was laughter. Then he stared up into the senior partner’s face and off past it again. The Saab. Hewitt.

‘Uh, Chris—‘

‘Excuse me.’

He pushed past Notley, pacing a steady line for Hewitt. She saw him coming and tensed. A brief nod to the tactical captain, and the man was at her shoulder. Chris came to a halt a metre away, swaying a little.

‘Louise,’ he husked.

She manufactured a small smile. ‘Hello, Chris. Well done.’

‘This is for you, Louise.’

He held it out. The Shorn Associates card, Mike Bryant’s name engraved and streaked across with new blood.

‘I don’t think now is—‘

‘No, it’s for you.’ Chris took another, sudden step in and tucked the card into Hewitt’s breast pocket. He nodded to himself, already turning away. ‘For you. Because that’s the way we do things around here, right?’

Hewitt’s smile was frozen on. ‘Right.’

‘I’ll see you on the road, Louise.’

He walked away, dipping in his pocket for keys. The door of the Saab was still wide open. Driver Control personnel busied themselves around it, measuring and photographing. When he tried to get in behind the wheel, one of them barred his way.

‘Sorry sir, we’re not finished here ye—‘

He backed up as Chris looked at him.

‘Get. Out of my way.’

The man retreated. Chris eased himself into the seat, teeth clenching up as his hastily taped ribs grated with the move. The medics had shot him full of something warm, but the pain was still getting through in flinty little flashes. He sat for a while, breathing it under control. He thought it would probably be manageable.

He closed the door. Reached for the ignition.

The Saab fired up growling. Around him, up and down the Gullet, activity stopped at the sound. Heads turned. He saw people gesturing.

No one seemed interested in stopping him.

He moved his head, a little awkwardly. Coughed and tasted blood. Checked the rearview and cut a smooth circle in reverse, so the car was pointing southward, towards Shorn. He shifted gear, let the vehicle start to glide forward.

‘Sir, wait.’ Muffled through the seal of the closed doors and windows. A uniformed tactical hurried across and rapped on his window. He cranked it down and waited, foot light on the clutch, barely holding the Saab back. The tac hesitated.

‘Uhm, sir, it’s just. The shooting down there. Well, we arrived sort of in the nick of time, sir, so it was a bit rushed. Just trying to get them off you, you know.’

‘Yes.’ His voice still wasn’t working properly. It had taken him whole minutes, lying there on the concrete, to make sense of the thunder, the screams of men dying and then the urgent voices of the tacs as they circled him. The ring of concerned faces peering down. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Yes, well, uhm. Thing is, a firefight like that, you don’t always get everyone dead centre, and now it looks like at least a couple are going to live. I, well, I assume you’re going to be pressing charges, sir.’

‘Yes, alright.’

‘Well, I’ll need a number for you, sir. For the statement. Obviously, we can get you at Shorn, but we like to provide a full personalised service in cases like this. Victim support, one-to-one interviews, we can come out to you any time. And I’m the officer assigned, so. Do you, uh, have a home number, sir?’

Chris closed his eyes briefly. ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh.’ The tac looked at him for a moment, puzzled. ‘Well, anyway. I’ll get you at Shorn, then.’

‘Yes.’ He tried to curb a flooding tide of impatience. He wanted to be gone. ‘Is that all you need?’

‘Oh. Yes sir. But, uh, you know, congratulations. The duel and everything. My whole family were watching it. Well done. Fantastic driving. Uh, my son’s a huge fan, sir.’

He fought down the urge to cackle. Hid it in a cough.

‘That’s nice.’

‘I expect you’ll be on the screen a lot the next few weeks. Probably even get an interview with that Liz Linshaw, eh?’ The tac saw the look on his face and stepped back. ‘Anyway, I’ll. Let you go, sir. Thanks.’

‘No problem.’

He let the Saab roll forward. People got out of the way. He moved past Louise Hewitt and then Jack Notley, gathering speed. By the time he passed the last of the uniforms and the parked police vehicles, he was closing on ninety. The Saab took the curve on a rising growl. He hit a pothole, but the suspension and the onset of the painkillers damped it out. He reached for the phone, jabbed it on. Winced only a little this time as his cracked ribs jarred. He placed a forward call to Joaquin Lopez in Panama, ten minutes ahead. Then he dialled Shorn’s priority client operator and told them to get him Francisco Echevarria immediately.

They didn’t like it. They didn’t know if—

‘Tell him it’s a national emergency,’ Chris suggested.

It took a couple of minutes, but Echevarria grabbed the call. He wasn’t pleased. Chris got the impression the ride in the last week had been bumpy.

‘Bryant? That you? Now fuckin’ what? What national fuckin’ emergency you talkin’ about?’

‘The one that’s going to put you in front of a fucking firing squad, you piece of shit. This is Chris Faulkner.’

Strangled silence, then fury. ‘You motherfuckin’—‘

‘Shut up and listen, Paco. I don’t know what line of shit they’ve been handing you in my absence, but things just changed for the better. Mike Bryant is dead.’

‘You’re lyin’.’

‘No, I’m not. I killed him myself. With my bare fucking hands. So I’m now junior partner at Shorn Conflict Investment, which means executive partner for the NAME account. Which means you, Paco. And I’m telling you, I’m going to have Vicente Barranco in the streets of Bogota by the end of this fucking month. So if I were you, I would gather up as much of your father’s stolen loot as you can get in a Lear jet, and I would fuck off out of the NAME right now, while you can still walk to the plane.’

Echevarria lost English in the storm of his fury. Spanish washed down the line, beyond Chris’s ability to follow. He cut across it.

‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, Paco. That’s it. After that, I’m sending Special Air to put a bullet in your face.’

‘You cannot do this!’

This time, Chris really laughed. Across the pain in his broken ribs, across all the pain. The drugs were numbing him nicely.

‘You still don’t get it, do you, Paco? From where I’m sitting, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Men like me, there’s nothing you can do to stop us any more. Understand? There is nothing you can do any more.’

He killed the call.

Fed power to the Saab and watched as his speed climbed.

Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.

THE END