Rolling in past junction ten, he checked his watch. Couple of minutes off quarter to nine. Great. Fucking great. He put through a call to Barranco at the Hilton. There was no answer from the room. Growing irritation sprouted suddenly into irrational fear. He cut the connection, redialled for the security detail. Someone answered on a yawn.
‘Yeah?’
‘Faulkner. What happened to Barranco?’
‘What’s the matter, he not turn up yet?’
Chris felt a spike of ice run him through the heart.
‘Turn up where?’
The voice on the other end got suddenly deferential. ‘At Shorn, sir. Weren’t we supposed to let him go? He took the secure limo. Called Shorn for it to come and get him.’
Foot to the floor, now. Head still fogged. Think.
‘Who authorised the fucking limo?’ he grated.
‘I, uh, I can check.’
‘You do that. Do it now. And stay on the line.’ He summoned a map of the day from memory and tried to place Hernan Echevarria on it. His head refused to cooperate. Breakfast with the partners, or was that Tuesday? Touring Mil-Tac’s new smart-mine facility in Crawley? If that was it, he was already out of town, under Mike Bryant’s watchful eye. He felt the tension ease a little.
Security came back on line from their room in the Hilton. ‘Transit was authorised at partner level,’ the voice said, smug with belated relief. ‘Louise Hewitt. She said she was surprised you weren’t around to cover it.’
‘Ah, shit.’
‘Was there anything else? Sir?’
Chris made a noise in his throat and killed the connection. The Saab barrelled down the approach road to the first underpass.
He was on the raised section that ran across the northern zones when he suddenly remembered where Mike Bryant and Hernan Echevarria were that morning.
He floored it again.
The damage was done.
He knew. Jolting the Saab into a space as close to the lifts as he could get, he knew and wondered why he was still bothering. Riding up alone with the chatty elevator voice for company, he knew and nearly screamed aloud at the waiting. Shouldering past a brace of startled admin assistants on the fifty-second floor, he knew beyond doubt. Staring at the coded entry door to the covert viewing chamber, the nightmarish confirmation of its carelessly ajar angle, he knew. Still, through all the knowing, as he threw the door all the way open and saw Barranco standing there, it hit him like sludge in his guts.
Beyond the glass, Nick Makin and Mike Bryant sat with Hernan Echevarria and another uniform, apparently discussing interrogation training. Their voices strained through into the chamber. A brittle burst of laughter rang so sharp it was almost static.
‘Vicente ...’
Barranco turned the face of a corpse towards him. He was pale beneath his tan, mouth drawn down tight. A vein beat at one temple.
‘Hijos de puta,’ he whispered. ‘You—‘
In the conference room, Echevarria was nodding sagely.
‘Vicente, listen to me—‘
He flinched back, went halfway to a karate guard as he saw Barranco’s eyes. The Colombian was trembling. He wondered fleetingly what combat skills honed in genuine combat would look like up against his corporate Shotokan training. Barranco looked at him with sick wonder and then turned away. He stood staring down at the desk where someone had left a bound copy of the Echevarria schedule.
‘I did not believe,’ he said quietly. ‘When the assistant told me. Asked me if I was with Hernan Echevarria. If I had got lost, and brought me here, smiling, fucking smiling. Let me in here to watch you—‘
‘Vicente, this isn’t what it looks like—‘
‘It is exactly what it looks like!’ The yell rang in the confines of the chamber. It seemed impossible those beyond the glass wall could not hear. Barranco lashed out with one foot. The desk skidded, spilled schedule, associated discs and papers. A chair fell, caught Mike’s baseball bat and sent it rolling.
‘Vicente.’ In his own ears, Chris could hear the pleading in his voice. ‘You must have known Echevarria was still at the table. But he’s out now. You’re in. Can’t you see that?’
The Colombian turned back to face him, crook-handed.
‘In,’ he hissed. ‘Out. What is this, a fucking game to you? What do you have in your veins, Chris Faulkner? What the fuck kind of human being are you?’
Chris licked his lips. ‘I’m on your side, Vicente—‘
‘Side? On my side?’ Barranco spat on the floor. His voice scaled up again. ‘You grinning, fucking whore, don’t talk to me about sides. There are no sides for men like you. A friend to murderers,’ he gestured at the glass, eyes glistening. ‘To torturers, if it pays. You are a fucking waste, a soulless gringo puto, a stench.’
Something ripped open behind Chris’s left eye. He felt himself flinch physically with the impact. Red-veined wings billowed upward in his head. The HM file opened for him like a brightly-coloured trap door. He saw helicopters hanging from a tattered-cloud rain-forest sky, whine and clatter of gatlings, whoosh-thump of rockets. Villages in flames, cremated trees, charred bundles scattered across the scorched earth. He heard discordant jail-cell screams spiking a tropical night. A visitation he hadn’t had since the death of Edward Quain was there beside him, shouting hoarse in his inner ear.
The bat.
It was in his hand.
The door code. Five tiny queeping touches across the keypad. The glass door hinged back and he erupted into the conference.
‘Faulkner, what the fuck are you doing?’
Makin, voice almost girlish in shock.
Mike, turning from a side table where he was building drinks.
Echevarria, eyes fixed past Chris on Barranco. His swollen, old man’s face mottled and worked as he struggled to his feet. Voice reedy with outrage.
‘This is—‘
Chris hit him. Side on, both hands, full swing with the baseball bat and all he had behind it. Into the dictator’s ribs. He heard the bones go, felt the brittle crunch through the bat. Echevarria made a noise like a man choking and slumped against the edge of the table. Backswing, in again. Same spot. The old man shrilled. Mike Bryant waded in. Chris stabbed him handily in the solar plexus with the bat end. Bryant staggered and sat down against the wall, whooping for breath. The other uniform bellowed and tried to get round the table to his boss. He tangled in his own chair and went over backwards. Chris swung again. Echevarria raised an arm. The bat broke it with an audible snap. The old man screamed. Back up, and swing again. He got the face this time. The dictator’s nose broke, the bone over one eye caved in. Blood ripped out, spraying warm and wet on his own face and hands. Echevarria went down and lay on the floor, curled foetally and still screaming. Chris spread his stance low and wide, and chopped down as if he was splitting logs. Head and body, an indiscriminate frenzy of blows. He heard hoarse yelling, and it was his own. Blood everywhere, running off the bat, in his eyes. The white glint of exposed bone in the mess at his feet. Choking, bubbling sounds from Echevarria.
The other uniform came flailing round the table at last. Chris, down now to adrenalin-cold clarity, swung about and let him have the bat sideways across the throat with full swing. The man jerked back as if tugged on an invisible string. He hit the floor like an upturned beetle, strangling noisily.
Everything stopped. On the floor, Echevarria made a bubbling sigh and fell silent. A metre and a half off, Nick Makin had finally made it to his feet.
‘Faulkner!’
Chris hefted the bat. His face twitched. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well, rasping tones unrecognisable in his own ears.
‘Back off, Nick. I’ll do you, too.’
He heard Mike crawling to his feet. He looked back to the door he’d come in, where Vicente Barranco stood staring at the carnage. Chris wiped some of the blood off his face and grinned dizzily at him. The trembling was starting to set in. He tossed the bat to the floor, next to Echevarria’s cr
umpled form.
‘Okay, Vicente,’ he said shakily. ‘You tell me. Whose fucking side am I on?’
‘You know, that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.’
Mike Bryant handed him the whisky glass and went back to sit behind his desk. Chris huddled on the sofa in the blanket the paramedics had lent him, still shivering. In front of him on the table, the chess board pieces faced off against each other in the silence. The onyx gleamed.
‘Sorry I hit you.’
Mike rubbed at his chest. ‘Yeah, with my own fucking bat. Could have done without that as well.’
Chris sipped at the whisky, both hands cupped around the glass as if it was hot coffee. The spirit went down, warming. He shook his head.
‘I just lost it, Mike.’
‘Yeah, no shit.’ Bryant glared at him. ‘Think I spotted that one too. Chris, what the fuck was Barranco doing at Shorn unsupervised? You knew we had Echevarria in for budget review today. Why didn’t you take Vicente out for a drive or something? Or at least keep him in the Hilton until you could check with me.’
Chris shook his head again. The words limped out of his mouth. ‘I was running late. He went out without me.’
‘That doesn’t explain how he got in here. Who cleared him for the tower?’
‘That’s what I tried to tell you earlier. Hewitt authorised a limo to bring him here.’
Mike’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hewitt?’
‘Yeah. Louise fucking Hewitt. I’m telling you, she’s been gunning for me since the day I walked in here. She wants—‘
‘Oh, bullshit!’ Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference chamber. ‘For Christ’s sake! Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is serious.’
The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swivelled the chair away and stared out of the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do you think we should tell Notley?’
‘Does it matter what we tell him?’
‘Fuck, yes.’ Mike jerked back round to look at him. What’s the matter, you want to lose your job or something?’
Chris blinked. ‘What?’
‘I said. Do you want to lose your job?’
‘I. But.’ Chris gestured helplessly and nearly dropped his whisky. ‘Mike, the job’s already lost. Isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just go round clubbing the clients to death, can you.’
‘Oh, I’m glad you realise that now.’
‘I’m. Mike, of course I don’t want to lose this job. I like what I do.’ Chris made the curious, prickling discovery that he was telling the truth. ‘We’re just getting somewhere important at last. I’m telling you, Barranco’s the one. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work. He can make us the. What?’
Mike Bryant was watching him narrowly.
‘Go on.’
‘Mike, I’m good at this. The people stuff. You know that. And after this, I’ve got Barranco for keeps. We’re close now. Really close. This one matters.’
‘And Cambodia doesn’t?’
‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing new in Cambodia. They’ve been down this road at least four times before. Same old song, just a different decade. All we have to do is ride the wave, and make sure the enterprise zones don’t catch any damage. The NAME’s different. You’re looking at a radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. How often do you get to do work like that any more?’
Mike said nothing for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he nodded and got up from the desk.
‘Alright, good. We’ll go with that. Radical restructuring. Tone down the stuff about Cambodia, though. All our accounts are important, and whatever Sary eventually does or doesn’t achieve, we stand to make a lot of money over there. Remember that.’
Raised voices from outside Mike’s office. The unmistakable tones of Louise Hewitt arguing with security. Mike made a wry face.
‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Block and cover. Start talking. And get rid of that fucking blanket, you look like an evicted criminal.’
‘What?’
‘Something about the NAME, Chris. Relevant detail. Come on, quick. Try to sound intelligent.’
‘Uh,’ Chris groped. ‘The, uh, the urban situation’s no better. Sure you’ve got a pretty contented overclass but that’s only—‘
‘The blanket.’
He shrugged it off. Got up and started to pace. Voice strengthening as he picked up the thread again. Improvising. ‘The thing is, Mike, that business with the students was crucial. Some of those kids were from the overclass, okay not many, but with an extended family system like the one you’ve got in the NAME, pretty much everybody knows someone who—‘
Louise Hewitt burst into the office.
‘What the fuck have you done, Faulkner?’
He turned to look at her and what struck him like a physical blow was how drop dead gorgeous she looked angry.
He’d always been aware that Hewitt was attractive in a hard, dark fashion, but it wasn’t the kind of look that drew him. Too severe, too buttoned up and in the end, let’s be honest here, Chris, blonde was really what did it for him. Louise Hewitt was manifestly a dark-haired woman in utter control of her own destiny. It didn’t help matters that he hated her guts.
Now, with colour burning in her cheeks, her hair in light disarray and her jacket settled with less than perfect attention on her shoulders, he suddenly saw through to the woman beneath. She stood with legs braced slightly apart, as if the fifty-second floor was the deck of a yacht in suddenly choppy waters, hands floating just off her hips like those of a movie gunfighter. The stance was unconsciously sensual, stretching the fabric of her narrow knee-length skirt and highlighting the lines of her hips.
One tiny part of Chris’s mind stayed rational enough to register the bizarre perversity of his sexual programming. The rest of him was shit-scared of what was going to happen next.
‘Louise,’ said Mike Bryant cheerfully. ‘There you are. I imagine you’ve heard, then.’
‘Heard? Heard?’ She advanced into the room, still half-focused on Chris. ‘I’ve just come from the fucking sickbay, Mike. They’ve got Echevarria on a ventilator. What the fuck is going on?’
‘Is he likely to die?’
Hewitt pointed her finger. ‘I asked you a question, Mike. Spare me the executive deflection techniques.’
‘Sorry.’ Mike shrugged. ‘Force of habit. The Echevarria end of things is played out. He was making the situation unmanageable.’
‘So you beat him to death?’
‘It’s unfortunate, but—‘
‘Unfortunate? Are you—‘
Chris cleared his throat. ‘Louise, Barranco is—‘
‘You,’ she swung on him like combat, ‘shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage today.’
Mike Bryant came out from behind his desk, hands lifted, soothing. ‘Louise, we had no choice. It was lose Echevarria or lose Barranco. And Barranco is the key to this. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work.’
Chris just stopped himself staring as he heard his own words coming out of Bryant’s mouth. Hewitt looked from one man to the other. Her anger seemed to crank down a notch.
‘That’s not what Makin says.’
‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’
‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’
‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’
‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her custom
ary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’
They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.
‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’
Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’
‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’
‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’
Hewitt shook her head.
‘This has got to go to Notley.’
‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’
‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’
‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’
Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’
‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—‘
‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.
‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’
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