‘Pussy.’ Bryant grinned to defuse the insult, and drummed impatiently on the table. ‘So tell me. How’s it feel?’

‘What?’

‘Conflict fucking Investment!’

‘Oh.’ Chris marshalled his sludgy thoughts. ‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant seemed disappointed. ‘That all?’

‘It’s not so different to Emerging Markets, Mike.’ Trying to think was hard work. Chris began to wonder if he should have accepted the pipe. ‘Longer-term outlook, but basically the same stuff. Yeah, I like it. Apart from that bitch Hewitt.’

‘Ah. I wondered how that was going. Had a run-in, have we?’

‘You could say that.’

Bryant shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t let it get you down. Hewitt’s been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always been harder to cut it as a woman in this field, so they come out twice as tough. They have to. See, these days Hewitt practically is Conflict Investment. Big reorganisation about five years back, austerity measures. Division got cut to the bone. There’s a lot of pressure to make good, and most of that pressure falls on Hewitt’s shoulders.’

‘Notley’s senior partner.’

‘Notley?’ Bryant piped more smoulder. ‘Nah, it was his baby in the beginning, but once he went senior he downloaded everything onto Hewitt and Hamilton. There was another guy, Page, but Hewitt called him out just before profit share last year. Rammed him right off the Gullet. Believe that?

‘The Gullet?’

‘Yeah, you know. Last section as you come up over the zones on the M11. The two-lane narrows. Where you took out that no-namer, well, just after, after the underpass. Where it goes elevated. Hewitt let Page get ahead there, knew he’d have to either slow down or turn around to face her. No chance of just being first to work these days, you’ve got to turn up with blood on your wheels or not at all. So yeah, she lets him go, waits, he’s not good enough to make the 180 turn on a piece of road that narrow, so he slows up, tries for a side-to-side, she won’t let him, just rams him off on a corner. Bam!’ Bryant gripped the pipe in his teeth and slammed fist into open palm. ‘Page goes through the barrier, falls right into a low-rise, goes through seven levels of zone housing like they were paper. Gas supply ripped open somewhere in one of the flats on the way down. Boom. Adios muchachos, everybody in black.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, pretty fucking impressive, huh.’ Mike squinted at the pipe, tried the lighter again. ‘See, now what Hewitt did, that’s okay, but now she’s got to prove that she doesn’t need two junior partners to help her run CI. If she can’t, it means she made a bad call. Pure greed call. No one round here minds greed, just so long as it’s good for the company as well. If it works out for Hewitt, she’s saved Shorn the expense of a junior partner, and she and Hamilton get bigger equity. It’s the free-market trade-off. Something for us, something for them. But if it doesn’t work out, she’s dead in the water and she knows it.’

‘Well, Ms Conflict Investment doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence in me,’ said Chris gloomily. ‘Not bloody enough for her, apparently.’

‘That what she said?’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Shit, after what you did to Quain? That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Well, let’s just say that not all my challenges have been that uncompromising. This kill-or-be-killed stuff is strictly for the moviemakers. It’s crude, man. You don’t always need a kill. That’s crude.’ Chris leaned forward as his enthusiasm kindled. ‘You ever see any of those old samurai movies?’

‘Bruce Lee? Shit like that?’

‘No, no. Not those. This is other stuff. Older. More subtle. See, these two guys, they’re about to have a duel. So they both stand there, swords out.’ Chris thrust with an imaginary sword and Bryant jerked back in reflex. His eyes narrowed momentarily, and then he laughed.

‘Whoops. Scared me there.’

‘Sorry. Wasn’t intentional. So yeah, the two of them stand there, and they stare into each other’s eyes.’

He locked gazes with Bryant, who emitted another snort of laughter.

‘They just stare. Because they both know that the one who blinks or looks away first, that’s the one who would have lost that fight.’

Bryant’s laughter dried up without fuss. He set the pipe aside. Both men were leaning on the table now, drilling their gazes into each other’s eyes with chemically altered concentration. The shared stillness of the moment stretched. The sounds of the bar receded into a backdrop, surf on a distant beach. Time ran on like a train they had both just missed. The pipe smouldered quietly to itself on the scarred wooden table. Vision wired their stares over it, eyeball to eyeball. From somewhere, an internal silence leaked into the world.

Mike Bryant blinked.

Mike Bryant laughed and looked away.

The moment blew away like an autumn leaf and Chris sat back with a look of tipsy fulfilment on his face. Bryant grinned, a little intensely. Chris was too drunk to catch the upped voltage. Bryant made a pistol of thumb and forefinger. He pointed at Chris’s face.

‘Bang!’

The laughter bubbled up again, this time from both men. Bryant made a sound between a snort and a sigh.

‘There you are. You stared me out.’

Chris nodded.

‘But I blew your fucking head off’

‘Yeah.’ Chris leaned back across the table. Enthused. Oblivious to the edge sheathed in the other man’s voice. ‘But you see, there was no need for that. We’d already established the winner. You blinked. I would have won.’

‘Bullshit. Maybe I had a hair in my eye. Maybe all these samurai guys walked away from fights they could have won just because they had a jumpy eye muscle that day. Where’d you read all this shit, anyway?’

‘Mike, you’re missing the point. It’s about total control. It’s a duel between two whole people, not just two sets of skills. We could have a fist fight and you could turn up with a gun. We could have a gun fight and you could come with an armoured car and a flame-thrower. That’s not what a duel’s about.’

Bryant picked up the pipe again. ‘Duel’s about winning, Chris,’ he said.

Chris wasn’t listening.

‘Look at China, a couple of centuries ago. There were cases there where two warlords sat down on the battlefield and played chess to decide the outcome of a battle. Chess, Michael. No death, no slaughter, just a game of chess. And they honoured it.’

Bryant looked sceptical. ‘Chess?’

‘Just a game of chess.’ Chris was staring off into a corner. ‘You imagine that?’

‘Not really, no.’ Bryant stuffed the pipe into a pocket and started to get up. ‘But it makes a good story, I’ll give you that. Now, how about we get the car and get out of here before the sun comes up? Because Suki’s going to fucking take me apart if I don’t get back soon. And she’s not into chess.’

Chapter Six

They came out of the Falkland through a side door and onto a different street. Cold night air like a slap in the face, and for a couple of moments Chris reeled. He wondered how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.

‘Where’s the fucking car?’

‘This way.’

Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him round the corner and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.

‘Ooops,’ he said softly.

The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.

None of them looked over eighteen.

They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.

‘You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,’ Chris sniggered, still drunk. ‘Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.’