‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I. Just shouldna. Taken all those drugs.’

He laughed maniacally and, at the last moment, he yanked the wheel and the BMW swung violently to the left. They slid out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut and past the high side of the transporter’s wagon, so close that through the side window Chris saw individual dents in the metal surface of the freight container. He heard the hissing explosion of brakes across the night air, and knew that Bryant had just gone ahead and done what he’d asked Carla to do earlier. He’d deliberately tripped the transporter’s collision systems. He’d been playing chicken with the machine’s reflexes. For fun.

Much later, back in his own car, he watched the same stretch of road again while Carla drove them home. Had he been a little more aware of his immediate surroundings, he would have seen Carla open her mouth to speak several times before she finally made up her mind.

‘I’m sorry, that was my fault. I didn’t—‘

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘I didn’t think he’d force it like—‘

‘He was just making things clear,’ said Chris distantly.

They rode in silence.

‘He’s good, isn’t he,’ said Carla after a while.

Chris nodded wordlessly.

‘Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.’ She laughed without humour. ‘And to think I said you were going to wreck him in a couple of years’ time. Jesus, irony or wha—‘

‘Carla, I’d really prefer not to talk about it, alright.’

Carla looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed, but if she’d planned to be angry, what she saw in his face drained the anger out of her. Instead, she reached across to take his hand in hers.

‘Sure,’ she said very quietly.

Chris took up the offered clasp, squeezing her fingers tightly. A faint smile twitched at his mouth, but his eyes never left the road ahead.

Chapter Nine

In architectural echo of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for over six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickle-down wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

On the street opposite the Shorn complex the prosperity had blossomed - or leaked - into the form of a tiny corner restaurant called Louie Louie’s. Originally set up in the previous century to serve the butcher’s market that had once stood where the Shorn complex now loomed, the place had closed down briefly during the domino recessions and then reopened under new management, supplying coffee and snacks to the post-recessional influx of workers in Basecamp. This much Chris had gleaned from Mike Bryant when they went across for coffee one morning. What he noticed on his own was that the place never seemed to close and that, whether through inverted snobbery or genuine quality, the execs in the Shorn tower sent out to Louie Louie’s in preference to almost any other eating establishment in the district.

The coffee, Chris was forced to admit, was the best he’d had in the UK, and he derived a further, ridiculously childish, satisfaction from drinking it out of the tall styrofoam canister while he stood by the window of his office and gazed down fifty-odd floors to the dimly illuminated frontage of the place it had been made. He was doing exactly that, and bluffing his way through an audiophone local-agent call from Panama, when Mike Bryant came to call.

‘Well, you go and tell El Commandante that if he wants his Panthers of Justice to have bandages and mobile cover next month he’d better reconsider that stance. All the phones—‘

He broke off as someone banged on the half-open door. Turning from the window, he saw Bryant shouldering his way into the office. In the big man’s arms were two packages wrapped in fancy black and gold paper. The bottom package was wide and flat and about the width of Bryant’s shoulders, the top one about the size and shape of two hard-copy dictionaries taped together. Both looked to be heavy.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Chris said and clicked the audiophone off.

‘Hi, Chris.’ Bryant grinned. ‘Got something for you. Where do you want it?’

‘Over there.’ Chris gestured at a small table in the corner of the still minimally furnished office space. ‘What is it?

‘Show you.’

Bryant put down the packages and ripped back the wrapping on the flat package to reveal the chequered surface of a marbled chess board. He grinned up at Chris again, freed the board from the wrapping entirely and set it straight on the table.

‘Chess?’ Chris asked stupidly.

‘Chess,’ agreed Bryant, working on the wrapping of the other box. It came loose and he tipped the box sideways, spilling carved onyx pieces across the board.

‘You know how to set this up?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ Chris came forward and picked up some of the pieces, weighing them in his hand. ‘This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?’

‘Place in Basecamp. They were having a sale. Two for the price of one. I’ve got the other one set up in my office. Here, give me the white ones. You do the black. Who was that on the phone?’

‘Fucking Harris in Panama. Got problems with the Nicaraguan insurgents again, and of course Harris won’t take a fucking decision on his own because he’s five hundred klicks off the action. He’s not sure of the angles.’

Bryant paused in mid-action. ‘He said that?’

‘More or less.’

‘So he called someone who’s five thousand klicks off to decide for him? You ought to call in the audit on that guy. What’s he on anyway, three per cent of gross?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Audit the fucker. No, better yet, call a retender. Let’s see him fight for his fucking three per cent like we have to.’

Chris shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like out there.’

‘What, better the scumbag that you know?’

‘You got it.’ Chris put the final black pawn in place and stood back. ‘Very nice. Now what?’

Bryant reached out to the white files.

‘Well, I don’t know much about this game, but apparently this is a fairly good way to start.’

He moved the white king’s pawn forward two squares and flashed another grin.

‘Your move.’

‘Do I have to decide now?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Call me with it. That’s the idea. Oh, and listen. That thing with Harris. I had the exact same shit with him over Honduras last year. Wish I’d called the retender then, but it was a sensitive time. Is this a sensitive time?’

Chris thought about it for a moment.

‘No. They’re plugged up in the jungle somewhere, nothing going to happen till the rain stops.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Call the retender,’ he said, pointing a cocked finger pistol downward, execution-style. ‘I would. Get that motherfucker Harris either dead or jacked up and working properly for you. You ever been to Panama?’

‘No. Emerging Markets stuff was all further south. Hammett McColl were into Venezuela, the NAME, bits of Brazil.’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you about Panama.’ Bryant offered his grin again. ‘Just for your information. The place is stuffed full of agents who’ll do Harris’s job twice as well for half the money. You offer one and a half, maybe two per cent of total, they’ll rip his fucking heart out and eat it. Down there they do the tendering in converted bullrings, gladiator-style.’ The American burlesque came on full. ‘Real messy.’