‘What’s the ground?’

‘North. Three-hundred-kilometre duel envelope, contracts to be signed in conference auditorium six at the Tebbit Centre. Turn up with blood on your wheels or don’t turn up. The word is Nakamura have pulled Mitsue Jones for this one. Flying her in to head up the UK team. Acropolitic don’t have anyone in her league, but they’ll no doubt be sending their finest. Against all of that, you get a team of three including you. Suggestions?’

‘Nick Makin. Chris Faulkner.’ There was no hesitation in Bryant’s voice.

Hewitt looked dubious. ‘Your chess pal, huh?’

‘He’s good.’

‘You don’t let personal feelings get in the way of professional judgment around here, Mike. You know that. It’s bad for business.’

‘That’s right, I know that. And I want Faulkner. You said this was mine, Louise. If you don’t—‘

‘Makin doesn’t like Faulkner,’ said Hewitt sharply.

‘Makin doesn’t like anyone. That’s his secret. The problem here, Louise, is that you don’t like Faulkner. And it isn’t much of a secret, either.’

‘May I remind you that you’re speaking to the executive partner of this division.’ Hewitt’s voice stayed level, just a shade cooler all of a sudden. She poured herself more water while she talked. ‘For your information, Mike, personal feelings have nothing to do with this. I don’t think Faulkner is up to a tender of this magnitude. I also think that you’re letting a friendship cloud your professional judgment and I’m going on record with that. This is going to go badly wrong if you’re not careful.’

‘Louise, this is going to go like a dream.’ Bryant grinned wolfishly.

‘Makin and Faulkner are both proven hard men on the road and as far as I’m concerned that’s the bottom line. We don’t have anybody better and you know it.’

There was a pause in which the loudest sound was Louise Hewitt swallowing water. Finally she shrugged.

‘Alright, Mike, it’s your call. But I’m still going on record against it. And that makes Faulkner one hundred per cent your responsibility. If he fucks up—‘

‘If he fucks up, Louise, you can fire him and I’ll hold the door open.’ Bryant flashed the grin again. ‘Or the window.’

Hewitt took a disc out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

‘If he fucks up, you’ll all be dead,’ she said shortly. ‘And Shorn’ll be out of a medium-term CI contract worth billions. That’s the briefing. Route blow-ups, road-surface commentaries. Make sure they both get copies. Make sure Faulkner understands what he’s got to do. Blood on the wheels, Mike, or there’s no deal.’

‘I remember a time,’ Bryant let just a hint of his American burlesque tinge the words. ‘Used to be enough just to get there first.’

Hewitt smiled despite herself. ‘Bullshit, you do. You just heard Notley and the others talk about it. And even they barely remember when it was that cuddly. Now get out of here, and don’t disappoint me.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Bryant picked up the disc and got up to go. At the door, he paused and looked back to where she was still sitting at the desk, sipping her water.

‘Louise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks for giving me this.’

‘Don’t mention it. Like I said, don’t let me down.’

‘No, I won’t.’ Bryant hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘You know, Louise, you go on record against Faulkner now and you run the risk of looking very silly when he works out.’

Hewitt gave him an icy, executive-partner smile.

‘I’ll run that risk, thank you, Michael. Now, was there any other advice you’d like to give me on running the division?’

Bryant shook his head wordlessly and left.

He stopped by Chris’s office and found the other man standing at the window, staring out at the hail. Winter was hanging on unseasonably long in London and the skies had been gusting fistfuls of the stuff for weeks.

“s happening?’ he asked as he stuck his head around the door.

Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off.

Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.

‘Mike.’ Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.

‘Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.’ It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. ‘Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say No, not ‘til the weekend.’

Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips, as he rolled out the time-honoured Dex and Seth comeback.

‘Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.’

‘What, weekends?’

Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. ‘You come up with a move or what?’

‘Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.’

This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain haemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centred game and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls at weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match, at over two weeks, had already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.

Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down to the Shorn armoury a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big gun. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

‘Got something for you,’ said Bryant, producing the briefing disc from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colours curiously.

‘And that is?’

‘Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.’

Chris ran the disc at home.

‘Look it over,’ Bryant told him. ‘Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavoured shit you drink and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.’

‘Why can’t I just run it now?’ Chris wanted to know.

‘Because,’ leaning closer, with a secret-of-my-success type air, ‘that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Old consultancy trick from way back.’

‘This just you and me?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.’