The results were gratifying.

Fletcher must have been watching the farewell gesture, not the road ahead and he forgot where he was. He jerked his car aside, pulled too far and broadsided the wall in a shower of sparks. The primer-painted car staggered drunkenly, raked fire off the concrete once more and bounced away in Chris’s wake, tyres shrieking. Chris watched in the mirror as the lawyer braked his vehicle to a sprawling halt, sideways across two lanes. He grinned and slowed to about fifty, waiting to see if Fletcher would pick up the challenge again. The other car showed no sign of restarting. It was still stationary when he hit the upward incline at the far end of the underpass and lost sight of it.

‘Wise man,’ he murmured to himself.

He emerged from the tunnel into an unexpected patch of sunlight. The road vaulted, climbing onto a long raised curve that swept in over the expanses of zoneland and angled towards the cluster of towers at the heart of the city. Sunlight struck down in selective rays. The towers gleamed.

Chris accelerated into the curve.

Chapter Two

The light in the washroom was subdued, filtering down from high windows set in the sloping roof. Chris rinsed his hands in the onyx basin and stared at himself in the big circular mirror. The Saab-grey eyes that looked back at him were clear and steady. The bar-code tattoos over his cheekbones picked up the colour and mixed it with threads of lighter blue. Lower still, the blue repeated in the weave of his suit and on one of the twisted lines in his Susana Ingram tie. The shirt shone white against his tan and, when he grinned, the silver tooth caught the light in the room like an audible chime.

Good enough.

The sound of splashing water ran on after he killed the tap. He glanced sideways to see another man washing his hands two basins down. The new arrival was big, the length of limb and bulk of trunk habitually used to model suits, and with long fair hair tied back in a ponytail. An Armani-suited Viking. Chris almost looked for a double-bladed battle axe resting against the basin at the man’s side.

Instead, one of the hands emerged from the basin and he saw, with a sudden, visceral shock, that it was liberally stained with blood. The other man looked up and met his gaze.

‘Something I can help you with?’

Chris shook his head and turned to the hand-dryer on the wall. Behind him, he heard the water stop in the basin and the other man joined him at the dryer. Chris acknowledged the arrival and gave a little space, rubbing away the last traces of moisture on his hands. The dryer ran on. The other man was looking at him closely.

‘Hey, you must be the new guy.’

He snapped his fingers wetly. There was still some blood on them, Chris saw, tiny flecks and some in the lines of his palm.

‘Chris something, right?’

‘Faulkner.’

‘Yeah, Faulkner, that’s it.’ He put his hands under the flow of air. ‘Just come in from Hammett McColl?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m Mike Bryant.’ A hand offered sideways. Chris hesitated briefly, eyeing the blood. Bryant picked up on it. ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just in a no-namer, and Shorn policy is you’ve got to recover their plastic as proof of the kill. It can get messy.’

‘Had a no-namer myself this morning,’ said Chris reflexively.

‘Yeah? Where was that?’

‘M11, around junction eight.’

‘The underpass. You take him down in there?’

Chris nodded, deciding on the spur of the moment not to mention the inconclusive nature of the engagement.

‘Nice. I mean, no-namers don’t get you anywhere much, but it’s all rep, I guess.’

‘I guess.’

‘You’re up for Conflict Investment, aren’t you? Louise Hewitt’s section. I’m up there on the fifty-third myself. She was batting your resume about a few weeks back. That stuff you did at Hammett McColl way back was some serious shit. Welcome aboard.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll walk you up there if you like. Going that way myself.’

‘Great.’

They stepped out into the broad curve of the corridor and a glass-wall view of the financial district from twenty floors up. Bryant seemed to drink it in for a moment before he turned up the corridor, still scratching at a persistent speck of blood on his hand.

‘They give you a car yet?’

‘Got my own. Customised. My wife’s a mechanic’

Bryant stopped and looked at him. ‘No shit?’

‘No shit.’ Chris held up his left hand, the dull metal band on the ring finger. Bryant examined it with interest.

‘What’s that, steel?’ He caught on and grinned suddenly, Out of an engine, right? I’ve read about this stuff.’

‘Titanium. Got it off an old Saab venting chamber. Had to resize it, but apart from that—‘

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The other man’s enthusiasm was almost childlike. ‘Did you do it over an engine block, like that guy in Milan last year?’ The finger snap again. ‘What was his name, Bonocello or something?’

‘Bonicelli. Yeah, like that, pretty much.’ Chris tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. His engine-block altar marriage pre-dated the Italian driver’s by some five years, but had gone almost unnoticed in the driving press. Bonicelli’s ran for weeks, in full colour. Maybe something to do with the fact that Silvio Bonicelli was the hellraising younger son of a big Florentine driving family, maybe just that he had married not a mechanic but an ex-porn star and blossoming manufactured pop singer. Maybe also the fact Chris and Carla had done it with a minimum of fuss in the backyard at Mel’s AutoFix, and Silvio Bonicelli had invited the crowned heads of corporate Europe to a ceremony on a cleared shop floor at the new Lancia works in Milan. That was the trick with the twenty-first century’s corporate nobility. Family contacts.

‘Marry your mechanic.’ Bryant was grinning again. ‘Man, I can see where that would be useful, but I’ve got to tell you, I admire your courage.’

‘It wasn’t really a courage thing,’ said Chris mildly. ‘I was in love. You married?’

‘Yeah.’ He saw Chris looking at his ring. ‘Oh. Platinum. Suki’s a bond trader for Costerman’s. Mostly works from home these days, and she’s probably going to quit if we have another kid.’

‘You got kids?’

‘Yeah, just the one. Ariana.’ They reached the end of the corridor and a battery of lifts. Bryant dug in his jacket pocket while they waited and produced a wallet. He flipped it open to reveal an impressive rack of credit cards and a photo of an attractive auburn-haired woman holding a pixie-faced child. ‘Look. We took that on her birthday. She was one. Nearly a year ago already. They grow up fast. You got kids?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Well, all I can tell you is don’t wait too long.’ Bryant flipped the wallet closed as the lift arrived and they rode up in companionable silence. The lift announced each floor in a chatty tone and gave them brief outlines of current Shorn development projects. After a while Chris spoke, more to drown out the earnest synthetic voice than anything else.

‘This place have its own combat classes?’

‘What, hand to hand?’ Bryant grinned. ‘Look at that number, Chris. Forty-one. Up here, you don’t go hand-to-hand for promotion. Louise Hewitt’d consider that the height of bad taste.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Yeah, but you never know. Saved my life once.’

‘Hey, I’m kidding.’ Bryant patted him on the arm. ‘They’ve got a couple of corporate instructors down in the gym, sure. Shotokan and Tae kwon do, I think. I do some Shotokan myself sometimes, just to stay in shape, plus you never know when you might wind up in the cordoned zones.’ He winked. ‘Know what I mean? But anyway, like one of my instructors says, learning a martial art won’t teach you to fight. You want to learn that shit, go to the street and get in some fights. That’s how you really learn.’ A grin. ‘Least, that’s what they tell me.’