‘I don’t,’ Makin got to one knee, holding his face. ‘Know. What the fuck. Youah talking about.’

Chris renewed his efforts to break Mike’s hold. Makin straightened, wiped his mouth and looked up. He raised his free arm.

‘I’ll see you on the fucking woad for that, Faulkner.’

‘Hey!’ Mike loosened his hold on Chris’s shoulders. ‘That’s enough of that shit, Nick. Nobody sees anybody on the road in this team. Nobody. You save that shit for the tenders. Chris, I’m going to let you go now, okay. Now you behave. No brawling on the car decks, it’s undignified. This isn’t the zones.’

He let go of Chris and stepped away, carefully poised between the two men, arms spread slightly upward from the waist, ready. Makin prowled sideways and spat. Chris felt the reaction twitch through him from the fist back to the shoulder. Mike Bryant drew a deep breath.

‘Okay, guys. What the fuck is going on?’

‘This piece of shit,’ Chris was still adrenalin fired, thrumming with the need to do violence. ‘Wired through our detail on Diaz to Echevarria.’

‘Yeah, so?’

Bryant blinked. ‘You did that, Nick?’

‘Jesus, yes. You said to light a fiah under Echevaia’s arse.’

Chris felt the fury drop out of him to make room for disbelief. He saw the same in Bryant’s stare. The big man shook his head.

‘But—‘

‘Christ, Mike. I want the axe over his head by Monday, that’s what you said. What was I supposed to do?’

Chris flared. ‘That’s fucking bullshit. You weren’t in here at the weekend.’

‘How the fuck do you know wheah I was? What are you, my fucking mother?’

‘I didn’t see you Saturday,’ said Bryant quietly.

‘I took the stuff home, Mike. Look, Echevaia was holding rallies for the faithful all weekend. It seemed like a good time to shake him. The uplincon is tomorrow, what was I going to do? Wait and then twy and paste it all together today? I’ve got Cambodian logistics to think about, a palace wevolution in Yemen. The Kashmiah thing. Guatemala’s coming apart again. I don’t have time for this shit.’

Chris surged forward a step. Fetched up with Mike Bryant’s arm across his chest.

‘I sent Joaquin Lopez down to the ME, fuckhead, asking after Diaz. He nearly fucking died today.’

‘That’s supposed to be my fault?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Diaz was off-limits, Nick. He was our holdout if old scumbag didn’t fold.’

‘You knew that!’

‘Oh, what am I? A fucking telepath? No one told me not to use Diaz, and he’s the stongest theat we’ve got.’

‘Alright.’ Mike rubbed at his face. ‘Maybe we didn’t make it clear enough. But you should have checked with Chris first. Same goes for you, Chris. You should have run it by Nick before you sent Lopez down there.’

‘But.’ Chris couldn’t identify the sudden feeling in his chest. ‘You told me to send him.’

‘Well, yeah, but not without consultation.’ Bryant looked back and forth between the two men. ‘Come on, people. A little communication. A little cooperation, for Christ’s sake. Is that too much to ask?’

Neither of the other men even glanced at him. Chris and Makin were either end of a hardwired stare.

‘People died, Mike, because of this fucking clown.’

Makin snorted.

Bryant frowned. ‘I thought you said nearly.’

‘Not Lopez. Other people. I had to call in Langley to get the goons off his back, and they blew up a whole fucking cafe.’

Makin traded in his snort for a sneer. Bryant made a noise only slightly less dismissive.

‘Well, what’d you expect? Come on, Chris. Langley? These guys used to be the CIA, for fuck’s sake. Even before deregulation, they were a bunch of cack-fisted incompetent fucking clowns.’ He looked across at Makin, grinned and made an imploring gesture with one hand. ‘I mean, Langley, for Christ’s sake.’

Chris felt himself losing his temper with his friend. ‘There was no fucking option, Mike,’ he snapped. ‘No one else in the ME has the response time. You know that.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s one for the Monopolies Commission.’ Mike pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘Look. It’s a shame about the cafe, but it could have been worse. I mean, with Langley you’re lucky they didn’t kill Lopez for you as well.’ Makin laughed out loud. Bryant joined in. ‘Fuck, the kind of punk sicarios they’re contracting out to these days, you’re lucky they didn’t take out the whole block.’

‘It isn’t funny, Mike.’

‘Oh, come on, it is a bit.’ Bryant shelved his grin. Sobered. ‘Alright. A fuck-up, is what it is. But we can cover the damage. We’ll ride out any waves Echevarria makes tomorrow, keep it in the team, and we’ll bury the Langley account. Pay it off, I don’t know, through one of the Cambodia slush funds or something. No one else has to know. Clean hands all round, come the quarterly. Alright?’ He looked round at his team. ‘Agreed?’

Makin nodded. Chris, finally, too. Bryant’s grin came back.

‘Good. But remember, gentlemen. A little more attention to detail next time, please.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hernan Echevarria, predictably, did not take it so well.

‘You sit this out,’ said Mike, rather grimly, as they stood in the covert viewing chamber, waiting for the uplink to go through. ‘We’ll do the lying.’

As usual when faced with politics, he had slung his baseball bat across his shoulders cruciform, and now he prowled about, rolling his neck back against the polished wood. On the other side of a one-way glass wall, Nick Makin busied himself with bottled water and screen control mice along one edge of the conference table. The rest of the slate grey expanse was bare, but for the shallow slope of recessed display screens near the centre.

‘You think this is the break point?’ Chris asked.

Mike pulled a face. ‘If yesterday’s performance is anything to go by, it’s pretty fucking close. It’s only the fact he is actually yelling at us that makes me think we might still have a chance. If he was planning to walk, I don’t think we’d even be talking. Well, shouting.’

The call had come in a couple of hours before lunch, barely past dawn back in the NAME. Echevarria must have spent all night talking to his forensic experts in Medellin. Mike took it. Chris never heard the detail, but understood it had gone something like what the fuck did you gringo sons of whores think you were doing on my turf, who the fuck do you think you are, talking to this Marquista traitor Diaz behind my back, if you were men of honour and not grey suited scum I would etcetera etcetera, blah, blah, apoplexy.

‘Okay, not quite,’ Mike admitted. ‘Figure of speech. He hasn’t dropped dead, fortunately. Otherwise we really would be in trouble. I don’t rate our chances of negotiating with Echevarria junior at all. So, at the meeting, let’s try and keep temperatures low. Conciliatory approach.’

Later that day, they heard the news. The gunships had flown, the highlands west of Medellin were in flames and the Monitored Economy’s pet press were proclaiming Diaz either dead or fleeing for the Panamanian border where he would be cornered and caged like the cowardly Marquista dog he was. In the cities, the arrests ran into triple figures.

‘He’ll be riding high, we’ve got that going for us.’ Mike, trying for upbeat as the three-minute countdown for the uplink commenced. ‘Taste of blood in his teeth, with a bit of luck he’ll think he’s invincible. With the right amount of cringing apology, I think we can talk him round.’

Chris hauled up a chair and leaned on the back. ‘You sure you don’t want me in there instead of Makin?’

Bryant just looked at him.

‘What?’

‘You going to let this go?’

‘Mike, it isn’t even my fucking account. In the end, I don’t give a shit. But you’re not going to tell me this wasn’t deliberate.’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break with the conspiracy theories, Chris. Why can’t you just accept it was a communications fuck-up? Is basic incompetence so hard to believe in?’