‘You can. I’m part of the package.’
‘No.’ The trawlerman’s gaze settled on him. ‘I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London. There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Honourable.’
It flickered across Chris’s memory before he could stop it. Liz Linshaw’s body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh.
‘I think you are mistaken about me,’ he said quietly.
Barranco shook his head. ‘You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.’
Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a waterfront cafe waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word. Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the cafe behind them.
The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.
‘So it went well,’ Lopez asked.
Chris stirred at his cocktail. ‘Seems that way. He’s going to come to London, anyway.’ His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. ‘I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I’ll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.’
‘Billing?’
‘Through the covert account. I don’t want this to show up until ... No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I’ll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that’ll help me sleep?’
‘Not on me.’ Lopez dug out his phone. ‘You’re at the Sheraton, right?’
‘Yeah. 1101. Jenkins.’
The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.
‘En ingles, guei,’ said Lopez impatiently.
Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. ‘You here in town, man?’
‘No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.’
‘Is he a fizi?’
Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. ‘You do a lot of this sort of stuff?’
‘Christ, no.’
The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again. ‘Definitely not. Something gentle.’
‘Got it. Address.’
‘Sheraton, room 1101. Mr Jenkins.’
‘Charge card or account.’
‘Very fucking funny. Hasta luego.’
‘Hasta la cuenta, amigo.’
He folded up the phone. ‘Stuff 11 be waiting for you at the desk. You go in, just ask if you got any messages. There’ll be an envelope.’
‘You can vouch for this guy, right.’
‘Yeah, he’s a plastic surgeon.’
Chris couldn’t see why that was supposed to reassure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crushing his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of seven or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finishing line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper’s scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he’d been carrying. Sleep was coming. He’d worry about everything else tomorrow.
But behind the aching relief, Barranco’s words floated like the voices out on the water.
You do not belong.
Chapter Twenty-Four
He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the fucking thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, fucking bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap. Mike Bryant’s recorded face grinned out at him.
‘Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you’ve got about three hours before your flight, so here’s something to think about while you’re waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!’
Groggy from the plastic surgeon’s special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man’s face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight assault on him while he slept. It looked bad.
‘Motherfucker.’
He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike’s gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Saturday and Mike, if he’d known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he’d stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov’s Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.
Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike’s attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response - the post-fight stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter’s trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of cliche. We are well matched, you and I. We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.
Chris grinned and folded the laptop.
He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.
At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.
‘No, it’s just. You didn’t need to. You know, I’m running on the Shorn clock. They’d pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.’
‘I wanted to see you.’
So why the fuck’d you go to Tromso? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Saturday morning traffic on the orbital was sparse, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.
‘How was your mum?’
‘She’s good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she’s been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.’
‘Is she shagging him?’ It didn’t quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti’s sex life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage. Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.
‘Sorry, I—‘
‘That was nasty.’
‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Helplessly.
What the fuck is happening to us, Carla. What the fuck are we doing here? Is it just me? Is it?
He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the glass of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand him the water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.