‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked me one.’

‘You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn’t you?’

‘You sound pretty convinced already.’

‘Just fucking—‘ He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. ‘Just answer me the question, Carla.’

‘You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?’

‘Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don’t need to yell at him.’

‘Don’t need? Or don’t dare?’

‘Fuck you, Carla.’ It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn’t gone, but abruptly it was cold, and that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.

‘No, fuck you, Chris.’ Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. ‘You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who’s fighting for something more than his fucking quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick-making little world works.’

‘A man who cares.’ Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. ‘Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.’

‘Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America’s inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you’re taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon fucking Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn’t they swamp us all in crack?’

‘I didn’t say they shouldn’t.’

‘No, because the truth is you don’t care about that either. You don’t care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That’s what this is about, isn’t it Chris?’ She laughed, something that was almost a sob. ‘Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command—‘

‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Carla.’ The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage. ‘You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe you should have just gone up to his fucking room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience’ll light you up a little better than I do.’

Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.

‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’

She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.

‘You piece of shit.’

It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.

He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.

‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.

She would not look at him.

‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’

He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.

It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.

‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’

‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.

‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—‘

‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.

And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the safety of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.

They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking. Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.

‘We have to get out of this,’ she said at last, muffled, into his neck.

‘I know.’

‘It’s going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it’s going to kill us both.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve got to stop.’

‘I know.’

‘Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don’t fuck it up when he does.’

‘Alright.’ There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: ‘Have you heard anything more?’

She shook her head, still pressed against him.

He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away. ‘They’re taking their sweet fucking time.’

‘Chris, it’s a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven’t heard and that means, Dad says that means they’re going to do it. He says otherwise we’d have heard by now. They’re raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that’s what he thinks.’

Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla’s constant undying faith in her father’s superhuman bloody wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they’d come to the break.

‘Okay, Carla.’ There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. ‘But whatever they’re doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there’s trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they can’t take me down on the road, then they’ll find some other way.’

She raised her head to look at him.

‘Do you think they know? About Vasvik?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don’t get a move on, they’re going to be too late to do anything except clean up the blood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other fucking gig the UN have ever played.’

He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn’t pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger’s face. He looked away from her and along the nighttime perspectives of the road.

‘Doesn’t give you much hope, does it.’