Chapter Thirty-One

They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was scraped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.

‘Surveillance mother,’ was Mike’s opinion. ‘Probably the new Lockheed. I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval. They’ll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen.’

He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted glass of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.

‘Should have indicated, Mike.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mike squinted up at the mirror. ‘Fucking asshole. If this strip wasn’t triple-monitored for the fair, I’d fucking have you, my son.’

‘What is it?’ Barranco had been catnapping in the front passenger seat.

‘Nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Just someone looking to die young.’

Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London. They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up. Bryant wasn’t used to driving in these conditions. No one was.

The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.

‘Maybe we should have flown,’ said Barranco nervously.

‘On a day like this?’ Mike was still grinning. ‘Come on!’

The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle’s lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior analyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the space he’d left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.

‘Thank you,’ said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.

Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. ‘Did this mean something?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Bryant breezily. ‘No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.’

Chris winked.

Ten minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment. The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos. Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited godparents they had come to depend on. It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.

As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut-crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.

‘Fucking clowns,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why they got to do that.’

‘Those are Harpies,’ Barranco told him quietly. ‘Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.’

‘Actually,’ said Mike, alarming the BMW, ‘they’re made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.’

He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.

‘You did not need to bring me here,’ muttered Barranco.

Chris shook his head. ‘I think you’ll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you’ve got assault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don’t buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.’

Barranco fixed him with a hard look. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what Echevarria’s got, and save us both some time.’

‘Uh ...’

‘You know, don’t you. You supply him, you pay for it all.’

‘Not me.’ He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his head again. ‘That’s not my account, Vicente. I’m really sorry. I’ve got no more access to it than you do.’

‘No, but you could get access.’

Chris coughed. Bent it up into a laugh. ‘Vicente, that’s not how it works. I can’t just walk into another executive’s office and go through his client files. Quite apart from the security systems, it’s a question of ethics. No, seriously. I mean it. I could lose my job over something like that.’

Barranco turned away. ‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. I realise you have a lot to lose.’

It didn’t seem to be meant ironically, and Chris thought he was beginning to get the measure of Vicente Barranco enough to spot these things. Over the past two days, he reckoned he’d built some pretty solid scaffolding for his relationship with the Colombian. He’d had the man out to dinner at his home and actively encouraged Carla to reprise her solidarity of the night at the Hilton. He’d gone drinking with him in some semi-risky clubs at the edges of the cordon. And on the Saturday morning after, at Barranco’s insistence, he’d even taken him on a short tour of the eastern zones in the Saab. This last, the Colombian sat through in almost total silence until he asked the single question. Is this where you grew up, Chris?

It was the first time he had used Chris’s first name on its own. A watershed. Chris considered a moment, then he spun the wheel of the Saab and made a U turn in the empty street. He headed southward through a maze of deserted one-way systems and roads he thought he would have forgotten by now, but had not. He found the abandoned, half-built multi-storey car park that overlooked the riverside estates to the west and drove up the spiral pipe to the roof. He parked at the edge and nodded forward through the windscreen.

‘Down there,’ he said simply.

Barranco got out of the car and wandered to the edge of the deck. After a while, Chris got out and joined him.

Riverside.

The name was like a taste in his mouth. Metallic bitter. He stared down at the low-stacked housing, the shaggy green of miniature park spaces allowed to run wild in between, the oil-scummed expanses of water the estates backed onto on three sides. It wasn’t the Brundtland, he told himself, it wasn’t the labyrinthine concrete expanse of homes never designed for any but the dregs. That wasn’t it. Something altogether different had gone wrong here.

‘In my country,’ said Barranco, echoing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘you would not be considered poor if you lived here.’

‘It wasn’t built for poor people.’

The Colombian glanced back at him. ‘But poor people moved in.’

‘Well, no one else would, you see. After the domino recessions. No facilities. No local shops, no transport unless you could afford taxis or fuel and a licence. Which, increasingly, no one could. You want to get anywhere?’ Chris turned and pointed north. ‘The nearest bus stop is two kilometres that way. There used to be a rail link, but the investors got scared and pulled out. When I was growing up, a few of the ones who had jobs used to cycle, but the kid gangs started throwing stones at them. They knocked one woman right off a dock into the river. Kept dropping stones on her ‘til she went under for good.’ He shrugged. ‘Having a job, a real job, marked you out.’