‘Oh, bullshit!’ Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference chamber. ‘For Christ’s sake! Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is serious.’

The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swivelled the chair away and stared out of the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do you think we should tell Notley?’

‘Does it matter what we tell him?’

‘Fuck, yes.’ Mike jerked back round to look at him. What’s the matter, you want to lose your job or something?’

Chris blinked. ‘What?’

‘I said. Do you want to lose your job?’

‘I. But.’ Chris gestured helplessly and nearly dropped his whisky. ‘Mike, the job’s already lost. Isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just go round clubbing the clients to death, can you.’

‘Oh, I’m glad you realise that now.’

‘I’m. Mike, of course I don’t want to lose this job. I like what I do.’ Chris made the curious, prickling discovery that he was telling the truth. ‘We’re just getting somewhere important at last. I’m telling you, Barranco’s the one. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work. He can make us the. What?’

Mike Bryant was watching him narrowly.

‘Go on.’

‘Mike, I’m good at this. The people stuff. You know that. And after this, I’ve got Barranco for keeps. We’re close now. Really close. This one matters.’

‘And Cambodia doesn’t?’

‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing new in Cambodia. They’ve been down this road at least four times before. Same old song, just a different decade. All we have to do is ride the wave, and make sure the enterprise zones don’t catch any damage. The NAME’s different. You’re looking at a radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. How often do you get to do work like that any more?’

Mike said nothing for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he nodded and got up from the desk.

‘Alright, good. We’ll go with that. Radical restructuring. Tone down the stuff about Cambodia, though. All our accounts are important, and whatever Sary eventually does or doesn’t achieve, we stand to make a lot of money over there. Remember that.’

Raised voices from outside Mike’s office. The unmistakable tones of Louise Hewitt arguing with security. Mike made a wry face.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Block and cover. Start talking. And get rid of that fucking blanket, you look like an evicted criminal.’

‘What?’

‘Something about the NAME, Chris. Relevant detail. Come on, quick. Try to sound intelligent.’

‘Uh,’ Chris groped. ‘The, uh, the urban situation’s no better. Sure you’ve got a pretty contented overclass but that’s only—‘

‘The blanket.’

He shrugged it off. Got up and started to pace. Voice strengthening as he picked up the thread again. Improvising. ‘The thing is, Mike, that business with the students was crucial. Some of those kids were from the overclass, okay not many, but with an extended family system like the one you’ve got in the NAME, pretty much everybody knows someone who—‘

Louise Hewitt burst into the office.

‘What the fuck have you done, Faulkner?’

He turned to look at her and what struck him like a physical blow was how drop dead gorgeous she looked angry.

He’d always been aware that Hewitt was attractive in a hard, dark fashion, but it wasn’t the kind of look that drew him. Too severe, too buttoned up and in the end, let’s be honest here, Chris, blonde was really what did it for him. Louise Hewitt was manifestly a dark-haired woman in utter control of her own destiny. It didn’t help matters that he hated her guts.

Now, with colour burning in her cheeks, her hair in light disarray and her jacket settled with less than perfect attention on her shoulders, he suddenly saw through to the woman beneath. She stood with legs braced slightly apart, as if the fifty-second floor was the deck of a yacht in suddenly choppy waters, hands floating just off her hips like those of a movie gunfighter. The stance was unconsciously sensual, stretching the fabric of her narrow knee-length skirt and highlighting the lines of her hips.

One tiny part of Chris’s mind stayed rational enough to register the bizarre perversity of his sexual programming. The rest of him was shit-scared of what was going to happen next.

‘Louise,’ said Mike Bryant cheerfully. ‘There you are. I imagine you’ve heard, then.’

‘Heard? Heard?’ She advanced into the room, still half-focused on Chris. ‘I’ve just come from the fucking sickbay, Mike. They’ve got Echevarria on a ventilator. What the fuck is going on?’

‘Is he likely to die?’

Hewitt pointed her finger. ‘I asked you a question, Mike. Spare me the executive deflection techniques.’

‘Sorry.’ Mike shrugged. ‘Force of habit. The Echevarria end of things is played out. He was making the situation unmanageable.’

‘So you beat him to death?’

‘It’s unfortunate, but—‘

‘Unfortunate? Are you—‘

Chris cleared his throat. ‘Louise, Barranco is—‘

‘You,’ she swung on him like combat, ‘shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage today.’

Mike Bryant came out from behind his desk, hands lifted, soothing. ‘Louise, we had no choice. It was lose Echevarria or lose Barranco. And Barranco is the key to this. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work.’

Chris just stopped himself staring as he heard his own words coming out of Bryant’s mouth. Hewitt looked from one man to the other. Her anger seemed to crank down a notch.

‘That’s not what Makin says.’

‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’

‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’

‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’

‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her customary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’

They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.

‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’

Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’

‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’

Hewitt shook her head.

‘This has got to go to Notley.’

‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’

‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’

‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’