Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—‘

‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.

‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’

For a pair of seconds, Hewitt was silent. Chris could almost hear the whine of concentration as she played it through. Then she smiled sourly at both of them and nodded.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s spin it, shall we.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Echevarria died just before noon, of repeated internal haemorrhaging. He never regained consciousness. Vicente Barranco was there to watch him die. Everybody else was too busy.

They’d been scrambling since Hewitt gave the green light.

‘Get his phone records from Brown’s,’ she flung at them on her way out to find Notley. ‘See if he posted any forward calls for this afternoon, and find out if he was checking in with anyone regularly. That way, we’ll have some idea of how much time we’ve got to play with. And start coming up with a disposal plan.’

Chris spent the next hour digging through files on useful terrorists.

Mike Bryant’s office became the command post. Chris commandeered the datadown while Mike paced about with his mobile, talking to people. They sent Makin after the phone records. All incoming business got routed down to the forty-ninth floor where junior analysts had orders to shelve it unless there was a NAME connection. In the cleared space it gave them, they built the contingency plan. A Langley shadow unit was hired out of Miami, sent to find and track Echevarria junior. The conference-chamber recordings were isolated from all external dataflow ports, and played back on a stand-alone projector to a grey-haired datafake expert on secondment from Imagicians. The expert tut-tutted like a disappointed schoolmistress, hit replay and started making notes. A stony-faced internal security squad with high-level clearance arrived, courtesy of Louise Hewitt, and Mike sent them to clean up the blood.

Makin called in from Brown’s with the phone data. There were no forward calls placed on Echevarria’s account.

‘Praise the Lord,’ said Mike, doing Simeon Sands with remarkable good cheer, given the circumstances. He flourished with his free hand. ‘There is a God because I am saved. Good work, Nick. They give you any static down there? Uh-uh. Good. No, but you never know. Bite the hair of the cliche that fed you and all that. What about regular stuff? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Yeah, well, to be expected, I guess. Yeah, we’ve got the hounds out in Miami. Yeah, Langley, best we could do at short notice. They’re on a tight leash. What? Ah, come on, Nick, this isn’t the fucking time for recrimin— Yeah, well I’m sure he knows that too.’ He glanced at Chris and rolled his eyes. ‘Look Nick, we haven’t got the time for this. Pay them off, get copies of everything and get back here.’

He cut off the call, held the mobile away from him and massaged his ear.

‘Like a dog with a fucking bone. Blame, blame, blame, like it’s going to fucking help now. So what do you reckon, Elaine?’

The datafake expert froze the tape and raked a hand through her silvered hair. On the pastel shaded wall, Chris towered four metres tall, leaning into the swing, face blind with fury.

‘Does it need to stand up in court?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

She shrugged. ‘So we can fix it. Just tell me what you want.’

‘Okay, good. Chris, how you doing?’

Chris nodded at the datadown. ‘Got a few possibilities, yeah. But Mike, none of these guys have pulled off a successful bombing in London for years.’

‘Yeah, well, they won’t have to. All they need do is claim responsibility. There ought to be plenty of the little fuckers up for that. No effort, no risk, instant media coverage. What more could they want?’ Mike flicked a finger at the screen. ‘What about them? They look ugly enough.’

‘No good.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Christian militants, anti-gay, anti-abortion. No axe to grind. Besides, they’re too fucking inept for anyone to believe they could get something like this together.’

‘Yeah, but—‘ Mike’s phone queeped in his hand. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Uh-uh. Alright, thanks. What about the other one? Uh-uh. Okay, well keep him that way then. No, I don’t know how long. Alright. Yes. Goodbye.’

He weighed the phone in his hand and looked pensively at it.

‘Echevarria’s dead. Just now. Dead and cooling fast. And Nick reckoned he promised to call his son in Miami some time this evening. We’re losing our window.’

In the end, they opted for a group of antique revolutionary socialists with a complicated acronym no one was likely to remember very well. The group had enjoyed a sudden resurgence in recent years, drawing disaffected zone youth in a number of European cities, staging the machine-gun assassination of low-level executives and causing big explosions in, or at least in the vicinity of, rather vaguely designated ‘globalist strongholds’. They’d managed to kill nearly two dozen people in the last five years, often including their intended targets. They used a wide range of military-grade automatic weapons and explosive devices, acquired mainly through Russian black-market channels and very easy to get hold of. Their justificatory rhetoric was a dense mesh of out-moded Trotskyist sentiment and anti-corporate eco-babble, and it appeared they spent almost as much energy purging the ranks and backbiting as they did killing people. Shorn’s infiltration ops wing had labelled them noisy but essentially harmless.

They were perfect.

Mike went to get fitted for a Weblar vest.

Chris was chasing up the hardware, when Jack Notley walked into the office unannounced and stood looking around with the nonchalance of someone on a guided tour. His Susana Ingram jacket was buttoned closed and he held his hands lightly clasped in front of him. He nodded pleasantly at the Imagicians consultant, who’d been back and forth from the imaging studio down the hall with variations on the requested footage and now, in Mike’s absence, was packing up her stuff.

‘Elaine. Glad to see we’re keeping you busy.’

‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise, Jack.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Notley’s gaze switched to Chris and he lost his smile. His eyes were unreadable. ‘And you. Are you busy as well?’

Chris fought down a tremor. ‘I, uh, we’re pretty much done here. But I need to check in with Vicente Barranco. He’s been—‘

‘I’ve had Senor Barranco taken back to his hotel. Elaine, could you give us a few minutes?’

‘Sure. I’m done here anyway. I’ll come back for this stuff later.’

She slipped out. Chris watched her go with a pang of envy. Notley came round the desk to stand at his shoulder.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked flatly.

‘Hardware profile.’ Chris gestured at the screen, scrabbling after composure. He found, oddly, that he was more embarrassed than afraid. ‘We’ve found a group to take the fall for Echevarria. I’m matching most-used weapons against our local inventory. We’ll need to use our own people, of course, there’s no time for anything else.’

‘No. We are pressed for time, aren’t we.’

‘Yes, although to be honest it’s probably better this way.’ His throat was dry. ‘It, uh, lowers our exposure, and it means we can control the situation.’

‘Control, yes.’ He felt Notley move behind him, out of his peripheral field of view. It took an effort of will not to twist round in the seat. Now the warm blush of embarrassment was shredding away into cold fear. The senior partner’s voice was hypnotically tranquil at his back. It felt like hands laid on his shoulders. ‘Remind me, Chris. Why are we in this situation, exactly?’