Probably imagination, the way the whole table was suddenly listening to this sharkish young man with the carefully masked speech impediment. Probably. Chris’s eyes flickered to Bryant. The big blond was watching.

‘You heard about that, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ Makin smiled. ‘It seemed kind of. Odd, you know?’

‘Well,’ Chris made a stiff smile of his own. ‘You weren’t there.’

‘No. Lucky for Elysia Bennett that I wasn’t, I’d say. Isn’t she still around somewhere?’

‘I assume so. You know, Nick, I tend not to worry too much about the past. Like you said, it’s a whole new quarter. Bennett was two years ago.’

‘Still.’ Makin looked around the table, apparently to enlist some support. ‘An attitude like that must make for a lot of challengahs. Shit, I’d dive against you myself just for the expewience if I thought you’d have a sentiment attack like that after the event. If I lost, that is.’

Chris realised abruptly that Makin was drunk, alcohol-fuelled aggressive and waiting. He looked at his glass on the table.

‘You would lose,’ he said quietly.

By now it wasn’t his imagination. The buzz of conversation was definitely weakening as the executives lost interest in what they were discussing and became spectators.

‘Big words.’ Makin had lost his smile. ‘Fom a man who hasn’t made a kill in nearly four years.’

Chris shrugged, one eye on Makin’s left hand where it rested on the table top. He mapped options. Reach down and pinion the arm. Snap the little finger of that hand, take it from there.

‘Actually,’ said a husky voice. ‘I think they’re quite small words from the man who took down Edward Quain.’

The focus of attention leapt away across the table. Liz Linshaw sat with one long-fingered hand propping her tousled blonde head away from the back of her seat. The other hand gestured with a cigarette.

‘Now that,’ she continued, ‘Was the mother of all exemplary kills. No one ever thought Eddie Quain was coming back to work. Except maybe as lubricant.’

Somebody laughed. Nervous laughter. Someone else took it up, more certainly and the sound built around the table. Bryant joined in. The moment passed. Chris gave Makin one more hard look and then started laughing himself.

The evening spread its wings under him.

Chapter Five

An unclear space of time later, he was relieving himself in a scarred porcelain urinal that reeked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a week. Yellowed plaster walls crowded round him. Sullen, gouged graffiti ranged from brutal to incomprehensible and back.

It wasn’t always clear where one message ended and the other began. Either that or he was very drunk.

He was very drunk.

Bryant’s idea, as numbers in the hotel bar began thinning; carry the party over into the cordoned zones.

‘They may be shit-poor over there,’ voice blurred as he leaned across the table. ‘But they know how to have a good time. There’s a couple of places I know you can buy all sorts of interesting substances over the counter, and they’ve got floor shows you wouldn’t believe.’

Liz Linshaw wrinkled her sculpted features. ‘Sounds strictly for the boys,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m for a cab.’

She kissed Bryant on the lips, causing a small storm of whoops and yells, and left with a sideways grin at Chris. A couple of other women excused themselves from the group in her wake and Mike’s expedition began to look in danger of fizzling out.

‘Oh, come on, you bunch of pussies’ he slurred. ‘What are you afraid of? We’ve got guns. He yanked out his Nemex and brandished it, ‘We’ve got money, we’ve got this city by the balls. What the fuck kind of life is it when we own the fucking streets they walk on and the blocks they live in and we’re still fucking scared to go there. We’re supposed to be in charge of this society, not in hiding from it.’

It wasn’t speech-making of Louise Hewitt’s calibre, but Mike managed to rope in a half dozen of the younger men round the table and a couple of the harder-drinking women. Ten minutes later, Chris was in the passenger seat of Bryant’s BMW, watching the emptied streets of the financial district roll by. In the back seat sat a nameless young male executive and an older woman called Julie Pinion — macho sales talk snarled back and forth between them. In the wing mirror, the following lights of two other cars. Shorn was descending on the cordoned zones in force.

‘Okay, you two keep it down,’ said Mike over his shoulder as they turned a corner. Up ahead the lights of a zone checkpoint frosted the night sky. ‘They won’t let us through here if they think there’s going to be trouble.’

He brought the BMW to a remarkably smooth halt at the barrier and leaned out as the guard approached. He was, Chris noticed, chewing gum to mask the alcohol on his breath.

‘Just going down to the Falkland,’ Bryant called cheerfully, waving his Shorn Associates plastic. ‘Take in the late show.’

The guard was in his fifties, with a spreading paunch beneath his grey uniform and broken veins across his nose and cheeks. Chris saw the cloud of vapour he made when he sighed.

‘Have to scan that, sir.’

“Course.’ Bryant handed over the card and waited while the guard ran it through his hipswipe remote and handed it back. The unit chimed melodically, and the guard nodded. He seemed tired.

‘You armed?’

Bryant turned back into the car. ‘Show the man your peacemakers, guys.’

Chris slid the Nemex out of its shoulder holster and displayed it. Behind him he heard the two backseat disputants doing the same. The guard flashed his torch in the windows and nodded slowly.

‘Want to be careful, sir,’ he told Bryant. ‘There’s been layoffs at Pattons and Greengauge this week. Lot of angry people out getting drunk tonight.’

‘Well, we’ll stay out of their way,’ said Bryant easily. ‘Don’t want any trouble. Just want to see the show.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ The guard turned back to the checkpoint cabin and gestured to whoever was inside. The barrier began to rise. ‘I’ve got to check your friends as well. You want to park just past the gate till we clear them?’

‘Be glad to.’ Mike beamed and drove the BMW through.

The second car passed muster but with the third there was some trouble. They peered back and saw the guard shaking his head while suited forms craned from the windows front and back, gesturing.

‘The fuck is going on back there?’ muttered Julie Pinion. ‘Couldn’t they even act sober for a couple of minutes.’

‘Stay here,’ Bryant said, and climbed out into the night air. They watched him walk back to the third car, lean down and say something to those leaning out. The heads disappeared back into the vehicle, as if on wires. Bryant put his hand on the guard’s shoulder and dug in his pocket. Something passed between them. The guard said something to the driver of the third car. A clearly audible whoop of delight bounced out of the windows. Bryant came back, grinning.

‘Gratuities,’ he said as he got into the car again. ‘Ought to be compulsory, the shit they pay those guys.’

‘How much did you give him?’ asked Pinion.

‘Hundred.’

‘A hundred! Jesus.’

‘Ah, come on Julie. I’ve tipped waiters better than that. And he’s going to take a lot more heat than a waiter if this dinner party goes awry.’

The little convoy pressed on into the cordoned zone.

It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here, the street lamps were isolated sentinels, spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty metres of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.