Get out, Chris told him, surprising himself. The plan had been to burn Quain alive. The plan had been to tell Quain why, and then throw the bottle with enough force to shatter on the floor between his feet. The plan had been to watch Quain turned into a shrieking, flailing, flame-armed thing, to listen to the screams and—

Get out and run, you fuck.

And Quain did.

Crazed, maybe, with fear of what he saw in Chris’s eyes, hypnotised by the blob of pale, dancing flame. Chris stood there and watched him go, groping about inside his own head for a reason. Something was happening in there, and he couldn’t make out what it was.

He threw the bottle into the Audi anyway, as much in frustration as anything else. It shattered on the dash and the flames sprang up. The sight seemed to switch something back on inside him. He sprinted back to the Volvo, kicked it alive and floored the accelerator. Fishtail waltz as he hauled the wheel over and his gaze sharpened on the portly, lumbering figure ahead on the road. Quain must have heard the engine and known what it meant. He was making for the central reservation as the Volvo came up on his heels. It wouldn’t have made any difference, Chris realised later. He would have driven straight through it to get to Quain.

He dropped a gear and the engine screamed. Quain looked back over his shoulder just before the Volvo hit. Chris saw his eyes. Then he was gone, a suddenly, impossibly aerodynamic body thudding and tumbling up off the hood, the windscreen, the roof. A flash of dark falling in the rearview as Chris braked the Volvo to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t enough.

He never knew if Quain was dead when he reversed back over him the first time. But he saw what emerged under the front wheels as he pulled up five metres back from the body.

It still wasn’t enough.

He did it again. And again.

Five times, before he realised it would never be enough.

‘He killed my father,’ he said.

And Mike Bryant, staring at him in the sifting dustlight. A look on his face Chris had never seen before. Stalled out, lost.

‘Your father?’

Chris sighed. Loading up for the long, tedious climb of explanation. ‘Not directly. Quain never met my father directly. My father worked for a reconstruction consultancy called IES — International Economic Solutions, but when you said it all together it sounded like Yes. Cute, huh? My mother said he used to.’

He clamped his mouth. Shook his head. Cleared his throat.

‘Uh, they modelled admin systems, infrastructure, things like that. They were into central Africa, the Middle East. Pretty small, but hungry and hard on the roads, as far as that went back then.’

Mike nodded. ‘Enough to just get there first, right?’

‘That’s what they say.’ Chris stared at a ray of dusty light falling across the bar top. A faint scarring of overlaid glass rings showed up in the wooden glow. ‘2018, Edward Quain was a hotshot young gun in Hammett McColl Emerging Markets. Couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. And he pulled off this cutting-edge piece of incursion for Hammett McColl in Ethiopia. Got backing for a major policy shift. Nothing dramatic by CI standards, this is more than thirty years ago, remember. But it was enough to bring down the government. A lot of high-ranking officials lost their jobs. And Quain’s new team publicly reneged on a stack of external contracts. Happened overnight, literally. IES couldn’t take the damage. They went under, bankrupted along with a dozen or so others, and about forty per cent of the low-end commercial sector in Ethiopia at the time. They say it precipitated the civil war.’

‘Ah yeah, I remember this.’ Mike snapped his fingers. ‘The Ayele Protocol, right? Read about it in Reed and Mason.’

‘Right. Quain walked away with a huge commission, Hammett McColl repositioned for regional dominance in the Red Sea zone, and my father woke up with a walletful of dead plastic he didn’t know about. He got shot the same day, arguing with a supermarket security guard. His card wouldn’t scan at checkout, they wouldn’t take him seriously and it got.’ Chris watched his knuckles whiten around the whisky glass with absent fascination, as if they belonged to someone else. ‘Out of hand. My mother says, said, if he’d been dressed better that day, it would never have happened. Hated suits apparently, my old man. Dressed scruffy as he could, outside the office. Maybe they thought he’d stolen the card or something. They tried to throw him out, it got rough. Blam. Some fat over-the-hill fuck with a dick extension blew his fucking head off’

He looked at the whisky glass. Let go of it abruptly and stared at the palm of his suddenly liberated hand.

‘We lost everything. The house, both cars. Health insurance, savings. Stock options. My mother got rehoused in the eastern zones. My father’s friends helped out as much as they could, but most of them were going under too. They were all at IES or working in related firms.’ Chris picked up his drink again, knocked it back. ‘And then, even that early, they say you could see the domino coming if you were paying attention. It was still nearly a decade off, the worst of it, but people were already running scared, just hanging on with whatever they had. And Quain had just seen to it that we had nothing.’

‘You remember all this?’

‘Not really, no. I was two when my father was killed. I was there but,’ Chris shivered, dodging the dream. ‘I don’t remember it. I just remember growing up in the zones with this accent everybody hated. This vague sense that things were better once. Before. But I could have picked that up listening to my mother. No way you remember stuff from when you’re two years old.’

‘No. But.’ Mike gestured helplessly. ‘How the fuck did you. I mean, Quain. Didn’t he see you coming, the day you joined HM? How did you even get into HM, come to that?’

‘I changed my name. My father wasn’t called Faulkner, it was my mother’s maiden name. She died of thorn fever, when I was seventeen. I took her name, sold everything else we owned and cut myself a new identity. Got a gangwit datarat in Plaistow to fix my records. Probably did a shit job, the money I gave him, but it was what I could afford. I doubt it would have stood up to close scrutiny, but when you’re from the zones who the fuck cares. You’re just cheap, faceless labour. And by the time I got to Hammett McColl, I had five years of new identity behind me. I’d made a lot of money for Ross Mobile and LS Euro, I could drive. That’s all the HM recruiters cared about.’

‘Sloppy. Was that their own people?’

‘No, contracted out. Some cut-rate two-room outfit off Ludgate Circus. They tendered for HM on straight cost. No duel requirement. Lowest offer wins.’

Mike shook his head. ‘Fucking amateurs.’

‘Yeah, but you know what. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Quain wouldn’t have recognised my father’s name. Some guy he ruined twenty years ago, one name out of hundreds he probably didn’t even know back when it happened, let alone two decades on. What are the chances?’

‘Yeah, figures.’ Mike puffed out his cheeks. ‘Jesus, what a story. Does Carla know all this?’

‘No. She knows I grew up in the zones, she knows my parents are dead, but we don’t talk about it. I met her after Quain. I’d already buried it all. She used to ask, back when we started seeing each other. Think it might even have been some of the attraction for her, the zone connection. I told her I wasn’t interested in looking back.’ He stared down the receding perspectives of the memory. ‘Snapped her head off whenever she asked. She stopped asking after a while.’

‘Yeah, it’s true. You never talk about it, do you.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We’re all too flat-out fucking busy trying to make it big right now to talk about the past. You’d think none of us had parents, the way we live.’