‘Can you feel my heart?’ she asked him, later.
He nodded drowsily against her chest.
‘It’s still beating like a fucking drum, Chris. That’s with thinking about what you did to me. I want you to do it again.’
‘What, right now?’
She laughed. ‘Well, ideally yeah. But I can wait.’ She craned her neck to look at his face. ‘Are you staying the night?’
‘If you ask me to.’
‘Stay the night.’
‘No, I got to go.’
‘You bastard.’ She slapped at his flank. ‘That’s not funny. I want you to stay, Chris. I want access to you.’
‘You’ve got access to me. Look at me.’ But beneath the comfortable humour, he felt a vague stirring of alarm. Not at what she wanted. At what he might want from her.
‘So we’re going to do this again?’
He thought about Carla. Pushed the thought away again. Let go.
‘Yeah, we are. I’m living out of a hotel now, Liz. No more complications.’
And in the back of his head, something heard and lifted its throat to the sky, and laughed like a hyena.
Amidst the plinthed Grecian sculpture, Louise Hewitt sat on the edge of the grey-sheeted bed and stared past the white blast of a bedside halogen lamp. The room was silent around her. She had hung her jacket away with automated care on her way into the apartment, and now her shoulders slumped under the soft silk of her blouse. There was an unaccustomed ache in her throat.
She looked down at the bed and pressed her lips together. Then she lay sideways on the covers and lowered her face to the pillow. His scent came off the grey cotton and she clenched her eyes shut.
‘Oh Christ, Nick,’ she murmured, and her throat clicked as she swallowed. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you?’
She lay there for a while, and a single tear leaked out from under her right eyelid. It trickled jerkily to the edge of her face and soaked into the pillow.
When the second and third tear slipped out, she sat up abruptly and wiped them off her face with the angry gesture of someone ripping off a mask. She cleared her throat, got up from the bed and went through to the study. She stabbed the datadown awake and seated herself before its soft, multi-coloured glow. She worked.
File #5: Final Audit
Chapter Forty
There were times over the next few weeks when Chris had to forcibly remind himself that this was his own life he was leading.
Partly it was the hotel. There was something insulated about living out of a box of high-class services long-term, something that felt like wearing thin rubber gloves. Household tasks he was used to performing himself happened distantly, almost invisibly. He put out his dirty laundry and it came back again pristine, as if cleaned by elves. Fresh towels, and little bottles of soap and shampoo appeared daily in the bathroom by a similar magic. He ordered food and it came to his door from a kitchen he never saw, or he fed himself in one of the hotel’s three internal restaurants. Either way, he was saved the tiny increments of physical and emotional effort involved in going outside to look for a place to eat.
At Shorn, he performed with a slightly numb, mechanical competence. The work piled up into account overload as Nick Makin’s abrupt departure took its toll on everyone. He cut a path through it like someone working through dense bush with a blunt machete. Focus ahead, swing, grab, clear and step, focus ahead, swing. Occasionally he sagged, but habit kept him on his feet.
The pellet wounds in his side healed, fading rapidly from actual pain to inconvenience to vague memory. Dreams of Carla stubbornly refused to follow the same path.
Covert reports came in from the NAME via Lopez. Barranco had taken his first dose of Shorn beneficence - three hundred Kalashnikovs plus ammunition, thirty of the Aerospatiale plane-killers, an even thousand King grenades, all brought ashore in the dead of night on some Pacific beach, courtesy of a privatised Epsilon-class Russian attack sub and her demobbed crew. The best international bulk-by-stealth couriers money could buy.
On the other side of the globe, Nakamura played Cambodia the way Vasvik had told him they would. Planning for the military coup lurched into motion. Chris had the relevant local tools to hand - he’d mustered them almost absently - days before the indesp intelligence came through. He pretended to study the reports, phoned through prearranged authorisation codes to Langley an hour later, sat and waited.
Explosions bloomed across Phnom Penh like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a whorehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled. Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.
Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he’d gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace - before they left, the rapid response crew Mike called had hosed down the bloody asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue analysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully massaged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.
The media did its job, rather better than anyone had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full-colour, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold. Comp Drivers In Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Zone Gangs Reap High Noon Whirlwind! Police Commend Shorn Heroes! Coverage went global, TV and the men’s magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs. Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity. One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were queuing up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.
Sign nothing, said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance. Yet.
Corporate police units went into the zones looking for associates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one knew anything worth telling. Arrests were made. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Shorn Leads Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Corporate Community! Drug Scum Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner! Safer Streets for Our Kids Promise Executives!
Ten days in, the original events surrounding Nick Makin’s death were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded, cowardly, drug-dealing masked killers.
Reality blurred out in hype.
Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce. Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab’s engine and offers of bizarre sexual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that some time soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Parana. Assam. Makin’s accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More,