He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.

In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.

Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there - about every third night, just so we stay sane about this, Chris - he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.

Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.

She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.

He hung up on her.

He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.

‘Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days - I just couldn’t blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.’

‘I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?’

‘You need to talk to her, man.’

‘That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?’

There was a long pause at the other end.

‘Got it.’ Mike said finally.

‘Good.’ Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.’

‘Yeah.’

“night, then.’

‘Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.’ There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.

Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.

‘Who was that?’

He gestured. ‘Ah, Mike. Work stuff.’

‘Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.’

‘Yeah, well. Cambodia.’

‘Anything I should know?’

He forced a grin. ‘A lot of stuff you’d like to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.’

She threw the towel at him.

‘I’ll get it out of you,’ she promised, advancing.

The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.

He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.

Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.

She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.

‘So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Can we go up to your room?’

‘No.’

She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.

‘Have you got someone up there?’

‘Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else. You fucking left me.’

‘So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?’

He swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.’

She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.

‘I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.’

‘Fair enough.’ He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. ‘What did you come for?’

‘To apologise.’

He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Go on then.’

She managed a smile. Shook her head. ‘You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?’

‘You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla. At two o’clock in the fucking morning. You’ve got some apologising to do.’

‘You called me a whore.’

‘And you called me.’ He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the row had stoked so high. ‘You said—‘

‘I said I couldn’t recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognise you any more.’

He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. ‘So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?’

‘I told you why I came.’

‘Yeah, to apologise. You’re not making a very good job of it.’

The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.’ He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. ‘No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.’

She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recognised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.

‘That’s not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘And you don’t want to be that man any more, Chris. You aren’t that man any more. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.’

‘This is crap, Carla.’

‘Is it?’

Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.

‘I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.’ She gestured at the hotel around them. ‘You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t just the job you do any more, that fucking tower you run your remote control wars from. It’s everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?’