In the midst of it all, Mike turned to Chris, face distorted with shock and anger. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he hissed.

It took ten minutes to clear the conference room, and even then security weren’t happy about leaving the partners with Chris. They’d heard their own set of rumours about the Echevarria incident.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Notley. ‘Really, Hermione. I appreciate your diligence, but we’re all colleagues here. Just tempers flaring, that’s all. A bit of misplaced road rage. Just keep a couple of your people outside the door, that’ll be fine.’

He ushered the guard captain out and closed the doors, then turned back to the table. In the places they had occupied when the room was filled, Chris, Mike, Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton sat staring at their respective patches of polished wood. Notley came back to the head of the table and stood looking at them.

‘Right,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s sort this out, shall we?’

Louise Hewitt made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t see anything to sort out, Jack. Faulkner’s just admitted to gross professional misconduct—‘

‘Yeah, that’s—‘

‘Chris, you will shut up,’ roared Notley. ‘You are not a partner, nor will you ever be if you cannot behave in a civilised fashion. Do as you’re told and be fucking quiet.’

‘Louise is right, Jack.’ Hamilton’s voice was soft and calm, at odds with the rage he’d shown earlier. He was back on comfortable ground. ‘Warning Barranco has endangered a delicate piece of policy restructuring. At a minimum, it’s cost us a possible bargaining chip with Echevarria. At worst, it’s given succour to a terrorist who could provide us with insurgency problems for the next decade.’

‘He was a freedom fighter last week,’ muttered Chris.

Louise Hewitt turned a look of distilled contempt on him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Chris,’ she said lightly. ‘Would it be fair to say that you’ve become political where the NAME is concerned? That you’ve been contaminated by local issues?’

Chris looked at Notley. ‘Am I allowed to answer that?’

‘Yes. But you’ll keep your tone civil, and show some respect, is that understood? This isn’t some basement fight club in the zones.’

‘Yes, I understand that.’ Chris jabbed a finger at Hamilton. ‘What I don’t understand is our junior partner’s system of communication. Until this morning, I had no idea either that I had been relieved of duty on the NAME account, or that we were reversing our established client relationship.’

‘Echevarria is the established—‘

‘Philip.’ Notley wagged a finger at the junior partner. ‘Let him finish.’

‘In fact,’ Chris saw the opening and accelerated into it. ‘The client change was news to me until this meeting, which wasn’t helpful. If I warned Barranco off, it was because I thought someone was running infiltration into the account—‘

‘Oh, please.’ Louise Hewitt pulled a face. ‘This is your job on the line, Chris. Surely you can do better than that.’

‘This morning, Louise, I received a direct call from the captain of the sub freighter we’re using to ship Barranco’s arms.  She’s stuck in Faslane, waiting for freight that isn’t coming because this,’ Chris indicated Hamilton, ‘genius has had it rerouted to the NAME military. Only he didn’t think to inform me of the fact, so all I can assume is outside interference. I act accordingly, I protect our client as best I can. I get slammed for it, when the real problem here is a lack of top-down communication.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Hamilton angrily. He also had seen the loophole.

‘Am I, Philip?’ Chris turned to gesture at Mike Bryant. ‘Ask Mike. He’s been as much in the dark as I have, he knows all about the sub freighter call, because the two of us were both trying to work out what the fuck was going on this morning. Right, Mike?’

Bryant shifted in his seat. For the first time ever that Chris could remember, he looked uncomfortable.

Notley’s gaze sharpened. ‘Mike?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Sorry, Phil. Louise. Chris is right. You should have told us earlier.’

Hamilton leaned across the table, flushed. ‘Bryant, you knew —‘

‘I knew there was a policy meeting, and yeah, from the hints you dropped, I guessed the way it was going. But there was nothing solid, Phil. And nothing about the shipments. You know,’ a sideways glance at his friend, ‘I didn’t know what Chris was going to do, but I couldn’t tell him for sure what was going on either. I can see why he would have played it the way he did.’

The room was still. A glance crackled between Hamilton and Hewitt. No one spoke. Jack Notley steepled his fingers.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked quietly.

Louise Hewitt shrugged. ‘Only that what we’ve heard is a pack of lies designed to hide the fact that Chris has gone political on us.’

‘Anything constructive,’ asked Notley, still more softly.

‘Yes,’ said Chris, thinking of Lopez, tossed into the arena and up against a twenty-year-old blade sicario who’d be savage with favela poverty and sight of a way out. Thinking of Barranco, machine-gunned to death on a darkened beach, blood leaking into the sand under a shattering of glass shard stars. ‘I am not political. My reasons for backing Vicente Barranco have nothing to do with politics. And anyone who wants to call that into question can see me on the road.’

Chapter Forty-Three

‘You are a lying motherfucker, Chris.’ Mike Bryant paced back and forth in front of the BMW, furious. His feet crunched in the hard shoulder gravel. Off to one side, a breeze stirred the grass beside the motorway ramp. He stopped and jabbed a finger at Chris. ‘You have turned political, haven’t you. Fucking Barranco got to you, didn’t he?’

Chris leaned on the still warm hood of the car, arms folded. The orbital stretched away below them, deserted as far as the eye could see in both directions. After the confines of the Shorn block, the sky over them seemed enormous. They’d driven for less than an hour, but it felt as if they stood at the edge of the world.

‘Oh, give me a fucking break. You’re accusing me of politics. A week ago, Barranco was the horse to back. Now suddenly, he’s unprofitable? What is that, Mike? That’s not political?’

‘The numbers make sense,’ said Bryant.

‘The numbers?’ Chris came off the hood of the BMW, taut with rage. ‘The fucking numbers? That shit is made up, Mike. You can make the numbers tell you any fucking thing you want them to. What about the numbers that made sense for Barranco? What happened to them? What are we, economists all of a sudden? You want to draw me a fucking curve? It’s got nothing to do with reality, Mike. You know that’

Mike looked away. ‘That fact remains, Chris. You’re in way too close with Barranco. You’ve got to come off the account. Let Hamilton run with it, see what happens.’

‘Great. And meanwhile what happens to Joaquin Lopez?’

‘That’s not important!’ Bryant made fists, punched exasperatedly off into the wind. ‘Fuck Chris, pay attention, will you. You can’t get personal on this thing. It’s just business. Lopez has been undercut, that’s all there is to it. If this new guy can do the same work for a percentage point less commission, what the fuck are we doing still working with Lopez anyway?’

‘It’s a half per cent, Mike. And he’s a twenty-year-old sicario, straight out of the favelas. How do we know what he’ll do?’

‘If he’s hungry, he’ll do well. They always do.’

‘Oh, what the fuck are you talking about, Mike? You were at the briefing. This guy is cheap and aggressive, and that’s all we know. He could be fucking illiterate for all the background Hamilton’s shown us. This is a bad call, Mike. This isn’t business, it’s a fucking greed call. Can’t you see that?’

‘What I see, Chris, is that you’re cruising for a fall.’ Mike’s voice softened, but it was the gentle tug of a steel tow cable, taking up slack. He moved in, stood close. ‘I see why you’re acting like this, but it’s no good. You’re out of control. You’re unmanageable. And we can’t afford that, not in any of us. I’m sorry about what happened to your dad, really I am.’