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‘Hello, Paco.’ He got his breath back, straightened up the chair. ‘You don’t know me, do you? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the man who beat your father to death.’

Echevarria’s face tightened. ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy, man? You di’n kill my father.’

Chris settled into the chair. ‘No, I did. The terrorist stuff was something we set up to cover what really happened. The CE—, those guys, they went with the claim because it gives them prestige. Your father was a sick fuck, and anyone killing him could claim they’d done a good day’s work.’

‘You gonna fuckin’ die for that, man.’ The dictator’s son was staring at him, transfixed. ‘You gonna fuckin’ die .’

‘Oh, please. As I was saying, there’s no way the, that bunch, are well enough organised to do something like that on the streets of London and get away with it. So, as I said, I killed your old man. I beat him to death, in this very room, with a baseball bat. All part of a day’s work for the Shorn corporation. Check with Mike Bryant if you don’t believe me, I’m a colleague of his.’

Echevarria’s voice came out strangled. ‘You—‘

‘It’s what we do here, Paco. Neoliberal commercial management. Global mayhem, remote-control death and destruction. Market Forces in action. If you don’t like it—‘

Hamilton charged him from the side.

He had time to be impressed - fat fuck didn’t look like he had it in him -then the chair went over and the junior partner was on top of him, bloodied nose spattering down into his face, soft hands digging into the cords of his throat with surprising strength.

Chris wasted no time struggling. He got a grip on the little finger of Hamilton’s right hand, curled it back and snapped it. Hamilton yelped and let go. Chris came up from the floor like a hinge and punched the partner in the throat. Hamilton lurched back, just on his feet, clutching at the point of impact. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Echevarria was yelling in Spanish. Chris got to his feet, stalked towards Hamilton. The partner’s eyes widened. Chris threw a punch, Hamilton ducked and fended with a rusty boxing move, the other hand still at his throat. There wasn’t much strength in it, and he came up panting. Impatiently, Chris repeated the punch, snagged Hamilton’s wrist with an aikido hold he knew and jerked the partner off balance towards him. He punched low into the expansive gut, and as Hamilton spasmed, he grabbed him round the neck and yanked up and round.

It had the fury of the whole day behind it.

It snapped Hamilton’s neck.

Chris heard the muffled crack, and as the partner went limp in his grip, the rage drained out of him. He let go and Hamilton hit the floor. He turned back to Echevarria and the suited aides who were crowding into the holocast around him. They stared at him like frightened children.

He cleared his throat. ‘Now—‘

Something cold and jagged slapped him. He blinked and raised one arm to look at the mass of silvery wire mesh that had come out of nowhere and wrapped around his side. He was starting to turn to the door behind him, when the stungun web sparked and went off with a smell like scorching plastic. The jolt flung him hard against the table, where he clung for a moment, staring.

In the open doorway, Louise Hewitt stood with the stungun still levelled and watched him collapse.

The last thing he saw was her smile.

Chapter Forty-Four

The cell measured about three metres on a side, and smelled very faintly of fresh paint, thick pastel layers of which coated the walls. There was a comfortable steel frame bed against one such wall, a three-drawer desk under the window and an en suite bathroom capsule in one corner. Next to the capsule, plain white towels hung on a heated rack and next to that there was hanging space and boxed shelving for his clothes. The fixtures were good-quality wood and metal, and the window looked out over the river through glass that only betrayed its toughened qualities with the tiny red triangle logo in one corner. The whole place was no worse than some hotels Chris had seen on placement, and it was in considerably better condition than any of the rooms in Erik Nyquist’s Brundtland estate apartment.

As far as he could work out, he was the only person in the block.

Guest of honour, he thought vaguely as he went to sleep the second night. Full run of the facilities.

The truth was, the corporate police didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They’d taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren’t used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.

Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.

Say what?

Murder, they were saying, but hell, don’t these guys off each other on the road practically every month.

That’s different.

It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status somewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.

The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.

He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed officers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each meal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.

Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head. Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.

A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour’s exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well-cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled glass roof covering a third of the open space. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a glassed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.

When it became apparent he wasn’t leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarrassed.

‘We bill your firm,’ she admitted finally.

He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn’t have known what to say to anybody he knew.

Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn’t remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.