‘Yeah, I can smell it.’
‘Yeah. Sorry.’ She stopped abruptly and leaned back a little, holding his head between her palms. ‘You okay? You look a bit pale.’
‘I’m.’ He gusted a sigh, pushing out some of the tension. Jerked his head at the screen so she had to let go. ‘It’s just some of this stuff. We’re looking at the North Andean Monitored Economy. I’d forgotten the shit they get up to in police cells out there.’
She moved away. ‘No worse than what’s going on in Cambodia, from what I hear.’
‘We’re leaning on them to stop that,’ he told her.
‘Yeah?’ There was a dull disinterest in her voice as she walked out of the room, a coat of detachment they had both started to evolve as an alternative to the rows there was no longer time or energy for.
He went after her. Back into the lounge, where the phone terminal stood in the corner. He remembered with a jolt through the stomach that he had not erased the original message.
‘Carla.’
‘What?’
He moved up close to her and put one arm on the juncture of neck and shoulder. The gesture felt clumsy, unaccustomed. It was weeks since they’d fucked. She looked at him out of suspicious eyes.
‘What, Chris?’
He ran his fingers up into the hair behind her ear and tugged through until his hand was clasping the back of her head. It was a caress that invariably set her cooking, but it still felt awkward. He closed the final gap between them, relieved to find that his erection had returned in force. She felt it pressed between them and a thin little smile appeared on her lips.
‘So what’s got into you?’
He kissed her. After a couple of moments she warmed to it.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said when their mouths split apart.
‘I’ve missed you too.’
‘Come upstairs with me.’
She had started to rub at the crotch of his jeans with one hand. The other worked at the buckle on his belt. ‘What’s wrong with right here?’
He hesitated. The passion in the moment guttered down. She looked up from what her hands were doing, terrifyingly attuned to the confusion fogging his head.
‘Chris?’
‘I don’t want you getting carpet burns,’ he said, and hauled her off her feet. The classic wedding threshold lift. One hand went to her breast, cupping and the blonde gobbles down Liz Linshaw ‘s nipple, smearing crimson lipstick
She laughed.
‘Well, well. Romance.’
Staggering a little, he got her upstairs. They crashed onto the bed and shed their clothes. Carla turned towards him, naked, and he felt a tiny crystal of warmth drip and slide somewhere deep inside him. He had forgotten how beautiful her body was, the broad-shouldered, long-boned pale expanse of it, the flat width of stomach and the full breasts above, breasts that would have been large on a smaller-framed woman but here the swollen hemispheres, flesh taut to breaking point, kneaded by red taloned hands.
He blinked and forced the image aside. Focused on the woman he was with, slotting into the old, comfortable sequence of postures and pressures, the places she liked to be touched, the eventual coupling
Liz Linshaw ‘s mouth, burrowing
He could not lose it. Even when Carla got on her hands and knees ahead of him the way they both liked to finish, he fantasized the other two women into existence on the bed with them. He imagined them vampire-like, clutching and sucking at Carla’s flesh and his own, and he came with that last image printed indelibly across his eyes.
They left then, dragging his post-coital warmth away with them like the fur of a newly slaughtered animal. And afterwards, when Carla shifted and murmured and tightened her arms around him, all he could feel was trapped inside something that wasn’t his.
‘This is fucking great stuff.’
Mike Bryant paced about the office space, leafing through the sheaf of hardcopy. Chris sat in a corner armchair and watched him. He hadn’t slept well, and there was a spreading ache behind his left eye. He was having a hard time getting up to the same level of enthusiasm as Bryant.
‘I mean, Jesus, these guys have got some grievances. Just look at it. Better than a dozen different insurgent leaders and every single one has got family tortured to death or disappeared. Fantastic. Primary Emotional Motivation, PE fucking M, right out of Reed and Mason. Textbook diehard revolutionaries. They’ll never quit. Listen, we only need to hold about a third, no, less than a third, of this stuff over Echevarria’s head, and he should cave right in.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘Of course he will. What’s wrong with you? We’d only need to persuade about three of these groups to team up, give them some second-hand Kalashnikovs out of stock - and Christ knows we’ve got enough of those - they’d piss all over Echevarria’s regular army.’
Chris’s temple throbbed. ‘Yeah, but what if he doesn’t scare.’
‘Chris, come on.’ Mike looked at him reproachfully. ‘You’re ruining my day here.’
‘What if, Mike. Fucking think about it.’
‘Jesus, you got out of bed the wrong side today. Alright.’ Bryant threw himself into another armchair opposite, dumped his feet on the coffee table between. ‘Let’s be grown up about it. What if. Contingency planning. Like I said, we wave about a third of these guys in his face.
And we tell him there are double as many more where those came from, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Then, if he doesn’t see sense, we’ll use someone out of the other two-thirds. That way, whatever reprisals he takes, he’ll be hitting the wrong people. Meanwhile, we talk to the front runner, and if necessary set him up with what he needs. That’d be, let’s see.’ Bryant flipped through the hardcopy again. ‘This guy Arbenz maybe, the People’s Liberation Front for whatever it was. Or Barranco’s Revolutionary Brigade. Or Diaz. They’re all strong contenders. You were there. Who do you make for the best bet?’
‘Well, not Arbenz. He got shot up in a gunship raid a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t you catch the bulletin?’
‘Fucked if I remember.’ Bryant snapped his fingers. ‘Wait a minute, that business with the villages in the south. Echevarria’s been strafing them again, fucking shithead. You know he made me a direct promise those BAe helicopters wouldn’t be used against civilians this year. Lucky we didn’t issue a press statement on that one.’
‘Yeah, well, your BAe gunships shattered Arbenz’s legs from the hips down, and apparently they were running that bioware ammunition, the stuff we saw at Farnborough back in January, slugs coated with immune-system inhibitors. Very nasty. They’ve got him in a field hospital in the mountains, but the last I heard from Lopez, it’s touch and go if he’ll make it.’ Chris rubbed at his eye and wondered about painkillers. ‘And even if he does, he’ll be in no condition to conduct a campaign any time soon.’
‘Okay, so that’s Arbenz out. What about Barranco?’
‘Yeah, I’d leave Barranco alone too, unless you absolutely have to use him. I met him once. He’s committed, and he’s short on ego - tough to win over.’
Bryant pulled a face. ‘You met Diaz too, right?’
‘Couple of times, yeah. He’s a better bet. Very pragmatic, strong sense of his place in history. He wants his name on a statue somewhere before he dies. Oh, and he’s a real Shakespeare nut.’
‘You’re winding me up.’
‘No, seriously. He can quote the fucking stuff. Got a scholarship on some bullshit liberal arts exchange programme in the States when he was a student. He gave me Hamlet, Macbeth, whatsit, King Lear, you name it. All word-perfect.’ Chris shrugged. ‘Well, sounded like it was word-perfect anyway. What do I know? Anyway, he told me, get this; he always wanted to visit Britain and see the mother of parliaments.’1
‘What?’ Bryant barked laughter. ‘You are winding me up.’
‘I swear. Mother of parliaments. That’s what he said.’
‘The mother of parliaments. Man, I love it. I almost hope Echevarria doesn’t cave in, just so we can have this guy across.’