For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco’s eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat’s deck smoothly to her feet. An assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.
‘I mean—‘
‘I know what you mean.’ Barranco’s posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat. When he turned back, something had changed in his face. ‘I know what you mean, because this is the first time you’ve come out and said it. You can’t imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can’t imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.’
Chris breathed again. ‘You should have asked.’
‘Asked if you had a soul?’ There wasn’t much humour in Barranco’s parched laugh. ‘Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country’s GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Senor Faulkner?’
‘I wouldn’t advise it, no.’
‘No. Then what would you advise?’
Chris weighed it up—
fuck it, it’s worked so far
and told the unbandaged truth again.
‘I’d advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that’s what they’ll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing’s ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.’
A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.
‘Good advice, my friend,’ he said through the smoke. ‘Good advice. I think I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.’
‘You can. I’m part of the package.’
‘No.’ The trawlerman’s gaze settled on him. ‘I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London. There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Honourable.’
It flickered across Chris’s memory before he could stop it. Liz Linshaw’s body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh.
‘I think you are mistaken about me,’ he said quietly.
Barranco shook his head. ‘You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.’
Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a waterfront cafe waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word. Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the cafe behind them.
The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.
‘So it went well,’ Lopez asked.
Chris stirred at his cocktail. ‘Seems that way. He’s going to come to London, anyway.’ His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. ‘I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I’ll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.’
‘Billing?’
‘Through the covert account. I don’t want this to show up until ... No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I’ll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that’ll help me sleep?’
‘Not on me.’ Lopez dug out his phone. ‘You’re at the Sheraton, right?’
‘Yeah. 1101. Jenkins.’
The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.
‘En ingles, guei,’ said Lopez impatiently.
Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. ‘You here in town, man?’
‘No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.’
‘Is he a fizi?’
Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. ‘You do a lot of this sort of stuff?’
‘Christ, no.’
The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again. ‘Definitely not. Something gentle.’
‘Got it. Address.’
‘Sheraton, room 1101. Mr Jenkins.’
‘Charge card or account.’
‘Very fucking funny. Hasta luego.’
‘Hasta la cuenta, amigo.’
He folded up the phone. ‘Stuff 11 be waiting for you at the desk. You go in, just ask if you got any messages. There’ll be an envelope.’
‘You can vouch for this guy, right.’
‘Yeah, he’s a plastic surgeon.’
Chris couldn’t see why that was supposed to reassure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crushing his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of seven or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finishing line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper’s scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he’d been carrying. Sleep was coming. He’d worry about everything else tomorrow.
But behind the aching relief, Barranco’s words floated like the voices out on the water.
You do not belong.
Chapter Twenty-Four
He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the fucking thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, fucking bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap. Mike Bryant’s recorded face grinned out at him.
‘Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you’ve got about three hours before your flight, so here’s something to think about while you’re waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!’
Groggy from the plastic surgeon’s special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man’s face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight assault on him while he slept. It looked bad.
‘Motherfucker.’
He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike’s gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Saturday and Mike, if he’d known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he’d stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov’s Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.
Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike’s attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response - the post-fight stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter’s trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of cliche. We are well matched, you and I. We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.