Everything stopped. On the floor, Echevarria made a bubbling sigh and fell silent. A metre and a half off, Nick Makin had finally made it to his feet.
‘Faulkner!’
Chris hefted the bat. His face twitched. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well, rasping tones unrecognisable in his own ears.
‘Back off, Nick. I’ll do you, too.’
He heard Mike crawling to his feet. He looked back to the door he’d come in, where Vicente Barranco stood staring at the carnage. Chris wiped some of the blood off his face and grinned dizzily at him. The trembling was starting to set in. He tossed the bat to the floor, next to Echevarria’s crumpled form.
‘Okay, Vicente,’ he said shakily. ‘You tell me. Whose fucking side am I on?’
‘You know, that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.’
Mike Bryant handed him the whisky glass and went back to sit behind his desk. Chris huddled on the sofa in the blanket the paramedics had lent him, still shivering. In front of him on the table, the chess board pieces faced off against each other in the silence. The onyx gleamed.
‘Sorry I hit you.’
Mike rubbed at his chest. ‘Yeah, with my own fucking bat. Could have done without that as well.’
Chris sipped at the whisky, both hands cupped around the glass as if it was hot coffee. The spirit went down, warming. He shook his head.
‘I just lost it, Mike.’
‘Yeah, no shit.’ Bryant glared at him. ‘Think I spotted that one too. Chris, what the fuck was Barranco doing at Shorn unsupervised? You knew we had Echevarria in for budget review today. Why didn’t you take Vicente out for a drive or something? Or at least keep him in the Hilton until you could check with me.’
Chris shook his head again. The words limped out of his mouth. ‘I was running late. He went out without me.’
‘That doesn’t explain how he got in here. Who cleared him for the tower?’
‘That’s what I tried to tell you earlier. Hewitt authorised a limo to bring him here.’
Mike’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hewitt?’
‘Yeah. Louise fucking Hewitt. I’m telling you, she’s been gunning for me since the day I walked in here. She wants—‘
‘Oh, bullshit!’ Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference chamber. ‘For Christ’s sake! Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is serious.’
The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swivelled the chair away and stared out of the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do you think we should tell Notley?’
‘Does it matter what we tell him?’
‘Fuck, yes.’ Mike jerked back round to look at him. What’s the matter, you want to lose your job or something?’
Chris blinked. ‘What?’
‘I said. Do you want to lose your job?’
‘I. But.’ Chris gestured helplessly and nearly dropped his whisky. ‘Mike, the job’s already lost. Isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just go round clubbing the clients to death, can you.’
‘Oh, I’m glad you realise that now.’
‘I’m. Mike, of course I don’t want to lose this job. I like what I do.’ Chris made the curious, prickling discovery that he was telling the truth. ‘We’re just getting somewhere important at last. I’m telling you, Barranco’s the one. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work. He can make us the. What?’
Mike Bryant was watching him narrowly.
‘Go on.’
‘Mike, I’m good at this. The people stuff. You know that. And after this, I’ve got Barranco for keeps. We’re close now. Really close. This one matters.’
‘And Cambodia doesn’t?’
‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing new in Cambodia. They’ve been down this road at least four times before. Same old song, just a different decade. All we have to do is ride the wave, and make sure the enterprise zones don’t catch any damage. The NAME’s different. You’re looking at a radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. How often do you get to do work like that any more?’
Mike said nothing for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he nodded and got up from the desk.
‘Alright, good. We’ll go with that. Radical restructuring. Tone down the stuff about Cambodia, though. All our accounts are important, and whatever Sary eventually does or doesn’t achieve, we stand to make a lot of money over there. Remember that.’
Raised voices from outside Mike’s office. The unmistakable tones of Louise Hewitt arguing with security. Mike made a wry face.
‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Block and cover. Start talking. And get rid of that fucking blanket, you look like an evicted criminal.’
‘What?’
‘Something about the NAME, Chris. Relevant detail. Come on, quick. Try to sound intelligent.’
‘Uh,’ Chris groped. ‘The, uh, the urban situation’s no better. Sure you’ve got a pretty contented overclass but that’s only—‘
‘The blanket.’
He shrugged it off. Got up and started to pace. Voice strengthening as he picked up the thread again. Improvising. ‘The thing is, Mike, that business with the students was crucial. Some of those kids were from the overclass, okay not many, but with an extended family system like the one you’ve got in the NAME, pretty much everybody knows someone who—‘
Louise Hewitt burst into the office.
‘What the fuck have you done, Faulkner?’
He turned to look at her and what struck him like a physical blow was how drop dead gorgeous she looked angry.
He’d always been aware that Hewitt was attractive in a hard, dark fashion, but it wasn’t the kind of look that drew him. Too severe, too buttoned up and in the end, let’s be honest here, Chris, blonde was really what did it for him. Louise Hewitt was manifestly a dark-haired woman in utter control of her own destiny. It didn’t help matters that he hated her guts.
Now, with colour burning in her cheeks, her hair in light disarray and her jacket settled with less than perfect attention on her shoulders, he suddenly saw through to the woman beneath. She stood with legs braced slightly apart, as if the fifty-second floor was the deck of a yacht in suddenly choppy waters, hands floating just off her hips like those of a movie gunfighter. The stance was unconsciously sensual, stretching the fabric of her narrow knee-length skirt and highlighting the lines of her hips.
One tiny part of Chris’s mind stayed rational enough to register the bizarre perversity of his sexual programming. The rest of him was shit-scared of what was going to happen next.
‘Louise,’ said Mike Bryant cheerfully. ‘There you are. I imagine you’ve heard, then.’
‘Heard? Heard?’ She advanced into the room, still half-focused on Chris. ‘I’ve just come from the fucking sickbay, Mike. They’ve got Echevarria on a ventilator. What the fuck is going on?’
‘Is he likely to die?’
Hewitt pointed her finger. ‘I asked you a question, Mike. Spare me the executive deflection techniques.’
‘Sorry.’ Mike shrugged. ‘Force of habit. The Echevarria end of things is played out. He was making the situation unmanageable.’
‘So you beat him to death?’
‘It’s unfortunate, but—‘
‘Unfortunate? Are you—‘
Chris cleared his throat. ‘Louise, Barranco is—‘
‘You,’ she swung on him like combat, ‘shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage today.’
Mike Bryant came out from behind his desk, hands lifted, soothing. ‘Louise, we had no choice. It was lose Echevarria or lose Barranco. And Barranco is the key to this. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work.’