Chris just stopped himself staring as he heard his own words coming out of Bryant’s mouth. Hewitt looked from one man to the other. Her anger seemed to crank down a notch.
‘That’s not what Makin says.’
‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’
‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’
‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’
‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her customary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’
They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.
‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’
Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’
‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’
‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’
Hewitt shook her head.
‘This has got to go to Notley.’
‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’
‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’
‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’
Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’
‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—‘
‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.
‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’
For a pair of seconds, Hewitt was silent. Chris could almost hear the whine of concentration as she played it through. Then she smiled sourly at both of them and nodded.
‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s spin it, shall we.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Echevarria died just before noon, of repeated internal haemorrhaging. He never regained consciousness. Vicente Barranco was there to watch him die. Everybody else was too busy.
They’d been scrambling since Hewitt gave the green light.
‘Get his phone records from Brown’s,’ she flung at them on her way out to find Notley. ‘See if he posted any forward calls for this afternoon, and find out if he was checking in with anyone regularly. That way, we’ll have some idea of how much time we’ve got to play with. And start coming up with a disposal plan.’
Chris spent the next hour digging through files on useful terrorists.
Mike Bryant’s office became the command post. Chris commandeered the datadown while Mike paced about with his mobile, talking to people. They sent Makin after the phone records. All incoming business got routed down to the forty-ninth floor where junior analysts had orders to shelve it unless there was a NAME connection. In the cleared space it gave them, they built the contingency plan. A Langley shadow unit was hired out of Miami, sent to find and track Echevarria junior. The conference-chamber recordings were isolated from all external dataflow ports, and played back on a stand-alone projector to a grey-haired datafake expert on secondment from Imagicians. The expert tut-tutted like a disappointed schoolmistress, hit replay and started making notes. A stony-faced internal security squad with high-level clearance arrived, courtesy of Louise Hewitt, and Mike sent them to clean up the blood.
Makin called in from Brown’s with the phone data. There were no forward calls placed on Echevarria’s account.
‘Praise the Lord,’ said Mike, doing Simeon Sands with remarkable good cheer, given the circumstances. He flourished with his free hand. ‘There is a God because I am saved. Good work, Nick. They give you any static down there? Uh-uh. Good. No, but you never know. Bite the hair of the cliche that fed you and all that. What about regular stuff? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Yeah, well, to be expected, I guess. Yeah, we’ve got the hounds out in Miami. Yeah, Langley, best we could do at short notice. They’re on a tight leash. What? Ah, come on, Nick, this isn’t the fucking time for recrimin— Yeah, well I’m sure he knows that too.’ He glanced at Chris and rolled his eyes. ‘Look Nick, we haven’t got the time for this. Pay them off, get copies of everything and get back here.’
He cut off the call, held the mobile away from him and massaged his ear.
‘Like a dog with a fucking bone. Blame, blame, blame, like it’s going to fucking help now. So what do you reckon, Elaine?’
The datafake expert froze the tape and raked a hand through her silvered hair. On the pastel shaded wall, Chris towered four metres tall, leaning into the swing, face blind with fury.
‘Does it need to stand up in court?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
She shrugged. ‘So we can fix it. Just tell me what you want.’
‘Okay, good. Chris, how you doing?’
Chris nodded at the datadown. ‘Got a few possibilities, yeah. But Mike, none of these guys have pulled off a successful bombing in London for years.’
‘Yeah, well, they won’t have to. All they need do is claim responsibility. There ought to be plenty of the little fuckers up for that. No effort, no risk, instant media coverage. What more could they want?’ Mike flicked a finger at the screen. ‘What about them? They look ugly enough.’
‘No good.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Christian militants, anti-gay, anti-abortion. No axe to grind. Besides, they’re too fucking inept for anyone to believe they could get something like this together.’
‘Yeah, but—‘ Mike’s phone queeped in his hand. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Uh-uh. Alright, thanks. What about the other one? Uh-uh. Okay, well keep him that way then. No, I don’t know how long. Alright. Yes. Goodbye.’
He weighed the phone in his hand and looked pensively at it.
‘Echevarria’s dead. Just now. Dead and cooling fast. And Nick reckoned he promised to call his son in Miami some time this evening. We’re losing our window.’
In the end, they opted for a group of antique revolutionary socialists with a complicated acronym no one was likely to remember very well. The group had enjoyed a sudden resurgence in recent years, drawing disaffected zone youth in a number of European cities, staging the machine-gun assassination of low-level executives and causing big explosions in, or at least in the vicinity of, rather vaguely designated ‘globalist strongholds’. They’d managed to kill nearly two dozen people in the last five years, often including their intended targets. They used a wide range of military-grade automatic weapons and explosive devices, acquired mainly through Russian black-market channels and very easy to get hold of. Their justificatory rhetoric was a dense mesh of out-moded Trotskyist sentiment and anti-corporate eco-babble, and it appeared they spent almost as much energy purging the ranks and backbiting as they did killing people. Shorn’s infiltration ops wing had labelled them noisy but essentially harmless.