The media did its job, rather better than anyone had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full-colour, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold. Comp Drivers In Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Zone Gangs Reap High Noon Whirlwind! Police Commend Shorn Heroes! Coverage went global, TV and the men’s magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs. Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity. One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were queuing up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.
Sign nothing, said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance. Yet.
Corporate police units went into the zones looking for associates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one knew anything worth telling. Arrests were made. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Shorn Leads Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Corporate Community! Drug Scum Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner! Safer Streets for Our Kids Promise Executives!
Ten days in, the original events surrounding Nick Makin’s death were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded, cowardly, drug-dealing masked killers.
Reality blurred out in hype.
Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce. Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab’s engine and offers of bizarre sexual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that some time soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Parana. Assam. Makin’s accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More,
He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.
In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.
Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there - about every third night, just so we stay sane about this, Chris - he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.
Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.
She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.
He hung up on her.
He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.
‘Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days - I just couldn’t blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.’
‘I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?’
‘You need to talk to her, man.’
‘That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?’
There was a long pause at the other end.
‘Got it.’ Mike said finally.
‘Good.’ Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.’
‘Yeah.’
“night, then.’
‘Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.’ There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.
Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.
‘Who was that?’
He gestured. ‘Ah, Mike. Work stuff.’
‘Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.’
‘Yeah, well. Cambodia.’
‘Anything I should know?’
He forced a grin. ‘A lot of stuff you’d like to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.’
She threw the towel at him.
‘I’ll get it out of you,’ she promised, advancing.
The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.
He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.
Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.
She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.
‘So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Can we go up to your room?’
‘No.’
She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.
‘Have you got someone up there?’
‘Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else. You fucking left me.’
‘So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?’
He swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.’
She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.
‘I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.’
‘Fair enough.’ He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. ‘What did you come for?’
‘To apologise.’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Go on then.’