Bryant stopped and looked at him. ‘No shit?’
‘No shit.’ Chris held up his left hand, the dull metal band on the ring finger. Bryant examined it with interest.
‘What’s that, steel?’ He caught on and grinned suddenly. ‘Out of an engine, right? I’ve read about this stuff.’
‘Titanium. Got it off an old Saab venting chamber. Had to resize it, but apart from that—’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The other man’s enthusiasm was almost child-like. ‘Did you do it over an engine block, like that guy in Milan last year?’ The finger snap again. ‘What was his name, Bonocello or something?’
‘Bonicelli. Yeah, like that, pretty much.’ Chris tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. His engine-block altar marriage pre-dated the Italian driver’s by some five years, but had gone almost unnoticed in the driving press. Bonicelli’s ran for weeks, in full colour. Maybe something to do with the fact that Silvio Bonicelli was the hellraising younger son of a big Florentine driving family, maybe just that he had married not a mechanic but an ex-porn star and blossoming manufactured pop singer. Maybe also the fact Chris and Carla had done it with a minimum of fuss in the backyard at Mel’s AutoFix, and Silvio Bonicelli had invited the crowned heads of corporate Europe to a ceremony on a cleared shop floor at the new Lancia works in Milan. That was the trick with the twenty-first century’s corporate nobility. Family contacts.
‘Marry your mechanic.’ Bryant was grinning again. ‘Man, I can see where that would be useful, but I’ve got to tell you, I admire your courage.’
‘It wasn’t really a courage thing,’ said Chris mildly. ‘I was in love. You married?’
‘Yeah.’ He saw Chris looking at his ring. ‘Oh. Platinum. Suki’s a bond trader for Costerman’s. Mostly works from home these days, and she’s probably going to quit if we have another kid.’
‘You got kids?’
‘Yeah, just the one. Ariana.’ They reached the end of the corridor and a battery of lifts. Bryant dug in his jacket pocket while they waited and produced a wallet. He flipped it open to reveal an impressive rack of credit cards and a photo of an attractive auburn-haired woman holding a pixie-faced child. ‘Look. We took that on her birthday. She was one. Nearly a year ago already. They grow up fast. You got kids?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Well, all I can tell you is don’t wait too long.’ Bryant flipped the wallet closed as the lift arrived and they rode up in companionable silence. The lift announced each floor in a chatty tone and gave them brief outlines of current Shorn development projects. After a while Chris spoke, more to drown out the earnest synthetic voice than anything else.
‘This place have its own combat classes?’
‘What, hand to hand?’ Bryant grinned. ‘Look at that number, Chris. Forty-one. Up here, you don’t go hand-to-hand for promotion. Louise Hewitt’d consider that the height of bad taste.’
Chris shrugged. ‘Yeah, but you never know. Saved my life once.’
‘Hey, I’m kidding.’ Bryant patted him on the arm. ‘They’ve got a couple of corporate instructors down in the gym, sure. Shotokan and Tae kwon do, I think. I do some Shotokan myself sometimes, just to stay in shape, plus you never know when you might wind up in the cordoned zones.’ He winked. ‘Know what I mean? But anyway, like one of my instructors says, learning a martial art won’t teach you to fight. You want to learn that shit, go to the street and get in some fights. That’s how you really learn.’ A grin. ‘Least, that’s what they tell me.’
The lift bounced to a halt. ‘Fifty-third floor,’ it said brightly. ‘Conflict Investment division. Please ensure you have a code seven clearance for this level. Have a nice day.’
They stepped out into a small antechamber where a well-groomed security officer nodded to Bryant and asked Chris for ID. Chris found the bar-coded strip they’d given him at ground-floor reception and waited while it was scanned.
‘Look, Chris, I’ve got to run.’ Bryant nodded at the right hand corridor. ‘Some greasy little dictator’s uplinking in for a budget review at ten and I’m still trying to remember the name of his defence minister. You know how it is. I’ll catch you at the quarterly review on Friday. We usually go out after.’
‘Sure. See you later.’
Chris watched him out of sight with apparent casualness. Beneath was the same caution he’d applied to the no-name challenger that morning. Bryant seemed friendly enough, but almost everyone did under the right circumstances. Even Carla’s father could seem like a reasonable man in the right conversational light. And anyone who washed blood off their hands the way Mike Bryant did was not someone Chris wanted at his back.
The security guard handed back his pass and pointed to the twin doors straight ahead.
‘Conference room,’ she said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’
The last time Chris had been face to face with a senior partner was to hand in his resignation at Hammett McColl. Vincent McColl had a high windowed room, panelled in dark wood and lined along one wall with books that looked a hundred years old. There were portraits of illustrious partners from the firm’s eighty-year history on the other walls, and on the desk a framed photo of his father shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher. The floor was waxed wood, overlaid with a two-hundred-year-old Turkish carpet. McColl himself had silvery hair, buttoned his slim frame into suits a generation out of date and refused to have a videophone in his office. The whole place was a shrine to hallowed tradition, an odd thing in itself for a man whose primary responsibility was a division called Emerging Markets.
Jack Notley, Shorn Associates’ ranking senior in Conflict Investment, could not have been less like McColl if he’d been on secondment from an inverted parallel universe. He was a stocky, powerful-looking man with close and not especially well-cropped black hair that was just beginning to show a seasoning of grey. His hands were ruddy and blunt fingered, his suit was a Susana Ingram original that had probably cost as much as the Saab’s whole original chassis, and the body it clothed looked fit for a boxing ring. His features were rough-hewn and there was a long jagged scar under his right eye. The eyes were keen and bright. Only the fine web of lines around them gave any indication of Notley’s forty-seven years. Chris thought he looked like a troll on holiday in Elfland as he moved across the light-filled pastel-shaded reception chamber.
His handshake, predictably, was a bonecrusher.
‘Chris. Great to have you aboard at last. Come on in. I’d like you to meet some people.’
Chris disentangled his fingers and followed the troll’s broad back across the room to where a lower central level housed a wide coffee table, a pair of right-angled sofas and a conspicuously unique meeting leader’s armchair. Seated at either end of one sofa were a man and a woman, both younger than Notley. Chris’s eyes focused automatically on the woman, a second before Notley spoke and gestured at her.
‘This is Louise Hewitt, divisional manager and executive partner. She’s the real brains behind what we’re doing here.’
Hewitt unfolded herself from the sofa and leaned across to take his hand. She was a good-looking, voluptuous woman in her late thirties, working hard at not showing it. Her suit looked Daisuke Todoroki – severe black, vented driver’s skirt to the knees and square-cut jacket. Her shoes had no appreciable heel. She wore long dark hair gathered back in a knot from pale features and minimal make-up. Her handshake wasn’t trying to prove anything.
‘And this is Philip Hamilton, junior partner for the division.’
Chris turned to face the deceptively soft-looking man at the other end of the sofa. Hamilton had a weak chin and a fat bulk that made him untidy, even in his own charcoal Ingram, but his pale blue eyes missed absolutely nothing. He stayed seated, but offered up a damp hand and a murmured greeting. There was, Chris thought, a guarded dislike in his voice.