Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.
‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’
She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.
‘You piece of shit.’
It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.
He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.
‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.
She would not look at him.
‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’
He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.
It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.
‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’
‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.
‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.
And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the
safety
of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.
They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking. Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.
‘We have to get out of this,’ she said at last, muffled, into his neck.
‘I know.’
‘It’s going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it’s going to kill us both.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ve got to stop.’
‘I know.’
‘Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don’t fuck it up when he does.’
‘Alright.’ There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: ‘Have you heard anything more?’
She shook her head, still pressed against him.
He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away. ‘They’re taking their sweet fucking time.’
‘Chris, it’s a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven’t heard and that means, Dad says that means they’re going to do it. He says otherwise we’d have heard by now. They’re raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that’s what he thinks.’
Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla’s constant undying faith in her father’s superhuman bloody wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they’d come to the break.
‘Okay, Carla.’ There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. ‘But whatever they’re doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there’s trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they can’t take me down on the road, then they’ll find some other way.’
She raised her head to look at him.
‘Do you think they know? About Vasvik?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don’t get a move on, they’re going to be too late to do anything except clean up the blood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other fucking gig the UN have ever played.’
He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn’t pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger’s face. He looked away from her and along the night-time perspectives of the road.
‘Doesn’t give you much hope, does it?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was scraped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.
‘Surveillance mother,’ was Mike’s opinion. ‘Probably the new Lockheed. I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval. They’ll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen. ’
He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted glass of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.
‘Should have indicated, Mike.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mike squinted up at the mirror. ‘Fucking asshole. If this strip wasn’t triple-monitored for the fair, I’d fucking have you, my son.’
‘What is it?’ Barranco had been catnapping in the front passenger seat.
‘Nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Just someone looking to die young.’
Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London. They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up. Bryant wasn’t used to driving in these conditions. No one was.
The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.
‘Maybe we should have flown,’ said Barranco nervously.
‘On a day like this?’ Mike was still grinning. ‘Come on!’
The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle’s lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior analyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the space he’d left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.
‘Thank you,’ said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.
Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. ‘Did this mean something?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Bryant breezily. ‘No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.’