Covert reports came in from the NAME via Lopez. Barranco had taken his first dose of Shorn beneficence – three hundred Kalashnikovs plus ammunition, thirty of the Aerospatiale plane-killers, an even thousand King grenades, all brought ashore in the dead of night on some Pacific beach, courtesy of a privatised Epsilon-class Russian attack sub and her demobbed crew. The best international bulk-by-stealth couriers money could buy.
On the other side of the globe, Nakamura played Cambodia the way Vasvik had told him they would. Planning for the military coup lurched into motion. Chris had the relevant local tools to hand – he’d mustered them almost absently – days before the indesp intelligence came through. He pretended to study the reports, phoned through prearranged authorisation codes to Langley an hour later, sat and waited.
Explosions bloomed across Phnom Penh like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a whorehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled. Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.
Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he’d gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace – before they left, the rapid response crew Mike called had hosed down the bloody asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue analysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully massaged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.
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.