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  ‘Louise, this is going to go like a dream.’ Bryant grinned wolfishly.

  ‘Makin and Faulkner are both proven hard men on the road and as far as I’m concerned that’s the bottom line. We don’t have anybody better and you know it.’

  There was a pause in which the loudest sound was Louise Hewitt swallowing water. Finally she shrugged.

  ‘Alright, Mike, it’s your call. But I’m still going on record against it. And that makes Faulkner one hundred per cent your responsibility. If he fucks up—‘

  ‘If he fucks up, Louise, you can fire him and I’ll hold the door open.’ Bryant flashed the grin again. ‘Or the window.’

  Hewitt took a disc out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

  ‘If he fucks up, you’ll all be dead,’ she said shortly. ‘And Shorn’ll be out of a medium-term CI contract worth billions. That’s the briefing. Route blow-ups, road-surface commentaries. Make sure they both get copies. Make sure Faulkner understands what he’s got to do. Blood on the wheels, Mike, or there’s no deal.’

  ‘I remember a time,’ Bryant let just a hint of his American burlesque tinge the words. ‘Used to be enough just to get there first.’

  Hewitt smiled despite herself. ‘Bullshit, you do. You just heard Notley and the others talk about it. And even they barely remember when it was that cuddly. Now get out of here, and don’t disappoint me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Bryant picked up the disc and got up to go. At the door, he paused and looked back to where she was still sitting at the desk, sipping her water.

  ‘Louise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks for giving me this.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Like I said, don’t let me down.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ Bryant hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘You know, Louise, you go on record against Faulkner now and you run the risk of looking very silly when he works out.’

  Hewitt gave him an icy, executive-partner smile.

  ‘I’ll run that risk, thank you, Michael. Now, was there any other advice you’d like to give me on running the division?’

  Bryant shook his head wordlessly and left.

  He stopped by Chris’s office and found the other man standing at the window, staring out at the hail. Winter was hanging on unseasonably long in London and the skies had been gusting fistfuls of the stuff for weeks.

  “s happening?’ he asked as he stuck his head around the door.

  Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off.

  Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.

  ‘Mike.’ Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.

  ‘Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.’ It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. ‘Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say No, not ‘til the weekend.’

  Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips, as he rolled out the time-honoured Dex and Seth comeback.

  ‘Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.’

  ‘What, weekends?’

  Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. ‘You come up with a move or what?’

  ‘Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.’

  This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain haemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centred game and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls at weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match, at over two weeks, had already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.

  Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down to the Shorn armoury a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big gun. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  ‘Got something for you,’ said Bryant, producing the briefing disc from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colours curiously.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.’

  Chris ran the disc at home.

  ‘Look it over,’ Bryant told him. ‘Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavoured shit you drink and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Why can’t I just run it now?’ Chris wanted to know.

  ‘Because,’ leaning closer, with a secret-of-my-success type air, ‘that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Old consultancy trick from way back.’

  ‘This just you and me?’

  Bryant shook his head. ‘Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is there a problem with that?’ Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘Something I should know about?’

  ‘No, no.’

  Watching the closing sequences of the briefing disc, Chris turned it over in his head and tried to work out why he did feel there was a problem with Nick Makin. Makin hadn’t exactly come across as friendly, but neither had Hewitt, or Hamilton for that matter, and a lot of Shorn execs had probably heard the story of Elysia Bennett and Chris Faulkner’s sentiment attack.

  The disc ended with the Shorn Associates logo engraved into a metallic finish on the screen, then clicked off. Chris shelved his thoughts, picked up his drink and went to look for his wife.

  He thought for a moment she’d gone to bed with a book, but as he passed the kitchen he saw that the connecting door to the garage was open and the lights were on. Led by the clinking sounds of tools, he walked through, and around the bulk of the Saab, which was jacked up on one side. Carla’s coverall-clad legs and hips protruded from under the car beside an unrolled oilskin cloth full of spanners. As he watched she must have stretched out to one side for something, because the angle of her hips shifted and the plain of her stomach changed shape beneath the coveralls. He felt the customary twinge of arousal that her more sinuous movements still fired through him.

  ‘Hey,’ he kicked one of her feet. ‘What’re you doing?’

  She stayed beneath the car. ‘What does it look like I’m doing. I’m checking your undercarriage.’

  ‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

  There was no respon
se other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.

  ‘I said I thought you’d gone to bed.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard you.’

  ‘Oh. You just didn’t think it was worth answering me.’

  From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn’t hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.

  ‘Chris, you’re looking at my legs. Obviously I haven’t gone to bed.’

  ‘Just making conversation.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the most engaging conversational gambit I’ve ever heard, Chris. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on it.’

  ‘Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so—‘ Anger and dismay at the idea of having a row with his wife’s feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.

  She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there. One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  For some reason, the irritation in her voice combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris’s seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably. Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.

  ‘I said what’s so ...’

  Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.

  ‘What?’ she asked, more softly.

  ‘It was just,’ Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. ‘Just your legs, you know.’

  ‘Something funny about my legs?’

  ‘Well, your feet really.’ Chris put his glass down and wiped at his eyes. ‘I, just.’ He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. ‘Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.’ He snorted again. ‘It’s. Doesn’t matter.’

  She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and went to crouch beside him. Turning her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.

  ‘Chris ...’

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said suddenly.

  She held up her hands. ‘I’ve got to wash up. In fact, I need a shower.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  In the shower, he stood behind her and ran soaped hands over her breasts, down across her belly and into the V of her thighs. She chuckled deep in her throat and reached back for his erection, hands still gritty with the last of the engine grime. For a while it was enough to lean in the corner of the shower stall together, locked in an unhurried kiss, rubbing at each other languidly in the steam and pummelling jets of hot water. When the last of the dirt and soap had cascaded off them and swirled away, Carla swung herself up and braced her upper body in the corner while her thighs gripped Chris around the waist and her hips ground against this.

  It was an inconclusive coupling, so Chris shut off the water and staggered with Carla’s arms and thighs still locked around him into the bedroom, where they collapsed giggling onto the bed and set about running through every posture in the manual.

  Later, they lay on soaked sheets with their limbs hooked around each other and faces angled together. Moonlight fell in through the window and whitened the bed.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Go?’ Chris looked down in puzzlement. He had slid out of her some time ago. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here in this bed with you. Forever.’

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘Well, till about six-thirty anyway.’

  ‘I’m serious, Chris.’ She lifted herself to look into his face. ‘Don’t go on this Cambodia thing. Not up against Nakamura.’

  ‘Carla.’ It was almost a reprimand the way he said it. ‘We’ve been over this before. It’s my job. We don’t have any choice. There’s the house, the cards, how are we going to cover those things if I’m not driving?’

  ‘I know you’ve got to drive, Chris, but at Hammett McColl—‘

  ‘It’s not the same, Carla. At HM I already had my rep. I’ve got to carve it out all over again at Shorn, or some snot-nosed junior analyst is going to call me out, and once that starts you’re watching your tail forever. If they think you’re easing up, going soft, they’re on you like fucking vultures. The only way to beat that is to stay hard and keep them scared. That way you make partner, and from then on it’s a Sunday afternoon spin. They can’t touch you. No one below partner status is allowed to call you out.’ A vague disquiet passed over him as he remembered what Bryant had told him about Louise Hewitt and the partner called Page. ‘And partner challenges are few and far between. You see them coming. You can negotiate. It’s more civilised at that level.’

  ‘Civilised.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Carla was silent for a while. Then she rolled away from him and huddled herself into the pillow.

  ‘The disc says Nakamura are going to send Mitsue Jones.’

  Chris shifted a little and tucked in behind her. ‘Yes, probably. But if you’d stayed to watch the rest of it, you would have seen that Jones hasn’t duelled in the last six months. And it won’t be her home turf. There’s a good chance they won’t even use her because of that. Not knowing the road can get you killed a lot faster than going up against a better driver. And anyway, driving on the same team as Mike Bryant and this other guy Makin, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Really.’

  Carla shivered. ‘I saw a profile of Jones a couple of years ago. They say she’s never lost a tender.’

  ‘Nor have I. Nor has Bryant as far as I know.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s driven over two dozen challenges, and she’s only twenty-eight. I saw her interviewed, and she looks scary, Chris. Really scary.’

  Chris laughed gently against the skin at the nape of Carla’s neck. ‘That’s just camerawork. In the States, she’s done centrefolds for Penthouse Online. Pouting lips, the works. She’s a fucking pin-up, Carla. It’s all hype.’

  For a moment, he almost believed it himself.

  ‘When is it?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Wednesday next week. Dawn start. I’ve got to sleep over at the office Tuesday night. You want to come in and stay in the hospitality suites with me?’

  ‘No. I’ll go across to Dad’s.’

  ‘You could always ask him to come and stay here for a change.’ Chris frowned and nuzzled at her back. ‘You know I don’t like the thought of you sleeping in that shithole. I worry about you.’

  Carla turned round to face him again. It was hard to tell which was uppermost in her expression, affection or exasperation. ‘You worry about me? Chris, listen to yourself, will you? Next Wednesday you’re out on the road, duelling, and you’re worried about me sleeping in some substandard housing. Come on.’

  ‘There’s been a lot of violence on that estate,’ said Chris doggedly. ‘If I had my way—‘

  He stopped, not entirely sure what he wanted to say next.

  ‘You’d what?’

  He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Forget it. I just think, why can’t Erik come and stay here with us for a change?’

  ‘You know why.’

  Chris sighed. ‘Yeah, because I’m a fucking suited parasite on the lives of honest working men and women.’

  ‘Got it in one.’ Carla kissed him. ‘Come on, I’ll be alright. You just worry about keeping my spaced armour intact. If you come back with the wings all chewed up like last time, you really will see some violence.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  She jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Oh yeah. I didn’t put in all that work to have you broadside and stick like a fucking no-namer. You drive like it matters what happens to your wheels, or that’ll be the last blowjob you see this year.’

  ‘Have to go to my usual supplier then. Ow!’

  ‘Fucking piece of shit! Usual supplier did you say? Who else are you getting blowjobs from, you p
iece of—‘

  ‘Blowtorch! I thought you said blowtorch.’

  Their mingled laughter penetrated the glass of the window and sounded faintly, in the still of the garden beyond. Had Erik Nyquist been there in the darkness, he would have been forced to admit that what he could hear was, indisputably, the sound of his daughter and the man she had married having fun. He might even have been glad to hear it.

  Unfortunately, Erik Nyquist was nearly a hundred kilometres southwest of the laughter, listening instead through paper-thin walls to the sounds of an edge dealer beating his girlfriend to pulp. In the garden, the only witness to the noise of Chris and Carla’s hilarity was a large tawny owl who watched the window unwinkingly for a moment, and then turned its attention back to the more pressing matter of disembowelling the half-dead field mouse in its talons.

  Chapter Twelve

  Apparently, it was a long-standing Shorn tradition to do final briefings down among the variously stripped and jacked-up bodies of the company workshops. Chris could see where the custom originated. Nominally, it gave the executives the opportunity to do some corporate bonding with the mechanics overseeing their final vehicle checks. Far more importantly, the scattered flare of welding torches and the stink of scorched metal put the hard edge of reality on what might have otherwise seemed very far removed from the air-conditioned civility of a more conventional briefing room. In Shorn parlance, it avoided any potential ambiguity.

  Accordingly, Hewitt kept it brutally short. Keep it tight, don’t fuck up. Come back with the contract. Leave the others in pieces on the road. She thanked the chief mechanic personally for his team’s hard work, and walked away.

  After she’d gone, Bryant went for Indian carry-out and Chris sat in the open passenger doorway of the Saab, leafing absently through the background printout on Mitsue Jones, while two mechanics in logo-flashed company coveralls strove in vain to find anything worth doing to the engine that Carla had not already done.