'You eaten?''Yeah, the rest of the curry. You?'

'On the way.' She grimaced. 'Kebab.'

'Yeah, I can smell it.'

'Yeah. Sorry.' She stopped abruptly and leaned back a little, holding his head between her palms. 'You okay? You look a bit pale.'

'I'm.' He gusted a sigh, pushing out some of the tension. Jerked his head at the screen so she had to let go. 'It's just some of this stuff. We're looking at the North Andean Monitored Economy. I'd forgotten the s.h.i.t they get up to in police cells out there.'

123She moved away. 'No worse than what's going on in Cambodia, from what I hear.'

'We're leaning on them to stop that,' he told her.

'Yeah?' There was a dull disinterest in her voice as she walked out of .

the room, a coat of detachment they had both started to evolve as an alternative to the rows there was no longer time or energy for.

He went after her. Back into the lounge, where the phone terminal stood in the corner. He remembered with a jolt through the stomach that he had not erased the original message.

'Carla.'

'What?' t He moved up close to her and put one arm on the juncture of neck i!

and shoulder. The gesture felt clumsy, unaccustomed. It was weeks since they'd f.u.c.ked. She looked at him out of suspicious eyes.

'What, Chris?'

i He ran his fingers up into the hair behind her ear and tugged through until his hand was clasping the back of her head. It was a caress that invariably set her cooking, but it still felt awkward. He closed the final gap between them, relieved to find that his erection had returned in force. She felt it pressed between them and a thin little smile appeared on her lips.

'So what's got into you?'

He kissed her. After a couple of moments she warmed to it.

'I've missed you,' he said when their mouths split apart.

'I've missed you too.'

'Come upstairs with me.'

She had started to rub at the crotch of his jeans with one hand. The other worked at the buckle on his belt. 'What's wrong with right here?'

He hesitated. The pa.s.sion in the moment guttered down. She looked up from what her hands were doing, terrifyingly attuned to the confusion fogging his head. 1 'Chris?'

'I don't want you getting carpet burns,' he said, and hauled her off her feet. The cla.s.sic wedding threshold lift. One hand went to her breast, cupping and the blonde gobbles down Liz Linshaw's nipple, smearing crimson lipstick She laughed.

'Well, well. Romance.'

Staggering a little, he got her upstairs. They crashed onto the bed and shed their clothes. Carla turned towards him, naked, and he felt a tiny crystal of warmth drip and slide somewhere deep inside him. He had forgotten how beautiful her body was, the broad-shouldered, long boned pale expanse of it, the flat width of stomach and the full b.r.e.a.s.t.s 124above, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that would have been large on a smaller-framed woman but here the swollen hemispheres, flesh taut to breaking point, kneaded by red taloned hands He blinked and forced the image aside. Focused on the woman he was with, slotting into the old, comfortable sequence of postures and pressures, the places she liked to be touched, the eventual coupling Liz Linshaw's mouth, burrowing He could not lose it. Even when Carla got on her hands and knees ahead of him the way they both liked to finish, he fantasised the other two women into existence on the bed with them. He imagined them vampire-like, clutching and sucking at Carla's flesh and his own, and he came with that last image printed indelibly across his eyes.

They left then, dragging his post-coital warmth away with them like the fur of a newly slaughtered animal. And afterwards, when Carla shifted and murmured and tightened her arms around him, all he could feel was trapped inside something that wasn't his.

'This is f.u.c.king great stuff.'

Mike Bryant paced about the office s.p.a.ce, leafing through the sheaf of hardcopy. Chris sat in a corner armchair and watched him. He hadn't slept well, and there was a spreading ache behind his left eye. He was having a hard time getting up to the same level of enthusiasm as Bryant.

'I mean, Jesus, these guys have got some grievances, Just look at it. Better than a dozen different insurgent leaders and every single one has got family tortured to death or disappeared. Fantastic. Primary Emotional Motivation, PE f.u.c.king M, right out of Reed and Mason.

Textbook diehard revolutionaries. They'll never quit. Listen, we only need to hold about a third, no, less than a third, of this stuff over Echevarria's head, and he should cave right in.'

'And if he doesn't?'

'Of course he will. What's wrong with you? We'd only need to persuade about three of these groups to team up, give them some second-hand Kalashnikovs out of stock- and Christ knows we've got enough of those - they'd p.i.s.s all over Echevarria's regular army.'

Chris's temple throbbed. 'Yeah, but what if he doesn't scare.'

'Chris, come on.' Mike looked at him reproachfully. 'You're ruining my day here.''What if, Mike. f.u.c.king think about it.'

'Jesus, you got out of bed the wrong side today. Alright.' Bryant threw himself into another armchair opposite, dumped his feet on the coffee table between. 'Let's be grown up about it. What if. Contingency planning. Like I said, we wave about a third of these guys in his face.

125And we tell him there are double as many more where those came from, right?'

'Right.'

'Then, if he doesn't see sense, we'll use someone out of the other two-thirds. That way, whatever reprisals he takes, he'll be hitting the wrong people. Meanwhile, we talk to the front runner, and if necessary set him up with what he needs. That'd be, let's see.' Bryant flipped through the hardcopy again. 'This guy Arbenz maybe, the People's Liberation Front for whatever it was. Or Barranco's Revolutionary Brigade. Or Diaz. They're all strong contenders. You were there. Who do you make for the best bet?'

'Well, not Arbenz. He got shot up in a gunship raid a couple of weeks ago. Didn't you catch the bulletin?'

4.

'f.u.c.ked if I remember.' Bryant snapped his fingers. 'Wait a minute, j that business with the villages in the south. Echevarria's been strafing them again, f.u.c.king s.h.i.thead. You know he made me a direct promise those BAe helicopters wouldn't be used against civilians this year.

Lucky we didn't issue a press statement on that one.'

'Yeah, well, your BAe gunships shattered Arbenz's legs from the hips down, and apparently they were running that bioware ammunition, the stuff we saw at Farnborough back in January, slugs coated with immune-system inhibitors. Very nasty. They've got him in a field hospital in the mountains, but the last I heard from Lopez, it's touch and go if he'll make it.' Chris rubbed at his eye and wondered about painkillers. 'And even if he does, he'll be in no condition to conduct a campaign any time soon.'

'Okay, so that's Arbenz out. What about Barranco?'

'Yeah, I'd leave Barranco alone too, unless you absolutely have to use him. I met him once. He's committed, and he's short on ego - tough to win over.'

Bryant pulled a face. 'You met Diaz too, right?'

'Couple of times, yeah. He's a better bet. Very pragmatic, strong sense of his place in history. He wants his name on a statue somewherebefore he dies. Oh, and he's a real Shakespeare nut.'

'You're winding me up.'

'No, seriously. He can quote the f.u.c.king stuff. Got a scholarship on some bulls.h.i.t liberal arts exchange programme in the States when he was a student. He gave me Hamlet, Macbeth, whatsit, King Lear, you name it. M1 word-perfect.' Chris shrugged. 'Well, sounded like it was word-perfect anyway. What do I know? Anyway, he told me, get this; he always wanted to visit Britain and see the mother of parliaments.' 'What?' Bryant barked laughter..'You are winding me up.'

'I swear. Mother of parliaments. That's what he said.'

126'The mother of parliaments. Man, I love it. I almost hope Echevarria doesn't cave in, just so we can have this guy across.'

Makin, perhaps predictably, was less amused by it all. He went through the stapled paperwork, one s.n.a.t.c.hed-aside sheet at a time, without saying a word, then tossed the whole thing onto his polished desk top so it slid away from him. He looked across the desk to where Chris and Mike sat in steel flame chairs, bracketing him. He focused on Bryant.

'I seiously don't think this is the way to go, Mike.'

Bryant wasn't up for it. He said nothing, just rolled his head in Chris's direction.

'Listen, Nick,' Chris leaned forward. 'I've worked the NAME before and I'm telling you '

'Youah telling me nothing. I've been working Latin American CI longer than you've been here. I took top commission in the Americas market last yeah '

Bryant cleared his throat. 'Year before last.'

'I'm in it for this year as well, Mike.' Makin's voice stayed even, but behind the steel gla.s.ses his face looked betrayed. 'When the unwesol veds come in.'

'Ah, come on Nick,' Chris felt a tight, feral jag of pleasure as he swung the comeback. 'That was last season. First thing you ever said to me, man. Can't live off stuff like that indefinitely. It's a whole new quaer.

Time f or fresh meat. Another new appoach. Remember that?'

Makin looked away. 'I don't remember saying that, no.'

'Well, you did, Nick.' Bryant got up and brushed something off the shoulder of his suit. 'I was there. Now, this is no longer under discussion.

We are going to do it Chris's way, because, to be honest, your Echevarria game plan is making me tired.'

'Mike, I know how these f.u.c.king spics work. This is the wrong move.'

Bryant looked down at him. He seemed more disappointed with the other man than anything else. 'This isn't Guatemala, Nick. Chris is the resident NAME expert, you like it or not. Now you talk to him and get this stuff into a usable form by Monday. I meant what I said. I am tired of d.i.c.king about with that old f.u.c.k. We go uplincon with Echevarria and his cabinet next week, and I want the axe over his head by then. You coming for a coffee, Chris?'

'Uh. Sure.' Chris got to his feet. 'Nick. You'll call me, right?'Makin made a noise in his throat.

At the door, Bryant turned and looked back across the office.

'Hey, Nick. No hard feelings, huh? It's just, we've let this slide too far. It's getting out of hand. Time to bring in the riot squad, you know. I 127don't want Notley looking in on us like we're a bunch of kids just set fire to the kitchen. That's not good for anyone.'

They left Makin with it.

'You threatening him?' asked Chris, in the lift.

Bryant grinned. 'Bit.'

The doors opened at ground level and they walked out into the arching, light filled s.p.a.ce of the tower's lobby area. Fountain splash and an ambient subsonic vibe filled the air. Chris felt his mouth flex into a grin of his own.

'You p.i.s.sed off with him, then?'

'Nick? Nah. Just he's too f.u.c.king impressed with himself, is all. Ever since that Guatemala thing. He just needs to know where the orders are coming from, then he jumps. Jesus, look at that.'

Hanging in the air above one of the fountains, a huge Shorn a.s.sociates holo ran back-and-forth flicker-cut footage of the Cambodian conflict. Cross-hair graphics sprang up and tracked selected hardware as it appeared on screen - helicopters, a.s.sault rifles, medical gear, camera zeroing in, logistical data scrolling down alongside each sniper-caught item. Make, specs, cost. Shorn contribution and involvement.

'This the BBC footage?' asked Bryant. He'd handed publicity to Chris a couple of weeks ago.

'At base, yeah. We bought it right out of the can in Phnom Penh, in case there was something inappropriate in there. You never can tell with that guy Syal, he's a real f.u.c.king crusader. Won a Pilger Award last year. Anyway, the woman at Imagicians said they'd generate some of the closer detail themselves, like for the medical hardware. They can shoot some real state-of-the-art life-support stuff in the studio, then mix and match on the palette, so it looks like it was really there.' Chris nodded up at the holo. 'Looks good, huh?'

'Yeah, not too shabby. So did Syal cut up rough when they took his footage off him?'

Chris shrugged. 'Don't think he got any say. We made sure there was a programme producer out there for the handover. Standard sponsorship terms. And what we handed them back had enough battle sequences to come across as gritty realism. You know, corpses on fire, that sort of stuff.'

'No women or children, right.''No. Ran it myself on the uplink. It's clean.'

In the holo, a Cambodian guerrilla' commander appeared, fiace weary.

He rattled away in Khmer. Subt.i.tling sprang up in red letters. It is a hard fight but with the help of our corporate partners, our victory is as certain as 'He really saying that?' asked Bryant curiously.

128I.

'Think so.' Chris was tracking a well-endowed blonde woman across t the floors.p.a.ce. 'Think they give them cue cards or something. You know, sometimes I think I could just come down here and stand under the subsonics for half an hour, save myself buying the coffee.'

Bryant spotted where Chris was looking. 'That's not subsonics.'

'Ah, come on Mike.'

'Yeah, that reminds me. Want to go to a party tomorrow night?'

'Party in the zones?' Chris and Mike had been back across the :].

cordons a few times since the Falkland incident, though never back to that particular pub and never quite as wrecked as they had been that night. At first, Chris was nervous on these visits, but Mike Bryant's easy familiarity with the cordoned zones and their nightlife slowly won him over. He came to see that there was a trick to handling things there, and that Bryant knew it. You didn't flaunt your elite status, but nor did you try to play it down. You acted like who you were, you didn't try to be liked, and in most cases you were accorded a wary respect. In time the respect might develop into something else, but you didn't expect that.

And you didn't need it to have a good time.

'Why should it be in the zones?' asked Bryant innocently.

'Oh, I don't know.' They stepped through the armoured-gla.s.s doors and into the street. The sun fell warm on their faces. 'Because the last three were?'

'Bulls.h.i.t. What about Julie Pinion's bash.'

'Okay, the last two, then. kald Julie's wasn't far off, come to that.''I'm sure she'd be thrilled to hear that, price she paid for that duplex.

That's an up-and-coming regenerated area, Chris.'

'So it is. I'd forgotten.'

They pushed into Louie Louie's and nodded at familiar faces in the queue. Chris's fame had eroded sufficiently that all he got from his Shorn colleagues these days were grunts and the odd grin.