Even the security shift was made up of men and women he barely knew well enough to nod at.

It was the pattern for the day. Outside of the datadown, there was no one to talk to. Makin had not shown, which was going to make for a tight squeeze when they tried to put together the NAME package on Monday. Irritated, Chris rangJoaquin Lopez anyway and told him what he wanted. Lopez, at least, was keen, but it was still the early hours of the morning in the Americas and Chris had got him out of bed. His conversation wasn't sparkling. He grunted back understanding, possible flight times and hung up.

Chris rang Carla at Mel's and discovered she'd taken the day off. He checked his mobile, but there was no message. He phoned home, and heard her voice telling anyone who rang she was flying up to Troms6 to see her mother. She would probably stay the week. It sounded, to Chris's tutored ear, as if she had been crying. He threw the mobile across the office in a jag of caffeine-induced rage. He rang Mike, who was on the other line. He retrieved the mobile, got a grip on himself and went back to talking to the datadown.

By five o'clock, he'd had enough. The work was a seamless plane, extending to the horizon in all directions. Cambodia, a.s.sam, Tarim Pendi, the Kurdish Homeland, Georgia, the NAME, Parana, Nigeria, the Victoria Lake States, Sri Lanka, Timor - in every single place, men were getting ready to kill each other for some cause or other, or were already about it. There was paperwork backed up weeks. You had to run just to stand still.

The desk phone rang. He snapped the 'open' command.

'Faulkner.'

'You still here?'

Chris snorted. 'And where are you? Calling from the island?'

'Give me time. Listen, rook to bishop nine. Check it out. Think I've got you, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

154Chris glanced over at the chess table.

'Hang on.'

'Yep.' He could hear the grin in Bryant's voice.

It was a good move. Chris studied the board for a moment, moved the piece and felt a tiny fragment of something detach itself from his heart and drop into his guts. He went back to the desk.

'Pretty good,' he admitted. 'But I don't think it's locked up yet. I'll call you back.'

'Do that. Hey, listen, you and Carla want to drop round tonight? I rang Suki and she's just bought a screening of that new Isabela Tribu movie. The one that won all the awards, about that female marine in Guatemala.'

'Carla's away at the moment.' He tried to make it sound casual, but it still hurt coming out. 'Gone to see family in Norway.'

'Oh. You didn't mention '

'No, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, we'd talked about it.' Chris stopped lying abruptly, not sure why he suddenly needed to justify himself to Bryant. 'Anyway, she's gone.'

'Right.' There was a pause. 'Well, look Chris. Why don't you come across anyway. If I've got to watch this f.u.c.king tearjerker, I'd sooner not do it alone, you know.'

The thought of escaping the silence waiting for him at home for the warmth and noise of Mike's family was like seeing the distant lights of a village through a blizzard. It felt like cheating Carla out of something. It felt like rescue. On the other hand, given the fury of the last knock-down drag-out bare-knuckle bout with his own wife, he wasn't sure he could face Suki Bryant's saccharine Miss Hostess 2o49 perfection.

'Uh, thanks. Let me think about it.'

'Got to be better than going home to an empty house, pal.'

'Yeah, I--' The phone queeped. 'Hang on, I've got an incoming.

Might be Lopez from the airport.'

'Call me back.' Mike was gone.

'This is Chris Faulkner.'

'Well, this is Liz Linshaw.' There was a dancing mockery in the wayshe said it, a light amus.e.m.e.nt that reminded him of something he couldn't quite touch. He groped after words.

'Liz. What, uhm, what can I do for you?'

'Good question. What can you do for me?'

The last twenty-four hours fell on him. Suddenly, he was close to angry. 'Liz, I'm about to call it a day here, and I'm not really in the mood for games. So if you want to talk to me '

'That's perfect. Why don't I buy you dinner this evening.'

155About half a dozen reasons why not suggested themselves. He swept them to the edges of perception.

'You want to buy me dinner?'

'Seems the least I.

can do, if we're going to cooperate on a book.

Look, why don't you meet me uptown in about an hour. You know a place called Regime Change?'

'Yes.' He'd never been inside. No one who worked Conflict Investment would ever have considered it. Just too tacky.

'I'll be in there from about six-thirty. The Bolivia bar, upstairs. Bring an appet.i.te.'

She hung up.

He called Mike back and made some excuses. It was tougher work than he'd expected - he could hear the disappointment in the other man's voice, and the offer of the night with the Bryants now carried added overtones of comfortable safety compared to 'Look, to be honest with you, Mike, I need some time on my own.'

A brief silence down the line. 'You in trouble, Chris?'

'It's.' He closed his eyes and pressed hard on the lids with finger and thumb. 'Carla and I aren't getting on too well right now.'

'Ohhh, s.h.i.t.'

'No, it's. I don't think it's that serious, Mike. It's just, I wasn't expecting her to take off like that. I need to think.'

'Well, if you need to talk...'

'Yeah. Thanks. I'll keep it in mind.'

'Just take it easy, huh.''Yeah. Yeah, I will. I'll talk to you Monday.'

He wandered aimlessly about the office for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He studied Mike's move, tried out a couple of half-hearted responses. He leaned on the window gla.s.s and stared down at the lights of Louie Louie's in the street fifty floors below. He tried not to think about Carla. Tried, with less success, not to think about Liz Linshaw.

In the end, he killed the office lights and went down to sit in his car.

The enclosed s.p.a.ce, recessed instruments, the stark simplicity of wheel and gearshift, were all more bearable than life outside. As the Saab's security locks murmured and clunked into place, he felt himself relaxing measurably. He sank back into the seat, dropped his hand onto the gearstick and rolled his head side to side in the neck support web.

'Now then,' he told himself.

The car deck was almost deserted. Mike's BMW was gone, the other man no doubt well on his way home to Suki and Ariana. There was a thin scattering of other BMWs across the luminous yellow-marked 156.

i iparking ranks, and Hewitt's Audi stood off in the partners' corner. It dawned on Chris how little he'd seen of the executive partner since Cambodia took off. There'd been the usual brushes at quarterly functions, a few team briefings and a couple of congratulatory mails, copies to himself, Bryant and Makin. For the rest, Hewitt had ignored him as completely as was possible given the work they both had to do.

For a moment he entertained the fantasy of waiting behind the wheel until she came down to the car deck. He thought about ramming the vehicle into drive and smashing the life out of her. Smearing her across the deck surfacing, the way Edward Quain-- He shook it off.

Time to go. He fired up the engine, rolled the Saab up the ramp and out into the street. He let the vehicle idle westward. There was no traffic to speak of, Regime Change was five minutes away, and with the corporate ID holoflashed into the windscreen gla.s.s he could park anywhere.

He left the Saab on a cross street filled with the offices of image consultants and data brokerage agencies. As he alarmed the car and walked away from it, he felt a slow adrenal flush rising in his blood. The buzz of a London Sat.u.r.day evening drifted to him on the warm air, streets filling slowly with people, talk and laughter punctuated with the occasional hoot from a cab trying to get through the tangle of pedestrians.

He slipped into it, and quickened his pace.

Regime Change was the end building on a thoroughfare that folded back on itself like a partially-opened jackknife. Music and noise spilled out onto the streets on either side from open-slanted floor-length gla.s.s panels in the ground floor and wide open sash windows above. There were a couple of queues at the door, but the doorman cast an experienced eye over Chris's clothes and nodded him straight in. Chorus of complaint, dying away swiftly as Chris turned to look. He dropped the doorman a tenner and went inside.

The ground floor bar was packed with propped and seated humanity, all yelling at each other over the pulse of a Zequina remix. A c.o.c.ktail waitress surfed past in the noise, dressed in some fevered p.o.r.nographer's vision of a CI exec's suit. Chris put a hand on her arm and tried to make himself heard.

'Bolivia Bar?'

'Second floor,' she shouted back. 'Through the Iraq Room and left.'

'Thanks.'

Screwed-up face. 'What?''Thanks.'

That got a strange look. He took the stairs at a lope, found the Iraq Room - wailing DJ-votional rhythms, big screens showing zooming 157aerial views of flaming oil wells like black and crimson desert flowers, hookah pipes on the tables - and picked his way through it. A huge holoprint of Che Guevara loomed to his left. He snorted and ducked underneath. A relative quiet descended, pegged out with melancholy Andean pipes and Spanish guitar. People sat about on big leather beanbags and sofas with their stuffing coming out. There were candles, and some suggestion of tent canvas on the walls.

Liz Linshaw was seated at a low table in one corner, apparently reading a thin, blue-bound sheaf of paperwork. She wore a variant on her TV uniform - black slacks and a black and grey striped silk shirt b.u.t.toned closed at a single point on her chest. The collar of the shirt was turned up, but the lower hem floated a solid five centimetres above the belt of her slacks. Tanned, toned TV flesh filled up the gap and made long triangles above and below the single closed b.u.t.ton.

Either she didn't see him approaching, or she let him get close deliberately. He stopped himself clearing his throat with an effort of will, and dropped into the beanbag opposite her.

'Hullo, Liz.'

'Chris.' She glanced up, apparently surprised. 'You're earlier than I thought you'd be. Thanks for coming.'

She laid aside what she'd been reading and extended one slim arm across the table. Her grip was dry and confident.

'It's.' Chris looked around. 'A pleasure. You come here often?'

She laughed. It was distressingly attractive, warm and deep-throated and once again Chris had the disturbing impression of recall he'd had on the phone.

'I come here when I don't want to run into anyone from the Conflict Investment sector, Chris. It's safe. None of you guys would be seen dead in here.'

Chris pulled a face. 'True enough.'

'Don't be superior. It's not such a bad place. Have you seen the waitresses ?'

'Yeah, met one downstairs.'

'Decorative, aren't they.'

'Very.' Chris looked around reflexively. There was a long bar bent into one corner of the room. A woman stood mixing drinks behind it.'What would you like?' Liz Linshaw asked him.

Tll get it.'

'No, I insist. After all, you're making yourself available to me, Chris.

It's the least I can do, and it's tax-deductible.' She grinned. 'You know.

Research costs. Hospitality.'

'Sounds like a nice way to live.'

'Whisky, wasn't it? Laphroaig?'

158He nodded, flattered that she remembered. 'If they've got it.'

Liz Linshaw pressed a palm on the table top and the menu glowed into life beneath her hand. She scrolled about a bit, then shook her head regretfully.

'No Laphroaig. Lot of bourbons, and, ah, what about Port Ellen?

That's an Islay malt, isn't it?'

'Yeah, it's one of the new ones.' The sense of flattery crumbled slightly. Had she being doing research on him, he wondered. 'Reopened back in the thirties. It's good stuff.'

'Okay, I'll try it.'

She pressed on the selection and swept a hand across the send patch.

At the bar, the woman looked down, face stained red by the flashing table alert on her worksurface. She glanced across at them and nodded.

'So, Chris.' Liz Linshaw sat back and smiled at him. 'Where did you develop your taste for expensive whisky?'

'Is this part of the interview?'

'No, just warming you up. But, I'm curious. You grew up in the zones, didn't you. East End, riverside estates. Not much Islay malt around there.'

'No. There isn't.'

'Is it painful to talk about this, Chris?'

'You're a zone girl yourself, Liz. What do you think?'

The drinks came, hers with ice. Liz Linshaw waited until the waitress had gone, then she picked up her tumbler and looked pensively into it.

She swirled the drink and the ice cubes clicked about.