I, uh, I can't do this, Liz, he'd lied, I'm sorry, and he'd turned away to stare out of the window, pretty sure this was the only way to stop the landslide. Trembling with the force of it.

Fair enough, she told him and in the window he watched her bend to leave the gla.s.s on the table by the futon. She stood for a moment at the door before she left, looking at his back, but she said nothing. She had not retied the gown. The gap between its edges was black in the reflected image, empty of detail that his own mind was feverishly happy to fill.

In the morning, he woke to find the gown draped across the quilt he had slept under. At some point during the night she had come in, taken it off and stood naked, watching him sleep. Even through the layers of mild hangover, it was an intensely erotic image and he felt himself hardening at the thought.

The house was silent around him. Birdsong from the tree outside the window, a solitary car engine somewhere distant. He lay propped up on one elbow in the bed, vague with last night's drinking. Without conscious thought, he reached for the gown, dragged it up the bed and held it to his face. It smelled intimately of woman, the only woman's scent outside of Carla's that he had breathed in nearly a decade. The shock was visceral, dissolving the hangover and dumping him out into reality like an exasperated bouncer. He threw off the gown and the quilt in a single motion, threw on clothes. Watch and wallet, off the bedside table in a sweep, stamping into shoes. He slid out of the spare room and paused.

There was no one home. It was a feeling he knew well, and the house echoed with it. A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table, detailing where breakfast things could be found, the number of a good cab company and how to set the alarms before leaving. It was signed stay in touch.

fie got out.

No appet.i.te for breakfast, no confidence that he wouldn't do something really stupid like go through her things or, worse still, wait around for her to come back. He triggered the alarm set-up and the door closed him out on a rising whine as the house defences charged.

He found .himself on a tree-lined hill street that swept up behind him and down then up again in front. A couple of prestige cars and a four track were parked at intervals along the kerbs, and down near the base of the parabola the street described, someone was walking a German Shepherd. There was no one else about. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.1 195He didn't know Highgate, had been in the area only a couple of times before in his life, to drink- and drug-blurred parties at the homes of HM execs. But the air was mild and the sky looked clear of rain in all directions.

He chose the downslope at random, and started walking.

The Saab jolted on a badly mended pothole. Dumped him back into reality. The memory of Highgate dropped away, receding in the rear vi ew.

'Carla.' He reached across the s.p.a.ce between them. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. 'Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything about your mother. It was a joke, alright.'

'Ha f.u.c.king ha.'

He held down the quick flare of anger. 'Carla, we've got to stop this.

We've only been in each other's company half an hour, and we're fighting already. This is killing us.'

'You're the one who.' She stopped, and he wondered what she was biting back the way he'd bitten back words a few moments earlier.

Is this it, he wondered dismally, is this the only way to survive a-long term relationship? Hide your thoughts, bite back your feelings, build a neutral silence that won't hurt. Is that what it's all about? Neutrality for the sake of a warm bed?

Is that what I turned Liz down for?

Liz, waiting, wrapped in the white silk that carried her scent.

'Carla, pull over.'

'What?'

'Pull over. Stop. There, on the hard shoulder. Please.'

She shot him a look, and must have seen something in his face. The Saab bled speed and drifted across the lanes. Carla dropped a gear and brought the car under a hundred kilometres an hour. Onto the hard shoulder and they crunched to a halt. Carla turned in her seat to face him.

'Alright.'

'Carla, listen.' He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling his way towards what he needed to say. 'Please don't run off like that again. Like you did. I missed you. I really did. I need you, and when you're not here I really. I miss you so much. I. I do stupid things.'Her eyes widened.

'Things like what?'

And he could not f.u.c.king tell her. He couldn't.

He thought he was going to, he even started to, started with Troy Morris's party, even got as far as talking about Liz and her book proposal, but he couldn't do it, and when she knew there was more behind it and pushed for it, he veered off into the zones and what he and Mike Bryant had done to Griff Dixon and his friends.

196She whitened as he told it.

'That can't be,' she whispered. 'You, they can't,' scaling almost to a shout. 'People can't do things like that. It's not legal.'

'Tell that to Mike. Ah, Christ, tell it to the whole f.u.c.king Shorn corporation, while you're at it.' And then it all had to come tumbling out, the morning after, the NAME contract, the f.u.c.k-up with Lopez and Langley, the dead in Medellin and the quick-fix burial of the facts, Panama and Barranco and his quiet insistence. You do not belong. Chris found he was trembling by the time he got to the end and there was what felt like a laugh building in his throat, but when it finally came out his eyes were wet. He unfastened his belt and leaned across the s.p.a.ce between the seats. He pulled himself across and against her, teeth gritted on the fraying shreds of his control.

They clung together.

'Chris.' There was something in Carla's voice that might have been a laugh as well, and what she was saying made no kind of sense, but the way she held him that didn't seem to matter much. 'Chris, listen to me.

It's okay. There's a way out of this.'

She started to lay it out for him. Less than a minute in, he was shouting her down.

'You can't be f.u.c.king serious, Carla. That's not a way out.'

'Chris, please listen to me.'

'A f.u.c.king ombudsman. What do you think I am, a socialist? A f.u.c.king loser? Those people are '

He gestured at the enormity of it, groping for words. Carla folded her arms and looked at him.

'Are what? Dangerous? Do you want to tell me again how you murdered three unarmed men in the zones last weekend?'

'They were sc.u.m, Carla. Armed or not.'

'And the car-jackers, back in January. Were they sc.u.m too?'

'That '

'And the people in that care in Medell[n?' Her voice was rising again.

'The people you killed in the Cambodia playoff. Isaac Murcheson, who you dreamed about every night for a year after you killed him. And now,you have the insane f.u.c.king nerve to tell me the ombudsmen are dangerous?'

He raised his hands. 'I didn't say that.'

'You were going to.'

'You don't know what I was going to say,' he lied. 'I was going to say those people are, they're losers Carla, they're standing against the whole tide of globalisation, of progress, for f.u.c.k's sake.'

'Is it progress?' she asked, suddenly quiet. 'Balkanisation and slaugh 197ter abroad and the free market feeding off the bones, a poverty, line economy and gladiatorial contests on the roads at home. Is that supposed to be progress?'

'That's your father talking.'

'No, luck you Chris, this is me talking. You think I don't have opinions of my own. You think I can't look around and see for myself what's happening? You think I'm not living out the consequences?'

'You don't--'

'You know, in Norway when I tell people where I live, where I choose to live, they look at me like I'm some kind of moral r.e.t.a.r.d. When I tell them what my husband does for a living, they '

'Oh, here we go.' He turned away from her in the narrow confines of the car. Outside his window, the wind whipped along the embankment, flattening the long gra.s.s. 'Here we f.u.c.king go again.'

'Chris, listen to me.' A hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off angrily.

'You've got to stand outside it for a moment. That's what I did while I was in Troms6. You've got to see it from the outside to understand.

You're a paid killer, Chris. A paid killer, a dictator in all but name.

'Oh, for--'

'Echevarria, right? You told me about Echevarria.'

'What about him?'

'You talk as if you hated him. As if he was a monster.'

'He pretty much is, Carla.'

'And what's the difference between the two of you? Every atrocity he commits, you underwrite. You told me about the torture, the people in those police cells and the bodies on the rubbish dumps. You put those people there, Chris. You may as well have been there with the electrodes.'

'That's not fair. Echevarria isn't mine.'

'Isn't yours?'

'It isn't my account, Carla. I don't get to make the decisions on that one. In fact ''Oh, and Cambodia's different? You get to make the decisions on that one, because you told me you do, and I read the reports while I was away, Chris. The independent press for a change. They say this Khieu Sary is going to be as bad as the original Khmer Rouge.'

'That's bulls.h.i.t. Khieu's a pragmatist. He's a good bet, and even if he gets out of hand we can '

'Out of hand? What does that mean, out of hand? You mean if the body count gets into the tens of thousands? If they run out of places to bury them secretly? Chris, for f.u.c.k's sake listen to yourself.'

198He turned back. 'I didn't make the world the way it is, Carla. I'm just trying to live in it.'

'We don't have to live in it this way.'

'No? You want to live in the f.u.c.king zones, do you?' He reached across and grabbed at the leather jacket she was wearing. 'You think they wear this kind of stuff in the zones? You think you get to jet off to Scandinavia when you f.u.c.king feel like it if you live in the zones?'

'I'm not--'

'You want to be an old woman at forty?' She flinched at the lash in his voice. He was losing control now, tears stinging in his eyes. 'Is that what you want, Carla? Obese from the s.h.i.t they stuff the food with, diabetic from the f.u.c.king sugar content, allergies from the additives, no money for decent medical treatment. Is that what you want? You want to die poor, die because you're poor? Is that what you f.u.c.king want, Carla, J.

because '

The slap turned his head. Jarred loose the tears from his eyelids. He J.

blinked and tasted blood.

'Now you listen to me,' she said evenly. 'You shut up and hear what I have to say, or this is over. I mean it, Chris.'

'You have no idea,' he muttered.

'Don't try to pull rank on me, Chris. My father lives in the zones--'

'Your father?' Derisively. Voice rising again. 'Your father doesn't--'

'I'm warning you, Chris.'He looked away. Cranked down the anger. 'Your father,' he said quietly, 'is a tourist. He has no children. No dependents. Nothing that ties him where he is, nothing to force him. He isn't like the people he surrounds himself with, and he never will be. He could be gone tomorrow if he chose to, and that's what makes the difference.'

'He thinks he can make a difference.'

'And can he?'

Silence. Finally, he looked back at her.

'Can he, Carla?' He reached out and took her hand. 'Yesterday I was on the other side of the world, talking to a man who might be able to kick Echevarria out of the ME. If I get my way, it'll happen. Isn't that worth something? Isn't that something better than the articles your father hammers out for readers who'll shake their heads and act shocked and never lift a f.u.c.king finger to change anything?'

'If it matters to you so much to change things all of a sudden, why can't you '

The heavy throb of rotors overhead. The car rocked on its suspen sion. The radio crackled to life.

'Driver Control. This is Driver Control.'

The rotor noise grew, even through the Saab's soundproofing. The 199helicopter's belly dropped into view, black and luminous green, showing landing skids, underslung cameras and gadings. It skittered back a few metres, as if nervous of the stopped car. The voice splashed out of the radio again.

'Owner of Saab Custom registration s8io576, please identify your self.'

What the f.u.c.k for, d.i.c.khead? The thought was a random jag of anger.

Match me from the footage you've just shot through my windscreen, why don't you? Instead of wasting my motherf.u.c.king time.

'This is a security requirement,' admonished the voice.

'This is Chris Faulkner,' he said heavily. 'Driver clearance 26oB354R.

I work for Shorn a.s.sociates. Now f.u.c.k off, will you. My wife's not feeling well, and you're not helping.'

There was a brief silence while the numbers ran. The voice came back, diffident.

'Sorry to trouble you, sir. It's just, stopping like that on the carriage way. If your wife needs hospitalisation, we can '

'I said, f.u.c.k off.'

The helicopter dithered for a moment longer then spun about and lifted out of view. They sat for a while, listening to its departing chunter.