Chris, still smarting from the way she'd lined up with Barranco, turned away and stared out of the pa.s.senger-side window at the pa.s.sing lights of the city.

'Well, that was f.u.c.king great,' he said finally.

Carla picked up the motorway feeder lane. She said nothing. If Chris had looked at her, he would have seen how close to the edge they were.

'Mike in the bathroom powdering his f.u.c.king nose, Barranco on a political rant and you backing him up every f.u.c.king '

'Don't start with me, Chris.' The Saab never wavered from its accelerating trajectory up the feeder ramp, but there was a ragged edge in Carla's voice that did finally make him look across at her face.

'Well, didn't you?'

'You should be overjoyed I did. Wasn't that my job tonight? Make your client feel good. Relax him. Isn't that what you said?'

'Yeh, that didn't mean hang me out to dry in front of him.'

'Well perhaps you should have made yourself clearer. I'm your wife, remember, not some grinning wh.o.r.e out of the escort pages. I don't do this s.h.i.t for a living.'

'You f.u.c.king enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me!'

It drew a sideways look from her. For a full two seconds she stared at him in silence, then her eyes went back to the road.

'You going to shout like that at Mike Bryant tomorrow?' she asked quietly. 'For his bathroom manners?'

'Don't avoid the f.u.c.king question, Carla!''I wasn't aware you'd asked me one.'

'You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn'tyou ?'

'You sound pretty convinced already.'

'Just f.u.c.king ' He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. 'Just answer me the question, Carla.'

'You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?'

239'Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don't need to yell at him.'

'Don't need? Or don't dare?'

'f.u.c.k you, Carla.' It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn't gone, but abruptly it was cold, and , that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.

'No, f.u.c.k you, Chris.' Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. 'You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who's fighting for something more than his f.u.c.king quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick making little world works.'

'A man who cares.' Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. 'Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he's a real f.u.c.king hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.'

'Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America's inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you're taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon f.u.c.king Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn't they swamp us all in crack?'

'I didn't say they shouldn't.'

'No, because the truth is you don't care about that either. You don't care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That's what this is about, isn't it Chris?' She laughed, something that was almost a sob. 'Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command '

'Why don't you just shut thef.u.c.k up, Carla.' The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage.

'You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe youshould have just gone up to his f.u.c.king room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience'll light you up a little better than I do.'

240Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.

'You f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Chris. You f.u.c.king piece ofs.h.i.t.'

She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.

'You piece of s.h.i.t.'

It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she'd never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he'd only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.

He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.

'You'd better mean that,' he said.

She would not look at him.

'This is a new level, Carla.' He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. 'We haven't been getting on, but. This is new. This is.'

He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.

It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him.

Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.

'I ought to make you get out of this f.u.c.king car.' Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near the-edge rush. 'I ought to make you f.u.c.king walk home.'

'It's my car,' he said gently.

'Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you '

'I'm sorry.' It was out of his mouth before he realised he'd said it.

And then they were groping for each other across the s.p.a.ce between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both ofthem held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.

241They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking.

Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.

'We have to get out of this,' she said at last, m.u.f.fled, into his neck.

'I know.'

'It's going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it's going to kill us both.'

'I know.'

'You've got to stop.'

'I know.'

'Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don't luck it up when he does.'

'Alright.' There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: 'Have you heard anything more?'

She shook her head, still pressed against him.

He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away.

'They're taking their sweet f.u.c.king time.'

'Chris, it's a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven't heard and that means, Dad says that means they're going to do it. He says otherwise we'd have heard by now. They're raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that's what he thinks.'

Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla's constant undying faith in her father's superhuman b.l.o.o.d.y wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they'd come to the break.

'Okay, Carla.' There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. 'But whatever they're doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there's trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they can't take me down on the road, then they'll find some other way.'

She raised her head to look at him.

'Do you think they know? About Vasvik?'

'I don't know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don't get a move on, they're going to be too late to do anything except clean up theblood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other f.u.c.king gig the UN have ever played.'

He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn't pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger's face. He looked away from her and along the nighttime perspectives of the road.

'Doesn't give you much hope, does it.'

242THIRTY-ONE.

They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was sc.r.a.ped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.

'Surveillance mother,' was Mike's opinion. 'Probably the new Lockheed.

I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval.

They'll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen.'

He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted gla.s.s of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.

'Should have indicated, Mike.'

'Yeah, yeah.' Mike squinted up at the mirror. 'f.u.c.king a.s.shole. If this strip wasn't triple-monitored for the fair, I'd f.u.c.king have you, my son.'

'What is it?' Barranco had been catnapping in the front pa.s.senger seat.

'Nothing,' said Bryant. 'Just someone looking to die young.'

Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London.

They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up.

Bryant wasn't used to driving in these conditions. No one was.

The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.

'Maybe we should have flown,' said Barranco nervously.

'On a day like this?' Mike was still grinning. 'Come on!'

The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle's lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior a.n.a.lyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted Sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the s.p.a.ce he'd left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.

243L'Thank you,' said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.

Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. 'Did this mean something?'

'Not a thing,' said Bryant breezily. 'No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.'

Chris winked.

"Fen minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment.

The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos.

Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited G.o.dparents they had come to depend on.

It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.

As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.

'f.u.c.king clowns,' he said. 'Don't know why they got to do that.'

'Those are Harpies,' Barranco told him quietly. 'Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.'

'Actually,' said Mike, alarming the BMW, 'they're made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.'

He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.

'You did not need to bring me here,' muttered Barranco.

Chris shook his head. 'I think you'll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you've got a.s.sault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don't buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.'

Barranco fixed him with a hard look. 'Why don't you just tell me what Echevarria's got, and save us both some time.''Uh . . .'

'You know, don't you. You supply him, you pay for it all.'

'Not me.' He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his 244head again. 'That's not my account, Vicente. I'm really sorry. I've got no more access to it than you do.'