323lxplosons l)loonled across Phnom Perth like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a wh.o.r.ehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled.

Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he'd gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace - before they left, the rapid response crew Mike called had hosed down the b.l.o.o.d.y asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue a.n.a.lysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully ma.s.saged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.

The media did its job, rather better than anyone had expected.

Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full-colour, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold. Comp Drivers In Eastwood Style Bloodbath/Zone Gangs Reap High Noon VVhirlwind/ Police Commend Shorn Heroes/Coverage went global, TV and the men's magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs.

Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity.

One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were queuing up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.

Sign nothing, said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance. Yet. Corporate police units went into the zones looking for a.s.sociates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one lew anything worth telling. Arrests,were made. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Show, Leads Gang Crackdown/Law and Order Priority for Cbrporate Cbmmunity/ Drug Sc.u.m Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner/Sajbr Streets for Our KMs Promise Executives/ Ten days in, the original event surrounding Nick Makin's death 324were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded, cowardly, drug-dealing masked killers.

Reality blurred out in hype.

Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce.

Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab's engine and offers of bizarre s.e.xual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that some time soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Parana. a.s.sam. Makin's accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More.

He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal.

He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.

In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings.

Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with o.r.g.a.s.m, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.

Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-p.o.r.n pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn't there - about every third night, just so zve stay sane about this, Chris - he m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.

Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.

She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she'd got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.

He hung up on her.

He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce allfurther incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology 325of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.

'Yeah, I know Chris. I'm really sorry. She's been calling for days - I just couldn't blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.'

'I'm f.u.c.king upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It's not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?'

'You need to talk to her, man.'

'That's an opinion, Mike, and you're ent.i.tled to it. But you don't f.u.c.king make my marital decisions for me. Got it?'

There was a long pause at the other end.

'Got it.' Mike said finally.

'Good.' Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. 'I'll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.'

'Yeah.'

"night, then.'

'Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.' There was a flat quality in Mike's voice that Chris didn't much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.

Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.

'Who was that?'

He gestured. 'Ah, Mike. Work stuff.'

'Yeah? You look pretty p.i.s.sed off about it.'

'Yeah, well. Cambodia.'

'Anything I should know?'

He forced a grin. 'A lot of stuff you'd like to know, probably. But let's talk about Mars.'

She threw the towel at him.

'I'll get it out of you,' she promised, advancing.

The next morning on the way to work, Mike's tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehea.r.s.ed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.

He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatoryfigures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.

Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself 326in a wall mirror and grinaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.

She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.

'So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?'

'What do you want?'

'Can we go up to your room?'

'No.'

She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.

'Have you got someone up there?'

'Don't be a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h. No, I haven't got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn't about someone else. You f.u.c.king left me.'

'So I've got to stand here while you shout at me?'

He swallowed and lowered his voice. 'There's a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.'

She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She'd been cuing recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she'd like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.

'I didn't come here to drink with you, Chris.'

'Fair enough.' He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. 'What did you come for?'

'To apologise.'

He looked at her for a long moment. 'Go on then.'She managed a smile. Shook her head. 'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You've turned into a real b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Chris. You know that?'

'You left me in the middle of the f.u.c.king zones, Carla. At two o'clock in the f.u.c.king morning. You've got some apologising to do.'

'You called me a wh.o.r.e.'

'And you called me.' He gestured helplessly, not remembering-how the row had stoked so high. 'You said--'

'I said I couldn't recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn't an insult, it was the truth. I don't recognise you any more.'

He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. 'So 327why come here at all? I'm a write-off, I'n unrecoverable. Tender trash.

So why waste your time?'

'I told you why I cane.'

'Yeah, to apologise. You're not making a very good job of it.'

The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.

'Well?'

'I didn't come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.' He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. 'No, listen to me, Chris. I'd do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.'

She stared away across the bar, a.s.sembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recog- promised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly.

She blinked a couple of times, fast.

'That's not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I've spent the last year, the last two years, I don't know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.' She smiled unconvincingly. 'And you don't want to be that man any more, Chris.

You aren't that man any more. You've found something harder and faster, and you like it better.'

'This is c.r.a.p, Carla.' 'Is it?'

Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.

'I'm leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There's no point.' She gestured at the hotel around them. 'You're happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn't just the job you do any more, that f.u.c.king tower you run your remote control wars from. It's everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn't come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?'

She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windowsof the bar to the street outside.

'You f.u.c.king left me, Carla. Don't try and turn it around.'

She gave him a bright, brittle smile. 'You're not listening to me., Chris. I'm leaving you. I'll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house--'

'And where are you going to go?' It came out ugly.

'I'm going to stay with,' she laughed a little. 'Not that it's anything to do with you any more. I'm going to stay in Troms6 for a while. Until I 328can get the divorce sorted out. I'm a.s.suming you aren't going to contest it, you'll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.'

'What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?'

'Oh, please. I'm not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I'm not the only woman you've got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you're paying.'

He shrugged. 'Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?'

She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. 'You don't know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You'll never f.u.c.king know.'

'Yeah. Whatever.'

She turned to go. Paused and turned back.

'Oh, yeah. You'd better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven't touched it, but I'm not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you're here f.u.c.king some moan on-demand t.i.t-job. My maturity's wearing pretty f.u.c.king thin.'

She walked away from him.

329FORTY-ONE.

Liz Linshaw caine over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They f.u.c.ked, but it wasn't much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.

They unplugged and lay apart.

'Thanks,' she said, staring at the ceiling.

'Sorry.' He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. 'Come here.'

She pushed his head away. 'Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what's wrong.'

'You don't want to hear it.'

'Yes I do.'

He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. 'Carla came to see me,' he said finally.

'Great.' she sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 'f.u.c.king great. You seeing her again?'

'Told you you didn't want to hear it.'

She looked down at him, angry. 'You're wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every f.u.c.king detail. You're what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that's going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?'