He turned back to Echevarria and the suited aides who were crowding into the holocast around him. They stared at him like frightened children.

He cleared his throat. 'Now '

Something cold and jagged slapped him. He blinked and raised one arm to look at the ma.s.s of silvery wire mesh that had come out of nowhere and wrapped around his side. He was starting to turn to the door behind him, when the stungun web sparked and went off with a smell like scorching plastic. The jolt flung him hard against the table, where he clung for a moment, staring.

In the open doorway, Louise Hewitt stood with the stungun still levelled and watched him collapse.

The last thing he saw was her smile.

350FORTY-FOUR.

The cell measured about three metres on a side, and smelled very faintly of flesh paint, thick pastel layers of which coated the walls. There was a comfortable steel flame bed against one such wall, a three-drawer desk under the window and an en suite bathroom capsule in one corner. Next to the capsule, plain white towels hung on a heated rack and next to that there was hanging s.p.a.ce and boxed shelving for his clothes. The fixtures were good-quality wood and metal, and the window looked out over the river through gla.s.s that only betrayed its toughened qualities with the tiny red triangle logo in one corner. The whole place was no worse than some hotels Chris had seen on placement, and it was in considerably better condition than any of the rooms in Erik Nyquist's Brundtland estate apartment.

As far as he could work out, he was the only person in the block.

Guest of honour, he thought vaguely as he went to sleep the second night. Full run of the facilities.

The truth was, the corporate police didn't seem to know what to do with him. They'd taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren't used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.

Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.

Say what ?

lurder, they were saying, but h.e.l.l, don't these guys off each other on the road practically every month.

That's different.

It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status somewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.

The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.

351He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed ofricers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each neal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.

Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head.

Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.

A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour's exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled gla.s.s roof covering a third of the open s.p.a.ce. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a gla.s.sed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.

When it became apparent he wasn't leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarra.s.sed.

'We bill your firm,' she admitted finally.

He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn't have known what to say to anybody he knew.

Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn't remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

He was asked if he wanted paper'and pens and said yes, reflexively, then didn't know what to do with them. He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton's death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he'd written and start further back. When his first line read my father was352murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and inst.i.tuted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched.

He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn't think of anything worth telling her.

The week ended. Another started.

Shorn came for him.

He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the gla.s.s roof. His escort had obligingly dragged a bench out from somewhere for him, and now he sat at one end of it and stared out at the curtain of rain falling a half metre away.

The plants, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.

The door to the quad snapped open and he flicked a surprised glance at his watch. He'd only been there twenty minutes. He looked up and saw Louise Hewitt standing there. It was the first time he'd seen her since she shot him with the stungun. He looked back at the rain.

'Morning, Faulkner. Mind if I sit down?'

He stared down at his hands. 'I guess they'll stop me if I try to break your neck.'

'Try to lay a f.u.c.king finger on me, and I'll stop you myself,' she said mildly. 'You're not the only one with karate training, you know.'

He shrugged.

'I'll take that as a yes, then.'

He felt the bench shift slightly as she lowered herself onto it at the other end. They sat a metre apart. The rain fell through the silence, hissing softly.

'Liz Linshaw says hi,' Hewitt told him, finally.

It jerked his head around.

'Well,' she amended. 'That's paraphrase. Actually, she says, you f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h, you can't hold him without charges this long, I want to see him. She's wrong about that, of course. We can hold you pretty much indefinitely.'Chris looked away again, jaw set.

'We don't plan to, though. In fact, your release papers should come through some time tomorrow morning. You can go home, or back to that expensive hotel f.u.c.knest you've been maintaining. Want toknow how come?'

He locked down the urge to ask, to give anything. It was hard to do.

He was hungry for detail from outside, for anything to engage the frantically spinning wheels in his head.

353"5o 1"11 tell you anyway. l'omorrow's Thursday, you shouht be out by lunchtime at worst. That gives you the best part of a day before you drive. We've posted for a Friday challenge, it's traditional at Shorn.

Gives everyone the weekend to get used to the result.'

'What the f.u.c.k are you talking about, Hewitt?' The insolence shrouded the question enough that he could justify breaking his silence.

'What challenge?'

'The partnership challenge. For Philip Hamilton's post.'

He coughed a laugh. 'I don't want Hamilton's f.u.c.king job.'

'Oh yes, you do. In fact, you issued a formal notice of challenge just before you killed him. Citing unprofessional conduct over the NAME account, ironically enough.' She reached into her jacket and produced a palm-pad. 'I can show you it if you like.'

'No thanks. I don't know what s.h.i.t you're cooking up, Hewitt, but it won't start. You know the policy, you told me yourself last week. No partner/employee crossover.'

'Well, yes, granted your actions were unorthodox. But, as you know, our senior partner is a big fan of policy-making by precedent. He's agreed that we can blur the distinction in this case. Apparently, he's had you in mind for partner status for quite a while. You or Mike Bryant, of ,.

course.

And then it all came crashing down on him, like a slum clearance he'd watched as a kid. Explosions ripping through what he thought was solid from one side to the other, dean straight lines of structure tipping, curtseying and dissolving into a chaos of tumbling rubble and dust while a huddled crowd watched. He couldn't see the resulting wreckage clearly yet, but he sensed its outlines.

'Mike won't drive against me,' he said without conviction.

Hewitt smiled. 'Yes, he will. I've talked to him. More precisely, I've talked to him about equity, capital weahh, partner-safe status, professional versus unprofessional behaviour and the dangers of unmanage ability. Oh, and the ident.i.ty of Four mystery hotel est over the last couple of weeks.'

'The f.u.c.k are you talking about?' But as he said it, the sliding sense of despair was overwhelming, because he already knew.

'Don't be obtuse, Chris. I've got indesp microcam footage from Liz's house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike's face when he saw that stuff.''Bulls.h.i.t.'

'No,' she said almost kindly. 'I've been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread's little performance in the first place?' She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. 'Okay, Linshaw was already 354leaning pretty hard in your direction, she's such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren't for me, you'd probably still be grinding through the same stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.'

Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. 'You set me up with Hamilton, didn't you. You knew what I'd do.'

'It seemed likely.' Hewitt examined her nails modestly. 'To tell the truth, I wasn't sure I'd get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez/ Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and offwe go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed. You really managed to f.u.c.k up beyond my wildest dreams. I don't know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.'

'You wouldn't understand,' Chris said distantly.

'No, I do understand. You're hooked on Barranco's shiny new dream - actually, it's a pretty grubby, old dream, but let's leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.'

It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. 'You're wrong, Louise.

Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is f.u.c.ked. He'll never touch Shorn again.'

'Well, that remains to be seen. He's a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant's boot on it, well, who knows?'

He folded his arms. 'I'm not doing it, Louise.'

'Oh, yes you are.' Her voice turned momentarily ugly. 'Because if you don't drive, then Phil Hamilton's death is just murder, and you'll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris.

Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart's. Either way is fine with me.'

She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.

'And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you're going under, you just remember Nick Makin.'

Chris looked at her, not really surprised. 'Makin, huh?'

'That's right.' She sat back again. 'Makin.''So I called it from the beginning. Your toy boy got b.u.mped for me, and you sent him to kill me.' He shook his head. 'Him and his gangwit proxies. That was brave of you.'

'There's no sent about it, Chris. He hated you for free. If anything,'

she closed her mouth, looked away. She blinked. 'If anything, I tried to 355talk Iron down because 1 knew it wasn't necessary. 1 knew you'd hck up sooner or later. And don't talk to me about brave, Chris. Not with Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage. Not with the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands. You're no f.u.c.king different to me in the end.'

'No?' He spotted the weak spot and stabbed at it. He mimicked her savagely. 'Tried to talk him down? Come on, Louise, if you'd wanted to stop Makin, you could have. He wasn't that strong. You let it happen because it suited the play. Tell yourself what you like in the wee small hours, but don't try and sell that s.h.i.t to me. In the end, he was just another p.a.w.n.'

'p.a.w.n. Ah, yes, the chess player.' Her colour was hectic again, but her voice had evened out. 'You know, I play a little chess myself, Chris. I never made a big splash about it, like some people, but I play. And it's a very limited game. In the end, it's just you and the other guy. That's not a good model for what we do, Chris. Not a good model for life in general. Of course it's very male, one-on-one combat, nice and simple.

But it isn't real. You need to upgrade, play something like AlphaMesh or Linkage. Something multi-sided, something with shifting alliances.'

'Yeah, that sounds more like your speed.'

'It's the speed of the world, Chris. Look around you. See the chess players? Sure you do, they're the stupid third-world f.u.c.ks sending out their p.a.w.ns to kill each other over a fifty-mile strip of desert or what colour pyjamas G.o.d likes to wear. We're the AlpbaMesh players, Chris.

The investment houses, the consultants, the corporates. We shift, we change, we realign, and the game keeps flowing our way. We move around these horn-locked back-and-forth testosterone d.i.c.kheads, we play them off against each other and they f.u.c.king pay us for the privilege.'

'Thanks for the insight.'

'Yeah well.' She got up to go. 'Here's another one. When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he's harder and faster than you - when that happens, just remember. You didn't lose to him, you lost to me.'

356FORTY-FIVE.

It rained on and off through the night and into the next morning. The last of the showers sputtered out as Chris was eating breakfast, and by the time he finished, the sky was brightening. His release order cane through about an hour later. The meal tray detail turned up, looking unusually cheerful, and told him he could leave whenever he wanted. They'd brought his phone and wallet, a small black carry-all for his clothes, and the one who'd loaned him the books said he was welcome to keep anything he was still reading. Chris said he couldn't possibly.

Outside, the city was still damp from the rain, and the air smelled rinsed. The weather had cleared the streets of people, leaving a forlorn Sunday feel on everything. A moisture-beaded Shorn limousine was waiting for him at the kerb, engine idling.

'We'll need to hurry, sir,' the chauffeur told him. 'The press release said four this afternoon, but you never know. Even the corporate cops have been known to leak. Mways a price for drive data, eh?'

In the event, his cynicism proved unfounded. The drive to the hotel was uneventful, and the chauffeur left him alone. Only once, as his pa.s.senger was getting out, did the man's professional lacquer crack. He waited until Chris started up the steps to the hotel, then climbed half out of the driver-side door and leaned across the roof of the limo.

'Good luck, sir,' he said.

Chris turned to look at him. 'Not a Bryant fan, then?' he asked, not quite steadily.

'No, sir. Didn't want to say anything before, in the car, in case you thought I was brown-nosing. But I'll be watching you tomorrow, sir.

Betting on you too.'

'That's. Very kind of you.' The attempt at irony wavered away, unnoticed. 'Any particular reason you're not backing Bryant?' Because he sure as f.u.c.k is a better driver than me.

The chauffeur shrugged. 'Can't bring myself to like the man. 'course, you didn't hear me say that, sir.'

'Say what?'

The chauffeur grinned. 'Like I said, sir. I'll be watching.'

Chris watched him drive away, gripped by a powerful desire to357exchange places with the man. Secztre service job, preferential hotsi,zg as likely as not. Modest **lea,ts, a modest life and a probable, futzlre measwed in decades, not days. Look at him, not a care in the f.u.c.king world.

Suddenly, he felt sick.

When he got up to his room, the sense of unreality was complete.

The only visible change since he left for work the day he murdered Philip Hamilton was the absence of Liz Linshaw's sleeping form curled into the bedclothes.