Bloodland

TUBE STEADIES HIMSELF with a couple of deep, measured breaths, replaces the revolver in his holster and steps away. Behind him now, the package is screaming, but what can he do? Venus and Scratch from the lead car were right behind him so they’ll be on it.

Kicking the door closed was dumb, and unnecessary, he could have just gone around it, or through the open window – but he had to feel like he was in a scene from a fucking movie, didn’t he? It’s the perennial temptation, the age-old problem – which comes first, the war or the stories? Put a gun in your hand and who are you?

He turns around.

Sweet Lord.

Venus looks at him.

Tube nods at the lead car.

‘Sir,’ he then says to the package, loudly, clearly, and with enough firmness to command the poor bastard’s attention, ‘these men will escort you to the airstrip. There you will receive immediate medical attention.’ He pauses. ‘Do you understand?’

The package nods. He’s pale, terrified, in agony.

Venus and Scratch take him away, quickly, out of the car and around the body. They shield him as best they can from what’s up ahead as well, and bundle him into the other car.

Tube just stands there. In theory, they could be vulnerable to attack here, some kind of retaliation, return fire, but it’s highly unlikely. Gideon controls this whole area, the airstrip, the mine, its immediate environs. Once you get near the compound, OK, things are a little different – the painted kids with bloodshot eyes take over… but they’re all still on the same side.

Except…

He looks around.

Except – you’d think - when something like this happens.

The lead car starts up, veers right, moves along the edge of the road for a bit and then speeds off.

Spokane, the driver of the middle car, opens his door and gets out, radio in hand.

He looks over at Tube. ‘Support on the way, sir.’

Tube nods.

Support. Clean up. Bags. At least one bag, anyway.

He shakes his head.

What a mess.

A few feet away is Deep Six. He’s just standing there, too, looking around.

Guess they’re both a little shell-shocked.

The silence now is the strangest thing.

Fuck.

No one moaning, no one crying, nothing.

Crazy, efficient motherfucker.

If anyone had asked him, Tube would have opted for Deep Six here, not Ashes, on the basis that it’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for – and Ashes was anything but quiet, fool couldn’t keep still for a second, slave to his ADHD or whatever he had, though he never seemed that disturbed, just a little weird, stupid actually. And that’s another thing, it usually isn’t the stupid ones who end up doing this kind of thing – for whatever reason it’s the smart ones, like Deep Six… who at any rate seems smart, but maybe he isn’t, maybe he’s as dumb as he lets on. And who knows, go figure, maybe Ray Kroner was smart after all. Doesn’t matter now, though, he’s gone to the bosom of the Lord and he sure as shit ain’t coming back.

Tube looks down at the body.

He didn’t like having to do it, not least because it was his first time at such close range, but it was a split second thing anyway, he acted on reflex, and if he hadn’t, if Ashes had shot the package – it’s just occurring to him now – the fallout would’ve been…

Unimaginable.

There’d be no containing it. Which begs the question – what the hell is Senator John Rundle doing down here anyway? Whatever the strategy is supposed to be, it’s a damn risky one. A Beltway insider like Rundle? Coming to the Congo? For a sit-down with Arnold Kimbela?

He guesses the stakes must be pretty high.

Not that it’s Tube’s job, or his place, to be speculating on such shit, but you can’t help it.

He looks over at Deep Six again.

‘Hell of a thing,’ he says. And that’s when he notices the look on Tom Szymanski’s face. It’s a scowl, brooding, almost baleful. ‘What?’

Szymanski shrugs, seemingly unable to speak.

Tube steps over to him. ‘I didn’t have a choice. That was a US senator, for Christ’s sake.’ He’s whispering this. ‘Ashes was going to shoot him.’

Szymanski looks up. ‘A senator?’

‘Yeah, John Rundle. Big family.’ He raises an arm and sweeps it around. ‘His brother actually owns all of this, the mine, the airstrip. You know, BRX.’ He pauses. ‘They write the cheques. So I’m sorry, but Ashes picked the wrong fucking day to go crazy.’

Szymanski considers this, seems to anyway.

‘Yeah,’ he says eventually, under his breath. ‘The wrong fucking day.’ It’s barely audible.

He walks away.

Tube watches him.

He stops in front of Ray Kroner’s body for a second and then walks on.

Venus and Scratch watch in silence as he passes them.

Tube can hear something in the distance now, from behind. It’s on the road. A deep rumbling sound.

Support.

One of the armoured humvees.

Tom Szymanski stops when he comes to the scene up ahead.

Tube studies him – his posture, body language. What’s he thinking? What’s going on inside his head as he looks down at this pile – this fucked-up arrangement – of corpses…

Twisted, bullet-riddled, blood-soaked.

Faces frozen in shock.

This calculus of horror.

Two women, one slumped over an empty wicker basket, the other lying sideways in a pile of, what are they, yams… and behind them, splayed out on the dirt road, three tiny, limp frames…

Is Deep Six straining to take this in, to comprehend it? Is it getting to him? Is he losing his perspective, losing his mind?

Tube exhales, turns around, looks in the opposite direction.

The armoured vehicle is approaching. It gets closer, louder. It pulls up next to the first SUV. Doors and hatches open, support personnel appear. They spread out, assess the damage, start the clean-up.

Though Tube is still in charge.

In fact, since the entire Buenke operation is under his command, he’ll be the one responsible for shaping and disseminating the official narrative of what happened here.

Which isn’t going to be easy.

Because Gideon Global don’t do explanations, or apologies.

Tube nods at Venus again and walks over to where he and Scratch are standing. As he does so, he makes a mental note.

Tom Szymanski takes extended leave.

Unpaid.

Effective immediately.

8

ON THE FLIGHT TO PARIS, Rundle goes over his notes again and then catches up on some of the J.J. stuff from the weekend. He watches various clips – mainly from the Sunday morning talk shows, This Week and Face the Nation – and has to admit that J.J. did pretty well. He’d said last week that he wanted to hang onto the media traction while changing the conversation, and he appears to have done just that – little or no mention of the ‘accident’, instead a vigorous assault on the Finance Reform bill. Of course, the high-visibility brace on his hand leaves no one in any doubt about the narrative subtext that’s being peddled here.

But nicely done. All round. No question about it.

Nor has it taken long for the speculation to ramp up about J.J. possibly running for the White House in two years’ time. No one has officially put their hat in the ring yet – it’s too early for that – but the more times you get asked the question, the less plausible, conveniently enough, your coy and disingenuous denials become.

Rundle can even see it himself now.

What’s more, he can see the benefits.

It’s become clear to him recently that his position vis-à-vis James Vaughan and the Oberon Capital Group may not be as solid as he’d been assuming. Rundle has played his part, there’s no doubt about that, he’s kept the supply chain ticking over, and at considerable cost, both financial and otherwise – but there’s also no doubt that in relation to certain follow-on matters he has been kept in the dark.

There’s a bigger picture here – it’s obvious, Rundle can feel it in his bones – but for whatever reason, or reasons, Jimmy Vaughan has consistently made a point of excluding him from it. With J.J. in the White House, however, things would be different. They’d have to be.

It would be a lock.

The Rundle Supremacy.

OK, there’s a long way to go before that happens, but in the short term if BRX can sew up the Africa situation, Oberon might be more favourably disposed towards the senator making a bid for the White House.

Maybe pitch in a little.

Quid pro quo sort of thing. Two-way street.

Not that there’d be anything formalised about it, much less illegal or nefarious – nothing, say, for The Nation or Democracy Now to be getting worked up about.

Because how do these people think shit gets done?

It’s just business.

Rundle closes his laptop, leans back and sighs.

He’s getting to Paris on his own steam, in the G650, and after that Gideon will be taking over – there’ll be a flight in a military plane to Kigali followed by a quick hop over to Bukavu in eastern Congo. Then he’ll be taken in a light aircraft to the mine at Buenke. At least the reverse trip, with the scale of comfort ascending, will be a little easier.

And in between he sits down with the colonel.

It’ll be a quick turnaround, couple of hours maybe, some hard talking, lots of back and forth, issues, conditions, whatever.

But a resolution has to be arrived at.

That’s the bottom line.

Rundle looks out the window, at the clouds below, billowing furiously.

He has spent his life arriving at solutions – structuring complex deals, negotiating buyouts… manipulating, cajoling, sweet-talking, playing hardball where necessary – but it has always been in streamlined air-conditioned spaces, in hotel rooms, office suites and conference centres.

This is going to be very different.

A jungle clearing, kids with Kalashnikovs, a damp hut, a metal table, a bare light bulb. That’s how J.J. described it. Equally, depending on his mood, the colonel could choose to hold the meeting in his new palace – so-called, and still half-built by all reports, with its unsuitable antique furniture, staircases leading nowhere and empty Olympic-sized swimming pool.

The point is, it’ll be different.

And Rundle has this notion -

He can’t help it.

He has this notion that by travelling to Africa in person, by engaging directly with a local warlord, by not flinching, he will come away stronger, empowered somehow, equipped not just with a re-negotiated mining contract but with a psychological edge as well, an air of dark authority. It’s as if he expects to be infected, bitten, tainted in some way.

His soul.

Rundle looks away, suddenly uncomfortable with this, a little embarrassed even. He swivels his seat around to face the empty cabin.

He is aware of all the history here, of the tropes and metaphors routinely used, the clichés even. He’s aware of the complex web of interdependencies going back over decades, the involvement of various agencies, corporate, military, intel.

He’s aware, too, of the enduring friendship between Jimmy Vaughan and Mobutu Sese Seko.

But -

Rundle swivels back to face the window again.

That would have been confined to Paris, or London, or Washington, wouldn’t it? At no point, as far as he knows, did Vaughan himself ever actually go to Congo.

He’s going, though, and it feels appropriate.

Rundle leans back in his seat and closes his eyes.

He’s only sorry now that he didn’t arrange to have Nora come along as well.

Conway sits at the kitchen counter, distracted, agitated, gazing at Corinne as she cajoles Jack into eating some cereal. What if he were married to her, he thinks, and Jack was their first, and they lived in an apartment in Paris, and he ran a successful software or consultancy business? And Corinne adored him, deferred to him, wanted him.

What if…

‘Well?’

Conway looks up. Ruth is standing there, with her coat on. She nods at the radio.

‘Any mention of when the funeral is?’

He straightens up. ‘Thursday morning.’

She passes Jack on her way to the fridge and strokes his head.

‘Is it going to be a state funeral?’

‘Mamma.’ Delayed reaction.

‘Yeah.’

She opens the fridge and takes out a carton of cranberry juice. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

‘No, me neither.’ It’s not the only thing he can’t believe. His brief phone call to Don Ribcoff and then… problem solved?

Again?

Or maybe Larry Bolger simply obliged, succumbed to the enormous pressure he was under, the guilt, the fear, the apprehension.

Ticker couldn’t take it anymore.

Either way, problem solved.

That problem solved.

Who does Conway phone up now, though, about his other problems? His financial woes, his impending profess-sional meltdown, his own guilt and fear and apprehension?

‘Oh,’ Ruth says, ‘I meant to ask you. How did the meeting go?’

They’d been so caught up last night in the news about Bolger’s death that they hadn’t talked about anything else.

He pauses. He’s about to tell her the truth. But not with Corinne there, not with the baby, not in the kitchen.

‘It went OK, I think. We’ll see.’

Ruth pours some juice into a glass and puts the carton back in the fridge.

‘Right,’ she says, and knocks the juice back. ‘I’m off.’

‘Mamma.’

A few minutes later, Conway heads out himself.

Driving into town feels normal enough, like any other morning, but only so long as he keeps the radio off and ignores the constant pinging of his phone. As soon as he arrives at his building, however, the feeling evaporates. Because what awaits him here, up on the sixth floor, especially after yesterday’s debacle with the Black Vine people, will bear no resemblance to a normal day at the office. Instead, there’ll be frantic messages from Martin Boyle, from the banks, maybe even from business correspondents, people at RTE and Newstalk and the papers. Among the staff, there’ll be an air of panic, of incredulity, of how can this be happening.

He’ll be expected to say something.

He’ll be expected to turn this around.

When Jimmy walks into his apartment on Tuesday afternoon he is almost sick. Finbarr warned him that the place had been turned over, but he isn’t prepared for the visceral shock of it – the sense of what it’d be like, he imagines, to look in the mirror one morning and see your face unexpectedly disfigured.

He puts his bag down.

Everything has been disturbed, moved, knocked over. The bookshelves have been cleared, with all the books now in messy heaps on the floor.

But he’s prepared to bet there isn’t a single one missing.

Because burglars don’t take books, certainly not old paperbacks. They clear bookshelves because they’re looking for something.

He goes over to his desk and switches on the computer. It’s one of the few objects in the room still in its proper place.

Which will maybe tell its own story.

And, straightaway, does.

Wiped.

Fuck.

It’s not the loss of data he’s concerned about – he has that on his laptop, on a flash drive, stored online – it’s the message this conveys. It’s how it makes him think again about what happened in London.

Fuck.

He looks around.

Apparently, two other apartments in the building were broken into as well, but he can only conclude that these were for show.

It’s with a certain degree of ambivalence, not to say unease, that he decides to start tidying up. The alternative would be to go and stay with a friend, but this is where he lives. It’s his apartment. He isn’t going anywhere.

He kneels on the floor, picks up a few books.

Starts there.

Thumbs through a couple of them, ends up reading bits, and quickly feeling indignant.

He picks up a Scribner’s Gatsby.

A Picador Dispatches.

Concrete Island.

It takes him a while.

In fact, it’s not until the next morning that Jimmy can bring himself to get back to work.

And effectively this means tracking down Dave Conway.

Without much difficulty he finds an address for Conway’s office in town and a reference to his home, which is somewhere near Enniskerry. He also finds a couple of phone numbers and an e-mail address. But initial approaches prove fruitless – a cursory message is taken, a call is not returned, an e-mail gets an automatic out-of-office reply. He makes it as far as the reception area of the building where Conway Holdings has its offices and is told that no one is available to see him.

But he picks up on something here. There’s a certain frantic air about the place, maybe even a sense of panic – which is not unusual these days, but he wonders if there’s more to it than that.

He considers going out to Enniskerry to see if he can locate Conway’s house, but decides against it, reckons that it might be a bit tricky. Or even risky.

Or just pointless.

When he gets back to the apartment, he delves further into a couple of online news archives, and keeps reading, searching, probing, as if some revelation might be at hand, some neat and convenient tying together of the various threads.

It’s not quite that, but a significant fact does emerge from the acres of material he manages to scan – Dave Conway and Larry Bolger were close. During Bolger’s time in office reference after reference puts the two men together, at meetings, in corridors, on the phone.

In photographs.

Jimmy looks at a few of these and tries to parse the body language, to extract some meaning from the position of a hand on a shoulder or the direction of a gaze.

It proves difficult, elusive.

Ultimately what he gets from the photographs is pretty obvious. And simple. It’s the realisation that as a result of this close association between the two men, Dave Conway will more than likely be attending Larry Bolger’s state funeral tomorrow morning in the church at Donnybrook and then later out at St Felim’s Cemetery.

‘I see the way you look at her.’

This is whispered. Ruth only whispers when she’s about to explode. Or when there’s no choice, when she’s at something like a funeral, and a state funeral at that.

And at the bloody graveside.

‘I don’t look at her,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’

Conway has been blindsided by this. Of course he looks at Corinne. The girl is so beautiful she breaks his fucking heart every time he sees her – but he’s not fourteen, he’s not an idiot.

He swallows.

‘You do.’

‘I don’t.’

He swallows again.

OK… maybe it’s not inconceivable – lately, at any rate – that Ruth has caught him staring at the au pair.

For inappropriately long periods of time.

But whatever she might think it’s not actually sexual. He doesn’t want to fuck her. He’s old enough to be her father.

He just -

He wants to envelop himself in the fragrant idea of her, and disappear.

Basically.

Evaporate. Escape.

Which might well be worse. From Ruth’s perspective. Mightn’t it?

A more serious transgression.

He should shut up.

It’s been a long day. Two hours in the church, readings, tributes, poetry, the interminable shuffle back along the aisle to get out, then the car park, the cortège, the lined streets.

And now they’re out here at St Felim’s, at the graveside.

Waiting.

For the oration. Which is to be delivered by another former Taoiseach, and will no doubt be tedious beyond belief.

‘I don’t understand. What is wrong with you?’

Ruth doesn’t look at him when she says this. It’s more of a rhetorical question. He’s reluctant to fight with her, but it’s inevitable, he supposes.

They’re a few rows back from the graveside, seated, and it’s chilly, uncomfortably so. He doesn’t recognise anyone on either side of them. No one seems to be listening anyway, everyone caught up in their own whispered conversations.

He stares at her, waits until she turns.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ he then says, almost giddy with the knowledge that he’s about to obliterate any annoying thoughts she might have about him and the au pair. ‘I’m as close to being bankrupt as makes no difference. That’s what.’

She stares at him, eyes widening.

His stomach turns.

He can see her trying to take this in.

But he won’t have to say anything more, that much is clear. She gets it. Every time he tried to imagine the scene it took him ages, working through it, just to explain.

Not necessary, it seems.

Ruth can put the pieces together. And can probably extrapolate from it, too, see the ramifications.

All the way to the poor house.

‘You fool,’ she hisses.

God, Conway thinks, if only that’s all I was.

‘And what about the kids? Jesus.’

At least he doesn’t have to go into any of the other stuff with her. The Larry Bolger stuff. The Susie Monaghan stuff.

The Don Ribcoff stuff.

‘The house is in your name,’ he says quietly, aware now of her starting to tremble beside him. ‘Remember? So are half of the companies. It’ll take ten years to sort it all out.’

Something occurs to him at that point. Phil Sweeney. Where is he? He didn’t see him at the church. He should be here somewhere.

Conway looks around, over his shoulder.

He’s assuming that despite their little falling-out things are OK there. With Phil. With the young guy, whatshisname, Jimmy Gilroy.

Now that Bolger is -

Well…

He’s just assuming.

Big crowd here. He turns back, stares straight ahead, at the grave, at the coffin.

But maybe he shouldn’t be making assumptions like that.

In the distance, a black state car glides into view.

Maybe he shouldn’t be making assumptions like that at all.

Jimmy sits huddled behind his Honda on a low wall opposite the entrance to the cemetery. There’s a large crowd here and they’ve all just watched the funeral cortège snake its way along the Cherryvale Road and disappear in through the imposing iron gates of St Felim’s.

Earlier on, Jimmy spotted Dave Conway and his wife coming out of the church in Donnybrook and getting into a dark green BMW. There was a large crowd there too and it wasn’t easy, but Jimmy knew it was him – recognised him from photographs. He wasn’t going to be able to follow them directly, because of how the cortège was organised, but he knew where they were headed and made his own way out. He took an alternative and much quicker route, but when he arrived at the cemetery he found, not surprisingly, that access to it was restricted.

With more crowds gathering, he decided to pick a spot, sit down and just let the afternoon unfold at its own glacial pace.

He glances over at the gates again now.

The thing is, Conway will reappear at some point and Jimmy will follow him.

Until then all he can do is watch and wait. Besides, it’s a nice day, cool, intermittently sunny, and there’s a gentle breeze.

There are worse things he could be doing.

He feels strange, though. He’s not here as a punter, not here to gawk or pay his respects. Nor does he feel, at the same time, like one of the journalists or photographers he keeps spotting about the place, guys he knows from his days at the paper.

In any case, they wouldn’t allow that. He’s officially out of the system, on the fringes at best.

They’re a very protected species.

When one of them wanders past, in fact, Jimmy gets the look, the slight double-take.

Fuck are you doing here?

‘Hi, Chris.’

‘Jimmy.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not bad. Nice day for it.’

Chris Sullivan. Political correspondent. Late forties. Inside track on just about everything.

Jimmy looks up at him, squints. ‘Shouldn’t you be inside?’

‘On my way.’ Sullivan checks his watch. ‘Larry’s not going anywhere.’ Then, eyebrows furrowed, ‘You working?’

It crosses Jimmy’s mind to say something here, maybe even to say everything. He has what he has, information-wise, story-wise. What he doesn’t have is the back-up and resources of a legitimate news organisation.

If there is such a thing anymore.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t call it work.’ He holds a hand up to his face to block out the light. ‘Though mind you, I was wondering.’

‘Yeah?’

‘What did you make of it?’ He gestures towards the cemetery. ‘A heart attack? In London?’

Sullivan shrugs. ‘If that’s how you’re going, I don’t think you get to choose where it happens.’

‘He was relatively young, though. Healthy. Bit strange.’

Sullivan looks at him. ‘What?’ Long pause. Then, ‘Would you fuck off. Larry Bolger? What are you saying?’

Jimmy hesitates.

That I talked to him a few days ago? That he implicated some pretty influential people in a horrendous crime, and that now he’s dead?

He clears his throat.

‘Nothing. I’m not saying anything.’

‘Apparently.’ Sullivan shakes his head. ‘And I’d keep it that way. Take it easy, Jimmy.’ He walks a few yards along the path, turns and crosses the road.

Jimmy watches as Sullivan approaches the cemetery gates. A uniformed guard lets him in. He disappears.

It wouldn’t have worked out.

Jimmy doesn’t have anything concrete, and if he did he’d be more or less giving it away. Guys like Chris Sullivan don’t share their by-lines.

Jimmy leans forward and rests his head on the side of the motorbike.

He’s a long way off a by-line on this one.

But what choice does he have? He has to keep going.

Has to keep waiting.

And it’s at least another ninety minutes before the first few cars start trickling out of the cemetery. During this time the crowd pretty much disperses. Nothing left to gawk at.

Jimmy then gets ready and keeps his eyes peeled for the green BMW.

After a couple of minutes, and about five or six cars, he sees it.

9

A GIDEON CONVOY TAKES CLARK RUNDLE FROM THE AIRPORT, which is just inside the Congolese border, to a lakeshore hotel near the old governor’s mansion in Bukavu. The hotel has spectacular views of the lake and seems to be fairly comfortable, with spacious rooms and a functioning AC system, but Rundle is focused on only one thing now – seeing Arnold Kimbela and then getting the hell out of here.

It has been the longest two days of his life.

The flight from Paris to Kigali was bad enough, but then there was a ten-hour overnight delay before he could take the short flight to Bukavu. At all times he has been surrounded – cocooned, indeed – by Gideon personnel, and there has never been the slightest question about his safety, but something about the… the atmosphere, clammy and dense, and the people, staring faces seen in the distance, harsh voices carried on the air… he doesn’t know, there’s a general hard-to-define looseness here, a dreamlike, nightmarish feeling that everything is about to fall apart, slide into chaos, and it bothers him, it’s like an incipient headache, or a rising wave of nausea.

Alone in his room, he gags and rushes to the toilet, but nothing happens.

He feels insecure, almost like a child, and for one or two seconds actually wants to cry. He imagines Nora sitting on the bed, opening her arms to him, but he flinches from the image, and shakes his head.

Then he goes over to the mini-bar, opens it and extracts two small bottles, a Jack Daniel’s and a Teacher’s. He unscrews these and knocks them back, one straight after the other.

That settles him.

After a while, he takes a shower, shaves, puts on a fresh suit. He looks at himself in the mirror. He straightens his tie.

At noon, they’re taking him back to the airport for the last leg of the journey, the one-hour flight to Buenke. They’ll be landing at the airstrip, which is a few miles from Kimbela’s compound, and a few more again from the mining area itself. With any luck, he should be back here at the hotel by late evening, ready to start the return trip in the morning.

Rundle paces the room for a while, going over various negotiating positions in his head, stuff he might need to pull out later on. Then, suddenly, he stops. He stands at the window and looks out at Lake Kivu. For the first time since arriving here, he feels able to… not relax exactly, but…

Slow down a little.

Look at something directly in front of him and not be thinking about something else. And what’s directly in front of him right now, he has to admit, is pretty stunning.

Not so the streets of Bukavu. As the convoy speeds through them a couple of hours later, along Avenue de la Résidence and Avenue Lumumba, past rundown art deco buildings – dusty and peeling, remnants of what must once have been a gorgeous city, probably as far back as the 1950s – Rundle’s anxiety returns. It’s the shanty town overlay, the air of menace and despair, the realisation that without this armoured SUV he’s in, and the ones up ahead and behind, without his Gideon shell, he wouldn’t survive ten minutes here, that left to walk any of these streets on his own, he’d be torn apart, limb from limb, then left to rot and decompose.

For the dogs, for the maggots.

The flight to Buenke is in a light aircraft and does nothing to mitigate his feelings of anxiety. They pass over mountainous terrain, jungle and scrubland and while it’s all undeniably beautiful he has this queasy sense that he’s falling deeper and deeper into some inescapable abyss. This is Congo’s ‘wild east’ after all, a region of the country in which government forces and rebel militias vie for control of the abundant natural resources so coveted by the rest of the world.

Though, OK, vie for control…

That makes it sound almost civilised, like a game of chess or something. But it’s not. The hard fact is, shifting loyalties here and the fluidity of the security situation in general make eastern Congo one of the most unstable and barbarous regions on the entire planet.

If there is a real chess game, where it’s played out, he supposes, is behind this great cloak of ungovernability, and the players are people like himself, and James Vaughan, and whoever the party leaders in Beijing have sanctioned to come over here and do business. It’s like the Cold War, with its drawn-out proxy conflicts, only this time there’s no pretext, no talk of a clash of ideologies, no talk of a domino effect.

This time it’s strictly business.

At the Buenke airstrip, Rundle is greeted, much to his relief, by Don Ribcoff, who came on ahead to oversee the security arrangements in person. He looks at home here, all dressed-up and heavily armed.

Rundle isn’t complaining.

As the two men walk from the plane to another convoy of SUVs, they discuss arrangements. Kimbela is at his compound for the rest of the day and will receive Rundle at 1600 hours. What happens after that – locations, timeframes, catering – will very much depend on how negotiations proceed. At all points along the way Rundle will be accompanied by a team of eight Gideon contractors, and leading the unit will be Peter Lutz, who – as they arrive at the head car of the convoy – Ribcoff now introduces Rundle to.

‘Sir,’ Lutz say, extending his hand, ‘it’s an honour.’

Rundle wants to say at ease here, or some such, but he knows this isn’t the military, knows the PMCs do things differently – he’s just not au fait with the protocols.

Not, of course – if this was the military – that he’d be saying at ease to anyone.

He’s a bit thrown at the moment, that’s all. The heat here is unbelievable, like New York in August, only ten times worse.

He looks at Ribcoff with renewed respect. The man is more or less wearing battle fatigues and hasn’t broken a sweat.

By the same token, Rundle is in a suit and tie, and while he won’t claim not to have broken a sweat, he is holding his own.

What he says, turning to Lutz, is, ‘That business last week?’

Lutz nods, readies himself. ‘Very unfortunate, sir, and we all send our best wishes to the Senator, but as far as procedures here are concerned, I can assure you that a definite line has been drawn in the sand.’ He pauses, glances around, and although there is no one within earshot, continues in a lower, more discreet tone. ‘As you know, sir, during the course of the incident it became necessary to terminate the contractor concerned. It was unavoidable. The only other contractor closely involved, and in a defensive capacity, let me stress, has already shipped out on extended leave, so I think -’

‘Why?’

Lutz hesitates, seems surprised by the question. ‘Why has he gone on leave, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘He appeared to have been traumatised by the incident. I felt it wiser to remove him, for his own sake, and also for the morale of the unit.’

Rundle considers this. ‘Makes sense, I guess.’

Ribcoff then nods at Lutz, who extends an arm, indicating to Rundle the middle car.

‘OK,’ Rundle says, following him, and adding, a little self-consciously, ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’

It’s a phrase he’s heard James Vaughan use many times.

Conway pulls out of the cemetery onto the Cherryvale Road. There is a big reception being held in a local hotel and everyone will be there, most of the cabinet, various financiers, business people, a bishop or two, the media, celebrities…

But at the earliest opportunity – approaching the first main intersection – Ruth takes a deep breath and says, ‘Take me home.’ Her voice is shaky, uncertain. These are the first words she’s uttered in over an hour.

Although Conway doesn’t want to go to the reception either, he certainly doesn’t want to go home. He doesn’t want to go anywhere.

But with Ruth in the car what choice does he have?

He takes a left, leaving the main road behind – and the route to the hotel.

He wants to say something, just to break the silence. There is nothing to say, though. Unless they want to have it out and go all the way.

But not in the car.

Not in the kitchen, not in the bedroom, not in front of the au pair, the kids, the baby.

Where then?

‘Ruth, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s a mess. North Atlantic are calling in their debts, and -’

‘You’re only telling me this now?’ She punches the dashboard. ‘You let me go on thinking everything was OK?’

‘I didn’t want -’

Ruth screams. ‘What? You didn’t want me to be worried? Don’t give me that crap, Dave, I’m not an idiot.’

‘Well, if you’re so on the ball,’ Conway says, squeezing the steering wheel, ‘why didn’t you see this coming? Because it’s been staring us in the face for months. You read the papers. You follow the news. Why should I be immune? Why should I be any different?’

Ruth screams again, but quickly muffles it. ‘Because,’ she says, the shake still in her voice, ‘I thought you were different.’

Conway doesn’t know how to respond to this.

He says nothing.

Once more, a thick silence descends.

The traffic is heavy and every light seems to be red.

It’s torture.

When they pull into their driveway, Ruth straightens up. She opens her side of the car before Conway has even cut the engine. She then storms across the gravel and in through the front door of the house, slamming it behind her.

Conway follows. He moves slowly, digging out his keys. When he gets inside, Ruth is standing in the hallway with the phone up to her ear.

He drops his keys onto the hall stand.

Ruth lowers the phone and presses a button on it.

‘Four messages,’ she says. ‘One from the Times, one from the Sunday Business Post, two from Martin Boyle. All urgent.’ She looks at him. ‘Jesus. So I’m the last to know, is that it?’ She flings the phone down onto the hall stand. There are tears in her eyes. ‘Bankrupt?’

Conway picks up the phone and replaces it in its charger. ‘Look, I owe the bank a couple of hundred million, Ruth. There’s no way I can pay it back.’

‘But…’

He looks at her, says nothing.

‘What about…?’

At which point Molly and Danny come rushing down the stairs, ‘MOMMY, DADDY…’

Followed by Corinne, who is holding Jack.

The next few minutes are chaotic. Everyone moves to the kitchen at the back of the house. The kids dominate, which is fine, it provides convenient cover – because Conway doesn’t want to continue the conversation with Ruth, doesn’t want to answer any of her questions, her what-abouts. Besides, he knows them all in advance. What about the kids? What about schools? What about the house? What about the horses? What about Umbria? What about me?

But that’s all shit they can sort out, with lawyers and accountants, and a little bit of pulling together. What Conway would like to point out to Ruth, but can’t, is that this could all be so much worse, that they’ve been lucky, that the man whose funeral they’ve just come from, if he’d lived, was actually on the point of burying them.

There’s no shame in financial ruin if everyone else is going through it at the same time, is there? But the scandal of a trial for, at the very least, conspiracy to murder, the ignominy of that would be insurmountable, the disgrace of it ineradicable. Then they really would lose the house, and the kids really would suffer.

She doesn’t have a clue.

But he can’t tell her now, because the simple fact is he didn’t tell her then. How could he have? Why would he have? It wasn’t supposed to get that complicated and messy. He found himself in the situation and he handled it.

He protected his interests.

And moved on.

Not that he’s pretending it was easy, or that it didn’t leave a mark, it did…

He still dreams about it.

But -

And it’s just then, as he senses Ruth approaching – rapidly, from the left – that Conway realises what he’s doing. His mind might be elsewhere, but he’s staring at Corinne again. He has allowed himself to be distracted, mesmerised even, by the revealing gap that appears every so often between the bottom of her short silk top and the top of her sculpted blue jeans. He catches sight of it as she moves about the kitchen, as she reaches up for something, or leans over, his eye tracking this innocent, elusive slit of smooth, tanned skin.

When Ruth gets to him, it happens very fast. She swings her hand back and slaps him hard on the face.

‘You pig.’

He lurches sideways, sliding off the stool. He brings a hand up to his stinging cheek.

‘Jesus.’

‘MOMMY!’

‘Out,’ Ruth says to him, as they both turn to look at a shocked Molly. ‘Now. Out of here.’ She grabs him by the arm and they move towards the door.

Corinne, clearly shocked too, steps forward to distract Molly.

Out in the hallway, door closed behind them, Ruth raises her hand again, but Conway blocks it, takes a firm hold of her wrist.

‘Christ.’

‘Get out of this house,’ she says, resisting, her voice no longer shaky.

‘Ruth, I -’

‘Don’t -’

For a few seconds they stay like that, locked in position, staring at each other, and in steely silence – too many words required, too many knotty, complicated sentences, to even begin the process of -

But suddenly, Conway releases her. He turns and walks off, grabbing his keys from the stand as he passes it. Without looking back, he goes out the hall door. He is careful not to slam it behind him.

The ride to the compound is fast and bumpy. On the way, they pass through a tiny village, which Don Ribcoff points out as the scene of last week’s ‘incident’. Rundle tries to picture it, J.J. close to a heart attack as all hell breaks loose around him, but the images are insubstantial, fleeting, and in any case are superseded by others – ones nearer the surface, and drawn from memory, chiefly Rundle and Kimbela in a Paris apartment three years ago, what Rundle likes to think of as his Africa summit. There were plenty of guns around the place that day – none of them Rundle’s, as it happens – but at least outside the apartment it was fucking Paris.

This is going to be different. Outside wherever they sit down today it will be Congo.

Democratic Republic of.

No surprise then that Rundle’s guts are in a knot.

As he recalls, Arnold Kimbela was scary and charming in about equal measure. But that was then, when Rundle knew very little about the man – which was mainly that he was a local force to be reckoned with, commander of a brigade of the Congolese army that operated outside the control of the Congolese government, but who also, more importantly, ran the mines, doled out the contracts, a loose enough arrangement by international standards, even by official Congolese standards, but round here all that you needed.

In the meantime, no doubt, the scariness-to-charm ratio will have shifted considerably. Gregarious and larger-than-life as he was, and probably still is, the colonel has acquired a reputation for brutality.

Extreme methods.

And so on.

Rundle closes his eyes.

He doesn’t have much of a stomach for this sort of stuff, but he takes a pragmatic view. Short of invading the continent, there isn’t much anyone can do about how these people choose to run their affairs. However, the international trade in mineral resources is a vital one, and is also, frankly, unstoppable, so the cost – and, by extension, awareness of that cost – is extremely difficult to avoid.

Whatever that might mean.

He opens his eyes again.

He’s beginning to sound a bit like a politician.

He looks out of the window. Flat grey scrubland rushes past. One minute this place is astonishingly beautiful, and the next it’s drab.

And bleak.

Or is that just how he feels?

‘You ready for this?’ Don Ribcoff says.

Rundle turns to him. ‘Yeah. Piece of cake.’ He smiles. ‘I mean, it’s just business, right?’

‘Well, I don’t -’

‘Look, I know, I know, kids with Kalashnikovs, heart of darkness, all of that shit, but at the end of the day it’s a meeting, it’s negotiations, it’s striking a deal. I’m a businessman, he’s a businessman. We disagree, what’s he going to do, eat me?’

Ribcoff grunts. ‘We’re not likely to let that happen, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try.’

‘Oh relax, Don. This’ll actually be pretty tedious. These mining contracts aren’t a barrel of laughs you know.’

This is bluster on Rundle’s part. He’s nervous, no getting away from it, but after what happened with J.J., he’s not about to put it on display. Besides, Don Ribcoff is the hired help here, he’s security, and the details of what goes on, of what this is about, are – and must remain – strictly confidential.

Soon the convoy is slowing down and they’re turning left in through some gates to a walled enclosure. They follow a heavily tree-lined driveway for about two hundred yards and come out onto a clearing. Then they stop alongside the main entrance to what Rundle takes to be Kimbela’s famously unfinished ‘villa’. It’s the sort of thing a prosperous tea merchant might have built for himself in one of the new suburbs of mid-Victorian London.

Here, of course, it looks absurd.

On the opposite side of the clearing is the row of concrete shacks J.J. talked about.

Rundle glances around. The place appears to be deserted. But within seconds this changes. Jeeps pull up on either side of the convoy, brakes screeching, soldiers piling off, and suddenly they’re surrounded.

Rundle stiffens.

Ribcoff rolls his eyes. ‘This is Kimbela’s praetorian guard. I can’t believe we actually train these idiots.’

‘Really? And who supplies them with those pressed fatigues and crisp felt berets?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘Yeah?’

Ribcoff laughs. ‘Sure.’

Rundle makes a show of laughing along. Then he reaches for the door and opens it. He steps out of this climate-controlled SUV and into a wall of heat.

Ribcoff does the same, followed by Lutz and his team in the other two vehicles.

Everyone stands around for a moment, soldiers, private contractors, but it’s barely enough time for any kind of tension or animosity to build. Not that it should, Rundle thinks, given that they’re all basically on the same payroll.

‘Clark, my old friend.’

The voice is deep and resonant. Rundle turns around and sees Kimbela emerging from behind one of the jeeps. He too is in pressed fatigues and a crisp beret.

And mirrored sunglasses.

Regulation issue.

Rundle gets the impression that they’ve all dressed up for this, for the occasion. He doesn’t think they did it for J.J. And there don’t seem to be any drug-crazed children around either.

Should he be flattered?

‘Colonel,’ he says and extends a hand.

Kimbela steps forward and they shake. The colonel is forty-two now, but he still looks like a slightly excitable, overweight teenager.

With attitude.

Which is exactly what he would have been twenty-five years ago when his old man was running an extortion and racketeering network for Mobutu.

‘It’s good to see you, Clark. Tell me, how is your brother?’ As he says this, Kimbela makes a move towards the house and indicates for Rundle to follow him. Rundle does so, followed in turn by Lutz and several of the Gideon contractors. ‘J.J. is well,’ he says. ‘He’s recovering. It wasn’t an easy trip for him.’ Then, feeling he should amend this, adds, ‘It wasn’t an easy time… for anyone.’

‘No, no it wasn’t.’ Solemn here. ‘But anyway, look. I saw him on, what is it called, Face the Nation? Online? He was good. Very good. The brace is an interesting touch, I think. No?’ He turns, looks at Rundle and bursts out laughing. Then, ‘American politics, if I may say so, is quite boring. Fiscal reform? Please.’ He laughs again, even louder this time.

Rundle tries to join in – he wants to be polite, but at the same time feels it shouldn’t be all one way. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘at least we have systems that work, we get things done, you know?’

Kimbela either doesn’t hear this or chooses to ignore it.

They are standing now in a large reception room. The furniture, as J.J. said, is fake Louis Quinze, upholstered chairs, a couple of chaises longues and a credenza arranged in no particular order.

It’s like a forgotten corner of some discount home furnishing outlet in a New Jersey shopping mall.

‘So, Clark,’ the colonel says, turning to Rundle, ‘would you like some tea?’

Conway gets in the car, reverses quickly on the gravel and turns. He shoots along the driveway, narrowly avoiding a stalled motorbike at the gates. He turns left and takes off.

He has no idea where he’s going, but it doesn’t matter. He needs time to think. Now that he’s come clean with Ruth, and that the Times and Business Post are clearly on the case, he can start devising a realistic rescue package for the company. And what he mustn’t forget is that it can be done. Compared to how things might have turned out, it won’t be that hard either. Dealing with the media intrusion is going to be tough, but easily preferable to dealing with the cops. And downsizing Conway Holdings? Creative restructuring? Brutal cutbacks? All a hundred times more preferable – how could they not be? – to prison time.

Somehow he has to bring Ruth on board and get her to see things his way.

After driving aimlessly for a while, Conway decides where he’s going. From here he can get to Tara Meadows in fifteen minutes. It’s quiet there, and isolated. He won’t have to talk to anyone. He’ll give Ruth a couple of hours to cool off and then he’ll phone her.

By that time he’ll have worked it out, everything, even a rescue package for their marriage. First off, Corinne will have to go. Not that any of it is her fault, but she’s a distraction. They can get some hatchet-faced old biddy to replace her. As he drives, Conway sees that the real issue on the domestic front is that he has hidden things from Ruth. Not just the true nature of the First Continental deal, and what happened at Drumcoolie Castle, all of that, which is understandable, but lots of other stuff as well, ordinary stuff, banal stuff.

And unnecessarily.

Being secretive has become a habit.

Ruth deserves better.

He must do better.

Glancing in his rearview mirror a moment later, as he comes off the roundabout, Conway notices something.

There’s a motorbike. It’s been there for a while. He wonders if it’s the same one that was stalled at the gates of his house.

As he was pulling out.

Seemed to be stalled.

Shit.

It’s a journalist, has to be.

Approaching the entrance to Tara Meadows now, Conway is undecided. He turns in anyway. At least it will flush this bastard out. He’ll hardly just follow him in.

But he does, brazenly.

Right behind him, no hesitation.

Conway proceeds along Tara Boulevard, towards the Concourse. Then he swerves suddenly, pulls in at the kerb and opens the door. He gets out. He stands there on the road, door still open behind him, and glares at the approaching motorcyclist.

The motorcyclist slows down, and stops. He gets off the bike and immediately starts undoing the clasps on his helmet.

Conway readies himself. He’s in no mood for this, but there’s no point in being overly aggressive either. It won’t be his last encounter with one of these guys. As he watches the helmet coming off, he wonders what the angle is going to be, financial or tabloid – figures and statistics or fat-cat confidential?

The guy is quite young. Conway stares at him for a few seconds, but doesn’t recognise him. And he’s fairly sure he would. Because he knows most of the hacks in this town. Over the years, he’s been inter-

Oh Jesus.

It hits him.

Of course. It’s so obvious.

Then Conway’s whole world dissolves, everything, his plans, his assumptions… even his delusions…

But what did he expect? What did he think he was paying for all these years?

No more Phil Sweeney, no more buffer zone.

Simple equation.

The young guy turns and hangs his helmet on one of the handlebars of the motorbike. When he turns back, Conway looks him in the eye and says, ‘You’re Jimmy Gilroy, aren’t you?’

Jimmy nods.

‘Yes, I am.’

How does Conway know this? Probably Phil Sweeney. Not that it matters.

‘What do you want?’

Jimmy’s a little nervous here. There’s no other way of proceeding, though. ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.’

Conway doesn’t answer straightaway. But his body language is telling. Initially, it was aggressive – hands on hips, ready for a confrontation – then it changed suddenly. Now he’s the one who seems nervous.

‘Questions about what?’

‘Different things. It depends.’ Jimmy glances around. This is one of those ghost estates – half-built, then abandoned when the money ran out. Despite the late afternoon sunlight, there’s a bleak, almost menacing feel to the place. ‘Can we go somewhere?’

Conway stares at him. He shakes his head. ‘What do you want to ask me?’

Jimmy pauses. He’s reluctant to begin, standing out in the open air like this. ‘Tara Meadows?’ he says, with a sweep of his hand, indicating the entire estate. ‘Is it one of yours?’

Conway exhales, clearly fighting the urge to snap at him, or worse. ‘That’s one of your questions?’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ He exhales again. He looks up at the sky. He seems to be considering something.

Jimmy remains very still.

‘Fine,’ Conway says eventually. ‘Let’s go somewhere.’ He turns around, pushes the door of his car closed and starts walking along the road, heading further into the estate.

Jimmy hesitates. He looks back at his bike. He should lock it.

‘Follow me,’ Conway says over his shoulder. ‘I want to show you something.’

Jimmy follows.

They walk along Tara Boulevard and enter a large, deserted town square. Thinking about it, Jimmy remembers an article he read a couple of years back about this development, what it was supposed to be, the great hopes for it. He can’t believe what he’s seeing now, though – a bleak, windswept square surrounded by empty apartment blocks and office buildings. On the far side of it he spots a group of youths, some on bikes, circling aimlessly, others sitting on a low wall drinking cans of beer.

‘You see this?’ Conway says, striding now towards the entrance to one of the buildings. ‘Supposed to be a hotel, the five-star… something, we didn’t have a name for it yet. But you know who’s living here now? Yeah?’ He holds open the door for Jimmy, who hesitates but then goes in past him.

‘No, who?’

‘Homeless people. Drunks. I don’t know. Squatters, junkies. Anybody who wants to. Welcome to Tara fucking Meadows.’

Jimmy walks straight in and looks around. It’s a hotel lobby all right, or would be if they finished it. He can see where the reception desk should go, and the lounge area. Over to the right, double doors, half open, lead into another room, probably a dining area or a function room.

The whole place is dark and musty.

All of a sudden Jimmy isn’t sure how comfortable he feels here. Dave Conway, if he wanted to, could stab him in the heart with a knife, repeatedly, leave him there on the floor to die. And how long would it be before anyone – apart from the local rat population – discovered his body? It could be days, weeks even. The only thing is, Conway doesn’t look like the sort of person who carries a knife around with him. Or even a gun. Standing in this bare hotel lobby now, he looks exactly like what he is, a businessman.

Besides, why would he want to kill Jimmy in the first place?

He hasn’t heard any of his questions yet.

And it’s entirely possible that he won’t have any answers when he does – that he won’t have the slightest idea of what Jimmy is talking about.

‘So,’ Conway says, ‘this is it. This is all there is. All that’s left.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. It’s what I’m reduced to, so believe me, I’ve got enough on my plate without’ – he stops for a moment – ‘without whatever Susie Monaghan crap you’re peddling.’

Jimmy takes a notebook from his back pocket and flicks it open. ‘I’m not peddling anything, Mr Conway, and as people keep pointing out to me, this isn’t about Susie Monaghan.’

‘What is it about then, tell me.’

‘Well, I’d like to know why Gianni Bonacci wrote your name on the back of a business card belonging to Clark Rundle.’

Conway leans forward. ‘Come again?’

Jimmy doesn’t say anything. He waits.

‘A business card? So fucking what? I did business with the guy.’ Conway shakes his head. He seems flustered. ‘Who did you hear this from anyway, Larry Bolger?’

‘No,’ Jimmy says. ‘I heard it from Bonacci’s wife. His widow.’

‘His widow?’

‘Yeah, I’ve just come back from Italy. I went to her apartment and talked to her. She showed me the card.’

Conway shrugs. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, ‘Come on. What’s this about? I’m tired.’

Jimmy shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He wishes they could sit down somewhere. He wishes he knew what he was doing. He wishes he had a job. ‘Right,’ he says, glancing at his notebook. ‘Here it is. Larry Bolger more or less told me that the helicopter crash that weekend wasn’t an accident. He said that Susie was collateral damage and implied that one of the other passengers was at the heart of this. I talked to some people and went through the passenger list and, let’s put it this way, Gianni Bonacci’s name is the only one that I couldn’t eliminate. Then I went and spoke to his wife who told me that the day before the crash Gianni had told her his life was in danger, that he had come across something, stumbled on it, something significant. Now.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Around this time you sold your company First Continental Resources to BRX, a company owned by Clark Rundle, whose name, along with yours, turns up on a business card in Gianni Bonacci’s briefcase.’ He pauses. ‘So, there it is… it’s just a lead. That’s all. I’m pursuing it. I’m here asking if there’s anything you can tell me, if you can explain any of this.’

He flicks the notebook closed, as though he was reading from it and is now finished.

Nerves.

He looks up.

Conway is staring at him. ‘This is all unsubstantiated, it’s… it’s circumstantial.’

‘Yeah, it’s circumstantial, sure, but the circumstances keep piling up. A few days after my conversation with Larry Bolger and what happens? He drops dead. Then my apartment is broken into. Nothing of any value is taken, but the hard drive on my computer is wiped. Meanwhile I have people like Phil Sweeney telling me I’m in over my head, and to find another story. Offering me money.’

Conway maintains eye contact, but there’s something different about him now, about his facial expression. It’s as though a key element that was holding it in place has dropped out. Certainty, conviction.

Self-belief.

‘Who are you working for?’ he says. ‘What paper? When is this story coming out?’

Jimmy hesitates. He’s not about to throw away his advantage here by admitting he’s not working for anyone. ‘Well, probably not this Sunday, but definitely -’

‘According to Phil Sweeney you’re unemployed.’

Jimmy looks away, then back, sighs. ‘OK, maybe, but when I get this figured out, I won’t be, all right?’ He pauses. ‘I mean, do you not remember that crash? Six people dead? This is a big fucking story.’

Conway doesn’t say anything.

Jimmy waits a beat. ‘So. I take it you’re the one Phil Sweeney is trying to protect. Is that right?’

Conway takes a deep breath. He holds it in for a few seconds before releasing it as a slow, shuddering sigh. He stares at Jimmy for another few seconds. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

‘No.’

Conway sighs again, in the same way. ‘Well then,’ he says, his voice weary, defeated. ‘I suppose the answer to your question is yes.’

Jimmy swallows. ‘Sorry?’

‘Your question. About Phil Sweeney and who he’s trying to protect. The answer to it. It’s yes.’

It quickly becomes clear to Rundle why sending his brother down here was such a miscalculation. Kimbela didn’t take J.J. seriously. He didn’t think he was expected to.

For his part, Rundle had thought he was being clever.

Because who wouldn’t be flattered by the attentions of a US senator, one who comes thousands of miles to pay you a visit, and at your convenience?

Arnold Kimbela, apparently.

It turns out that J.J. is a mere politician, not the sort of person – not round here anyway – who commands much respect. Politicians are a joke. They kiss babies and smile for the cameras. They do what they are told. Clark, on the other hand, is a businessman, and one with an international profile. He is – there’s an expression for it – a mover and a shaker. He gets things done.

It’s on the tip of Rundle’s tongue to say, well, what about Mobutu? But he knows what the answer would most likely be. Mobutu wasn’t a politician. Are you crazy? He was Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku wa za Banga, the king, the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.

OK. Fine.

Rundle is tired.

They’ve been sitting in this room now for over an hour, sipping tea from china cups and shooting what could only loosely be called the breeze. The heat is so overpowering that Rundle feels he might be close to hallucinating. They’ve had the tea ceremony with the little zombie girl, who turns out to be family – Kimbela’s niece or daughter, or maybe even his wife, Rundle isn’t quite sure. Possibly all three. They’ve discussed Lost, which Kimbela has watched on box sets. They’ve argued over the new LudeX 3 games console, its place in the market and whether or not it will achieve full spectrum dominance.

And all the time, in the background, soldiers and contractors stand around, smoking, whispering, some obviously bored, others trying to listen in on the conversation.

But at a certain point, Rundle has had enough.

‘So, Colonel,’ he says, ‘we have business to discuss.’

‘We do?’ Kimbela seems puzzled.

Rundle isn’t in the mood for games. ‘Our ongoing relationship, the contract situation. BRX is very anxious to continue at Buenke, and to help in any way we can, but we do realise that there’s competition.’ He glances over his shoulder, sees Ribcoff, then looks back at the colonel. ‘A rival bid. From the Chinese.’

Kimbela still looks puzzled. ‘But I thought…’ He leans forward. ‘I thought I’d discussed this with your brother. I instructed him to inform you of my position. Isn’t that why he came? To deliver a message?’

Rundle suppresses a groan. ‘Yes, but…’ There’s no finessing this. ‘Look, I didn’t get the message, OK? Between one thing and another, what happened here, his injury, he got confused.’

‘Aaaaahh,’ Kimbela says, drawing it out. ‘And look at me, thinking my old friend Clark has come on a social visit. To pay his respects.’

‘Oh, but I have, too, I -’

Kimbela bursts out laughing, and even slaps his thigh. ‘Of course you have, of course you have.’ He wipes a tear from his cheek. ‘But seeing as how you are here, no? Maybe we can clear the matter up, is that it?’ He goes on laughing.

Rundle finds this really annoying, and wonders what Ribcoff is making of it all. ‘Well, I do need to know what you said to J.J.’ He’s whispering. ‘Because, as you can imagine, a lot is riding on it.’

Kimbela nods, all serious again. He shifts his considerable weight in the chair, which looks as if it could snap under him at any second. ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘These Chinese? Scary people. They want everything, and they want it now. And not just in Congo, in all of Africa.’ He sighs, and shakes his head.

Naturally, Rundle is aware of this. Even in the three years since BRX bought the mine at Buenke, the Chinese presence in Africa has increased exponentially. And BRX, with substantial oil and mining interests in Angola, Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea, has seen this growth at first hand.

‘They send people over,’ Kimbela continues, ‘who will live in huts and survive on a bowl of rice a day. You people?’ He gives another of his short, loud bursts of laughter. ‘You people have to have hot dogs and sodas and Taco Bell and reality TV shows and every kind of shit. So the result is, you are being left behind.’ He pauses. ‘You have…’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Yes, fallen asleep at the wheel.’

Rundle isn’t sure what Kimbela is getting at here. Could it actually be the big kiss-off? No reason why not. Because the fact is, like it or lump it, China is going through an accelerated industrial revolution at the moment and has unlimited cash to feed its voracious appetite for natural resources – the kind of cash that the US these days can only dream of.

Highest bidder wins.

But what made the Buenke deal a little different, Rundle thinks, and where BRX were ahead of the curve, was that no one really knew what they were after. People assumed it was copper, and while Buenke certainly had some copper, there were better locations elsewhere – farther south, for example – that the Chinese would have been more likely to favour.

Rundle remembers the negotiations the way you might remember a particularly awful root canal procedure. First you had that stupid conference in Ireland, with Gianni Bonacci poking his nose in and Dave Conway pushing for more money. Then, after that whole mess was resolved, you had the meeting in Paris with Kimbela and the elaborate sham of pretending they were signing an actual, legally binding contract.

But it suited both parties at the time, and the arrangement has worked perfectly well ever since. That is, until the goddamn Chinese started poking their noses in, looking to hoover up a few more mining concessions.

Putting ideas in people’s heads.

The problem is, BRX can’t just up sticks and go somewhere else. This is site-specific shit here. ‘You know,’ he says, fixing his gaze at a point on the floor, ‘asleep at the wheel, I’m not sure about that. But maybe… maybe we haven’t been keeping our eye on the ball.’

‘As you like,’ Kimbela says. ‘Though tell me, who is this we? The Americans? The West in general?’ He pauses. ‘Because now, it seems, it’s the turn of the East.’

Rundle looks up. Kimbela is staring at him.

This could be awkward.

Without some sort of local support, BRX would have to leave the region, no question about it. Without the colonel, however, you could perhaps negotiate some deal with a rival militia group. But that would be a very long shot indeed, and not the outcome from all of this that Jimmy Vaughan wants to hear about.

Nor is it a card that Rundle can play right now, sitting in front of Kimbela, looking him straight in the eye.

Hey fatso, how’d ya like a bullet in the brain?

Rundle leans forward. He’s beyond tired at this point. ‘Colonel,’ he says, ‘stop fucking with me, OK? I need to know.’ He holds his hands out in surrender. ‘What was the message?’

Kimbela laughs at this. It’s clear he’s lapping up Rundle’s unease, his humiliation. But as before, he stops quite abruptly. ‘Very well, my friend. The Chinese, yes? They want to build a network here, a spider’s web of railroads and highways going out from Congo through Angola and Zambia and Tanzania to ports on either side of the continent. And you know why?’ He makes a snorting sound. ‘Of course you do. So they can come here, extract every mineral they can find from under the ground and cut down every tree in every forest and ship it all back to China.’ He holds up a finger. ‘But in exchange they will give us banks and soccer stadiums. Oh, and hospitals, too, and universities. And a functioning sewage system. And they want to do it all themselves, with imported labour, Chinese engineers, Chinese technicians, all living in temporary compounds, speaking Mandarin and eating chow mein. And no talk of human rights, either. None of that paternalistic bullshit we routinely get from you people about political transparency and fighting corruption.’ He stops and smiles. ‘Sounds good, yeah? Sweet? Tempting?’ The smile quickly fades. ‘If you’re in Kinshasa, maybe. If you’re already in the fucking government. But not for someone like me. Out here. In the hills.’ He thumps his chest. ‘In this brave new world, there’s no place for someone like me.’

This is shouted.

Rundle flinches.

‘You Americans?’ Kimbela goes on. ‘You have no real policy for Africa. The politburo in Beijing, they’re thinking one hundred years into the future. But what are you doing? Setting up AFRICOM? With its headquarters in Stuttgart? Is that meant to be some kind of a joke? No, you’ve got nothing to offer us but bureaucracy and aid and inefficiency and…’ – he drags the words out – ‘spectacular ignorance. But you know what? It’s fine. I love it. Plus ça change.’

Rundle isn’t too sure what point Kimbela is trying to make here. He’s beginning to understand how J.J. felt, and it obviously shows in his face.

‘Look,’ Kimbela says, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘what I’m telling you is, this thing, this arrangement we have.’ He waves a hand back and forth between them. ‘It suits me very well. I don’t want it to change.’ There is a long pause, during which his smile slowly returns. ‘And that, my friend, is what I told your brother.’

‘Yes, but…’ Jimmy looks around this spectral hotel lobby. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to sit. The place is empty. Are they just going to stand here? He looks back at Conway. ‘Protect you from what?’

‘My part in what happened. Not that Phil Sweeney actually knows what happened. He doesn’t. Which is something, by the way, you should get straight in your head right now.’

Jimmy nods.

Conway then seems to brace himself. He picks a spot on the dusty concrete floor to stare at, and starts talking. ‘I’d been trying to sell First Continental for years. It was one of my old man’s early companies and originally consisted of five copper mines spread out over various parts of eastern Congo, but with what was going on there, the unrest, the war, he lost most of the concessions and when he died there was just one left, near a place called Buenke, but even that hadn’t been operational for about five or six years. I tried to sell it, couldn’t and then more or less forgot about it.’ He looks up at Jimmy for a moment and a flicker of doubt crosses his face. ‘You do know what I’m talking about, right? My father? Conway & Co.? I’m assuming you’ve got background on all of this. You actually are a journalist?’

Jimmy nods. ‘Yeah, of course I am.’

Conway narrows his eyes. ‘Right. Anyway, I get this offer, out of the blue, for First Continental and the mine at Buenke. It’s from BRX and is decent enough, I suppose, but I’m thinking, they’re a huge company, interests everywhere, always expanding, maybe they’ll shell out a little more.’ He shrugs, half apologetically. ‘Look, I’m a businessman. You don’t just accept an initial offer without…’ He hesitates, then waves the point away. ‘So. It turns out that Clark Rundle, the CEO of BRX, is coming to Ireland to attend some conference and he suggests that we meet up to discuss the offer. Now at the time, I’ll be honest with you, I thought this was pretty weird. A guy like him? Of his stature? Negotiating the sale of an old copper mine?’ He pauses. ‘But what was I going to do? Not go?’ He pauses again. ‘It was a weekend thing, at Drumcoolie Castle in Tipperary, corporate ethics in the age of globalisation, some crap like that. Anyway, I meet Rundle on the Friday evening, with a couple of his cronies, and we get on pretty well. At first, he seems like a bit of a stuffed shirt, but then he loosens up. I’m flattered too by all the attention I’m receiving, and then doubly so – more, in fact – when I realise just who one of the guys with him is, an old guy, James Vaughan. Of the Oberon Capital Group. Who I’m now looking at and thinking, what’s he doing here? He isn’t listed as one of the delegates – I checked up on it later. Nevertheless, he seems to be paying very close attention to everything that’s happening, and in particular to the conversation Rundle and I are having. Strange thing is, as the evening progresses, and although they don’t say anything about it explicitly, I get the impression from both of them that they’re excited, giddy almost, at the prospect of acquiring this shitty little copper mine in the middle of nowhere.’ He pauses. ‘Now why would that be, I find myself asking. There’s also something arrogant about them, in their attitude to me, like I’m stupid and won’t notice what’s going on. Needless to say, that rankles.’ He stops and takes a deep breath. ‘Jesus. I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

Jimmy doesn’t move a muscle.

‘OK.’ Conway takes another deep breath. ‘You know, when I look back at it now, at that evening – we were in the main lounge, the Angler’s it’s called – I can see that everything was in place for what happened afterwards. We were there. Gianni Bonacci was there. He was a couple of tables over, with some of the Nike people. And Susie Monaghan was there, up at the bar with Niall Feeley. It’s like a… a tableau.’ He pauses to visualise it.

Jimmy tries to visualise it, too. Lounge of a big country hotel? Mahogany-panelled walls? Red leather armchairs? Fine art prints of hunting and angling scenes?

He looks at Conway, who seems lost in reverie. Jimmy has some questions here, needs certain things clarified, but does he ask now, or wait? He waits about two seconds. ‘How did you know them all?’

Conway looks at him. ‘Dublin. Everyone knows everyone. I knew Niall from years back, and of course I knew Susie. Who didn’t?’ He sighs. ‘And for some reason Bonacci stuck out. He didn’t have that executive look.’ He pauses again, his eyes busy, as though he’s trying to work out how much he’s said so far and if there’s any chance he might be able to just cut loose at this point and stop.

Jimmy jumps in. ‘So, what then?’

‘Well, later on, I got talking to Niall and Susie at the bar, and somehow Gianni Bonacci ended up joining us. You know how it is, people come, people go, but at the same time I think he was mesmerised by Susie. He kept staring at her from his table and eventually just came over and wormed his way in. He started talking to Niall and within ten minutes had got himself invited to go on this big, all-bloke trip Niall and Ted Walker were organising for Sunday. They’d hired a helicopter and were going to be scouring the Donegal coastline for good spots where they could go paragliding later in the summer. Anyway, after a while I got talking to him myself and before I realised he was a UN inspector I was telling him about the mine at Buenke and how I was in the process of selling it to Clark Rundle. I mean, why not? It wasn’t a state secret or anything. I didn’t go into any of the details, but he seemed very interested and after another couple of drinks started asking me if I knew what was going on in that part of the DRC and if I’d ever heard of Arnold Kimbela. I said of course I had.’ He pauses. ‘Even though I hadn’t.’

‘Who?’

‘Arnold Kimbela? Local warlord. I checked up on him later, too. He was originally the leader of a Mobutuist rebel faction, but then he went on to gain control of this huge mineral-rich territory in the east, which he now runs as a sort of de facto state. All mining contracts and land sales there have to go through him. He also has an iron grip on the local population. Torture, rape, mutilation, whatever. At its best it’s a form of indentured labour, and at its worst… I don’t know. When First Continental was running the mine there, at Buenke, it wasn’t anything like that, it was a proper mine, so…’

Jimmy swallows. What?

‘So. I don’t know,’ Conway goes on. ‘Apparently he’s a very smart guy, from a rich background, educated in Belgium and all of that. What can I say?’ He shrugs it off. ‘But look, the point is, Bonacci seemed to get more and more puzzled at the idea of a company like BRX wanting to buy a copper mine, and in that particular location. BRX is a private company, he said, and very secretive, so that sort of information doesn’t usually get out. Which is when I realised I should have kept my mouth shut. I toyed with the idea of letting Clark Rundle know what I’d done, but I decided against it. I chickened out, basically. I should have told him, though.’ He pauses. ‘Because that might have…’ He looks away, shaking his head.

Jimmy glances down, and sees the notebook in his hand. He isn’t taking any notes. Should he be? Where’s his pen? How’s he going to remember all of this?

Shut up.

Conway looks back. ‘Anyway, at that point Bonacci’s attention was very much divided between me and Susie, and of course Susie won out, especially as she started flirting with him, and pretty outrageously. The reason for this was because her ex-fiancé, Gary Lynch, who she was more or less stalking, had appeared in the bar and she was trying to get his attention. She even left with Bonacci, though no one seems to know how far that went. One thing is certain, though, she was doing a lot of coke. What’s also undisputed is that Bonacci spent most of the next day trailing along behind her like a lovesick puppy. Now I didn’t see any of this. I was off in a conference room with my solicitor poring over the contract. But what also must have happened during the day, at some point, and which nobody saw, was that Susie and Bonacci broke into – or somehow inveigled their way into – Clark Rundle’s room and went through his papers. Rundle said later on that his stuff had been disturbed, that certain things had been moved. No one can know now, but what seems likely or at least possible is that Bonacci shot his mouth off to Susie about BRX and the mine, maybe trying to impress her, maybe genuinely concerned about it, and that Susie, crazy bitch that she was, suggested they both go and find out more. Sneak into Rundle’s room. It’d be a hoot. Come on. Carpe fucking diem.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Now this probably isn’t the sort of thing Bonacci would have done in a million years, but there he is, who knows, maybe coked out of it himself, and with this gorgeous woman egging him on, going, have you no balls? I have. Come on.’

Conway stops, stares ahead, seems to be considering what he’s just said, trying it out for size. He looks back at Jimmy. ‘Maybe that’s not how it was, not exactly, but it fits. It explains what happened later.’

Jimmy nods. He’s reluctant to open his mouth, in case this stops.

He nods again, hoping it will act as a prompt.

‘In the meantime,’ Conway says after a while, ‘I was still locked away with my solicitor, but I had this great idea. I decided to get on the phone to Larry Bolger and persuade him to come down to the conference, swing by for an hour or two, show his face. It was a Saturday, he was due in Cork anyway for a thing that evening, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d done a lot of favours for Larry over the years, and this wasn’t asking much. I figured if I could be seen hanging out with the prime minister, introducing him around, it’d strengthen my negotiating position with BRX. So after a bit of cajoling Larry agrees. He shows up around six o’clock and before you know it we’re all sitting at a table in the main dining room – me, Larry, Clark Rundle, James Vaughan and this other character, Don Ribcoff. There’s minimal security, just a couple of guys on the door, and the atmosphere is very relaxed, very congenial. Larry and Vaughan, it transpires, have met before and have plenty to talk about. I’m going over some figures with Rundle, and for those few moments, sitting there at that table, I feel brilliant. I mean, think about it, with James Vaughan beside me I’m one degree of separation from John F. Kennedy. It’s amazing. I feel like I’m a player, like I’ve arrived or something, and this is just the beginning.’ He exhales loudly. ‘What a joke.’ He looks away again.

Jimmy waits. Then can’t wait any longer. ‘What happened?’

‘What happened? We’re all there, in the middle of our various conversations, when Gianni Bonacci arrives into the dining room and walks right up to our table. He says his name, that he’s with the UN Corporate Affairs Commission and then he slaps a piece of paper down in front of Clark Rundle and in the space of time it takes for the two guys on the door to get over and grab him he says, Thanaxite? You’ve found thanaxite in eastern Congo? And you’re going to be extracting it? Does anyone know about this? Then he bangs his fist on the table and says, We need to talk. And that’s it. They drag him off.’ Conway clears his throat. ‘Was Susie there in the background, hovering outside? I don’t know, maybe she was, I can’t remember, I didn’t see, but what I do remember is the shockwave of panic around that table, Jesus Christ, it was palpable. Rundle was as white as a ghost. He grabbed the piece of paper, looked at it and then flung it at Ribcoff. From what I could see it was a printout of a photo, probably taken on a mobile phone – a photo of a document. I didn’t see what was on it, but I didn’t need to, we’d all heard what Bonacci said. Anyway, it was the strangest thing, over the next minute or two, no more, Larry and I just sat there, frozen, not even daring to look at each other, as this desperate, whispered conversation took place between Rundle, Vaughan and Ribcoff. I don’t know if it was blind panic on their part, or… or contempt for us, but it was as if we weren’t even there. Vaughan asked how Bonacci had gotten a hold of this information, and Rundle said that didn’t matter now, Jesus, because the situation had to be contained, and immediately. Ribcoff started to say he’d look into it, but Rundle said no, looking into it was for later, right now this little fucker, whoever he was, had to be stopped, he had to be prevented from causing any further damage. Ribcoff put his hands up and said, fine, tell me what to do, and Rundle said, whatever you have to… clean him out first, bleach him, and then… whatever, but don’t make it obvious, don’t make it about him, he’s UN for Christ’s sake, I don’t know, cause a diversion, some sort of distraction. There was a silence and then Ribcoff said right, and left the table. After another tense pause, Rundle looked at both me and Larry and said, Gentlemen, listen, I’m really sorry about this… but before he could get any further, more security arrived and there was a bit of a flurry and Larry was whisked away and then Vaughan got up and left as well…’

Conway suddenly seems overwhelmed. He turns away and starts massaging his temples. He walks over to the big, grimy window that looks out onto the empty plaza.

Jimmy stands there, watching, waiting. Questions are piling up in his mind now. He tries to filter some of them out and to prioritise others – the obvious first question being, what is thanaxite?

That’s the word – the name – Conway used, isn’t it?

Jimmy pats his jacket to find a pen. He flips his notebook open and scribbles the word down – a preliminary version of it, at least – and then a few quick notes.

Photo of a document? Taken on a mobile?

Does anyone know about this?

Bleach him?

After a few moments, Jimmy glances up at Conway – at his stooped frame, his hunched shoulders, his head leaning forward against the dirty glass of the window.

Is he losing him?

With no other way to frame the question, Jimmy just blurts it out. ‘Mr Conway… what is thanaxite?’

As the convoy pulls out of the compound, Rundle feels a surge of contradictory emotions – acute relief and intense irritation. He’s relieved that he can go back to Vaughan with the good news, but he’s irritated that he had to come all the way down here to hear it in the first place – given that J.J. had apparently heard the very same thing a week earlier.

He’s also irritated by Arnold Kimbela himself, this little tin-pot piece-of-shit who insists on being treated like a form of royalty – he won’t use phones or e-mail, won’t deal with middle-ranking executives, even refuses to work with accountants. If he wasn’t sitting on an invaluable deposit of thanaxite, the man would have run out of money, arms, supplies and friends a long time ago.

But it doesn’t take Rundle more than a minute or two to realise that the relief here far outweighs any irritation. He controls the supply chain, which he’s just locked down for another couple of years, more or less. Effectively, that now means he’s got Jimmy Vaughan by the balls.

He turns to Ribcoff and says, on a whim, ‘How far are we from the mine?’

They’re on their way back to the airstrip.

‘Fifteen miles.’ Ribcoff answers. ‘About. Why?’

‘Can we make a detour?’

Ribcoff calculates. ‘Sure. There’s time. I guess.’ He pauses. ‘Is that such a good idea?’

Rundle nods his head firmly. ‘I just want to have a quick look.’

Ribcoff leans forward to relay the change of route to Lutz, who radios ahead to the car in front.

About a mile or so farther down the road the convoy takes a left turn and within seconds conditions get considerably rougher – the road twistier, bumpier.

Rundle has never been hands-on when it comes to his business, not really, not the way old Henry C. was, visiting sites, rolling up his sleeves, examining geological charts, talking to foremen, certainly not the way his great-grandfather was, Benjamin Rundle, who apparently used to get down and dirty operating steam shovels, laying railroad tracks and digging irrigation canals. Maybe it’s part of the evolutionary process, but Rundle has always been a head-office man, the boardroom and the bank being his natural habitats. BRX has operations worldwide and he has travelled extensively, but how often has he strayed beyond the climate-controlled confines of the airport, the hotel and the conference centre?

He did once visit a BRX mining facility in Brazil, now that he thinks of it. It was to mark the start of a massive drilling project using a new and innovative technology.

Somehow, he suspects, this will be different.

Quite how different he has no idea until they arrive on the outskirts of the mining settlement.

It proves to be something of a shock.

What was he expecting, though? An open pit? Excavators? Dump trucks? Maybe some timber structures and an abandoned copper smelter? He would have seen photos and advanced satellite imagery of the Buenke mine back when they were negotiating the purchase of it from First Continental, but these wouldn’t have made any lasting impression on him.

As the convoy stops, Rundle leans forward to get a better view. ‘What the fuck?’ he says.

Just up ahead, on the grassy edge of a steep incline, a group of armed soldiers stand around smoking. Below them, sloping down and stretching out for about a square mile is this rough, brown, hollowed-out patch of earth, with a stream running through it. Surrounding it on all sides is lush greenery and rolling hills. Within it, scores of people move about the pockmarked terrain like ants in a colony. He can’t make them out clearly from here, but he understands what’s going on, what they’re doing.

‘This is the mining area, sir,’ Lutz says from the front, chirpy, like some sort of a tour guide.

Rundle doesn’t respond.

He knows what it is, Jesus. He’d just forgotten how differently they do things here.

‘Look, Clark,’ Ribcoff says after a while, ‘if you’re debating about whether or not to get out of the car, I wouldn’t. As you can see, the colonel’s men run this place.’ He pauses. ‘It can sometimes get a bit rough down there, a bit volatile.’

Rundle hesitates, then says, ‘Binoculars?’

‘Of course.’ Ribcoff is clearly relieved.

Lutz rummages up front for a moment, then turns around and holds out a pair. Rundle takes them. They’re light and compact. Lutz points out the focus and zoom buttons.

Rundle takes a moment, opens the window and trains the binoculars on the general scene below. The first thing he focuses on is a group of young men squatting at the edge of the stream, one of them sifting something, sand or gravel, in a hand-held sieve. They’re all in dirty, raggedy clothes and look lean and scrawny. With his finger, Rundle presses the zoom lever next to the eyepiece and pulls back with a start as the image leaps forward and magnifies. The guy with the sieve appears almost close enough now to touch.

Rundle flicks away from this and lights on another detail, a young man – a teenager, a kid really – battering at the hillside rock face with crude-looking tools, a hammer and chisel.

Then, in quick succession, he passes over a series of what look like holes in the ground – what actually are holes in the ground – little hand-dug pits, as far as he can make out. One of them is more than that, it’s wider, deeper, an improvised shaft, out of which he now sees a small child crawling, like an insect, followed by two others. They are carrying hammers and tin cans. How many others are in there? How deep is it? Rundle swallows and flicks away again. He sees women scrambling in the dirt, and more children. He sees soldiers patrolling along the edges, with Kalashnikovs, and on the far edge he sees a pile of sacks next to a truck. On the side of the truck is a familiar logo – he can just make it out.

Gideon Global.

This is the start of the chain.

Of the arrangement Kimbela spoke about.

His people run the site. They herd in the artisanal miners and supervise the extraction. Then Gideon personnel take over and transport the sacks of rock and dust to the airstrip, from where they’re flown to Kigali or Goma, and then on to processing plants in Europe. After that, the processed powder finally makes its way to the various components manufacturers in the US. No comptoirs, no négociants, no trading posts, no international dealers even. This is a rationalised, streamlined, highly controlled and above all secret supply corridor.

Which took a lot of time and effort to set up.

So many headaches along the way, and right from the get-go.

Rundle moves the binoculars back over the scene, sweeps across it, slides it into a blur. There must be a couple of hundred people here. Then he finds himself doing it again, going back, but this time slowly, scanning, searching for something.

What?

That open mineshaft.

He finds it.

A small, rough hole in the earth.

The three children he saw climbing out of it earlier are around it now, squatting, examining the contents of their tin cans. They are stripped to the waist and covered in a dirty brown dust. He zooms in carefully, and goes from one to the other, studying their faces.

Their big, blank solemn eyes.

He closes his own for a second or two, and then zooms out again, just a fraction.

But when he refocuses, the children have stopped doing what they were doing, all three of them. They’ve put their tin cans down on the ground and are peering up, looking – he realises – in his direction, at him.

He stares back, but only for a moment, before dropping the binoculars. He presses the automatic switch to close the window. Then he turns sideways, towards Ribcoff, and says, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’

Conway pulls his forehead back from the grimy window and turns to face Jimmy Gilroy. Now that he’s started this, he realises how far there is to go, and he’s exhausted.

‘Triobium-thanaxite,’ he says, with a sigh. ‘It’s a rare metallic ore. Congo is full of them, niobium, cassiterite, cobalt, uranium. You’ve heard of coltan, right? It’s used to make capacitors for cell phones and games consoles, every bloody thing, camera lenses, surgical implants. Well, this one is extremely rare. It has a unique chemical composition and until about four years ago had only ever been found in a remote part of Brazil. Then they discovered a deposit of the damn stuff in the mine at Buenke.’

‘Who’s they?’

Conway looks at Gilroy and almost laughs. ‘Well, at least you’re asking the right questions.’

This Jimmy Gilroy is young and inexperienced and has just admitted he’s unemployed, but Conway is fine with that. He doesn’t feel he’s made a mistake or anything by talking to him. Besides, Phil Sweeney said he was smart, and Phil would know. Phil also said he’d worked with Gilroy’s father. Conway never met Dec Gilroy, but he’s vaguely aware of his reputation – aware that anyone who ever did meet the man really liked him.

So while it might be overstating it to say that Conway likes the son here – they did only meet half an hour ago, and the circumstances are hardly ideal – he is comfortable with him. Curiously, as well – and this is crucial – he doesn’t seem to resent him.

All in all, he’ll do.

He’s fit for purpose.

Because this is it, isn’t it?

Conway’s already gone way too far to turn back now, and while he’s not quite prepared to admit it to himself yet, he’s almost relieved.

‘They,’ he says, ‘is an advanced satellite imaging company owned by BRX and the Oberon Capital Group. Obviously, given how rare the stuff is, and how valuable, they decided to try and keep it a secret.’

‘What’s it used for?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know. More of the same, I suppose, only bigger and better. Next generation apps.’ He shrugs. ‘Aerospace, defence turbines, jet engines. Nanotechnology, biotechnology. Who the fuck knows with these people.’

There is silence for a while as this sinks in.

‘And Gianni Bonacci discovered your little secret.’

‘It wasn’t my secret, Jimmy. Believe me. I was just trying to flog an old copper mine. But yeah, right after Bonacci dropped his bombshell I won’t deny that I put the squeeze on Rundle. He wasn’t too happy with that and pointed out to me that unless Bonacci was reined in there wouldn’t be any sale.’ He puffs up his cheeks and then exhales loudly. ‘The thing is, because Bonacci had used the words We need to talk, Rundle figured that that meant it was a shakedown. Which in turn meant that he probably hadn’t told anyone else yet.’

‘Right.’

‘Which meant there was time. In theory. A window of opportunity. To do something. But when I sat down with Don Ribcoff a while later, at Rundle’s request, and fed him every little titbit I knew about Bonacci, everything I’d heard or picked up on in conversation – about him, about Susie, about the two of them, about the coke, about the proposed helicopter trip the next day – I had no idea what I was doing, no idea that there’d be…’ He pauses, struggling, reluctant to say it straight out. ‘Consequences. I mean, it might sound disingenuous now, but at the time I didn’t really understand how serious it was, how seriously they were taking it. I didn’t understand how high the stakes were. Looking back, sure, but -’

‘What did you think?’

‘That they’d, I don’t know, pay him off. I was fully expecting them to pay me off, to hike up their offer, which they eventually did, of course.’ He then makes a sweeping gesture with his hand to indicate their surroundings. ‘It paid for this bloody place. Got it up and running, anyway.’ He shakes his head. ‘Look, there was a lot of frantic activity that night, a lot of back and forth, so my assumption was that some contact was made with Bonacci, and that therefore discussions would be ongoing. Besides, it wasn’t really any of my business. Whatever this thanaxite was, I didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to even think about getting involved in the extraction process myself. I was just delighted that the mere mention of it was apparently going to lead to a financial bonanza for me.’

There is another silence, during which Conway thinks to himself, that was pretty lame. Isn’t this meant to be some sort of confession? He looks at Gilroy and actually feels sorry for the poor bastard – having to stand there, having to listen to this.

‘Jimmy,’ he says after a while, a knot tightening in his stomach. ‘I don’t know what happened exactly, or how, but I can tell you this. Late on the Saturday night, Don Ribcoff came to me with a bag of cocaine the size of a pound of fucking sugar and told me to deliver it to Susie with instructions for her to babysit Gianni Bonacci, that’s the phrase he used, babysit him. She wasn’t to let him out of her sight, she was to go with him on the trip to Donegal. If she did that, there’d be another bag the same size waiting for her when she got back.’

‘And did you deliver it?’

A pause. ‘Well, what do you think?’

‘Then what did Susie ask? I mean’ – Jesus, the look on his face – ‘what did she imagine was going on, if she’d been the one who pushed Bonacci into -’

‘Remember, that was just speculation.’ He pauses. ‘And no, she didn’t ask anything. I’m afraid all Susie could see in front of her was this big fat bag of toot.’

Gilroy stares at him, in silence, no doubt trying to picture the scene. Conway can picture it all too vividly himself. He remembers thinking at the time, this is fucking insane.

‘So,’ he says, ‘she did what she was told. Exactly how she went about it, no one knows. Did she go to Bonacci straightaway? Did she go to his room? Did she fuck him? Maybe. What she definitely did do, the next morning, was inveigle Niall Feeley and Ted Walker into letting her go along on the helicopter ride. They probably took a bit of convincing, a lot of convincing, but no one ever said no to Susie Monaghan.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Then a few hours later the helicopter crashed along the Donegal coast and they were all killed.’

Conway is aware of what’s missing here, of what he’s not saying – of the gap, the final piece of the jigsaw, and Gilroy doesn’t ask him, doesn’t push it.

But he stands there, waiting.

‘No one said anything to me about it, Jimmy, not Ribcoff, not Rundle, no one, but after what they came out with the previous evening, I just… I mean… at first there was so much shock over the whole thing, over the crash, the country was convulsed with it, with grief, there was wall-to-wall coverage, and it was all about Susie. What had Rundle said? Don’t make it obvious? Cause a distraction? Well, they certainly did that, because I don’t think Gianni Bonacci’s name was mentioned more than a couple of times in the reports. And if it was, no one was interested.’ He exhales again. ‘I mean, sure, it occurred to me that they’d done it, somehow, rigged it, but I didn’t for the life of me know how, or how they could have done it so fast. It just seemed bizarre. But then as the days went by I discovered more and more about who Don Ribcoff was, is. I’d thought he was Rundle’s security guy, you know, a glorified bodyguard sort of thing, but then I found out he runs what effectively amounts to a privately owned army. One with unbelievable resources. And reach. So in the light of this’ – he laughs here, but it’s mirthless, more a snort of incredulity – ‘the whole thing started to seem horribly plausible.’

He laughs again in the same way, and nods, as though in agreement with what someone else has said.

Gilroy remains silent. He appears to be in shock.

‘I had no further contact with Clark Rundle,’ Conway quickly goes on. ‘It was all through his lawyers after that. They made a new bid for the mine, which was staggering, a multiple of what their original offer had been. It was the price they were prepared to pay for my silence.’ He pauses. ‘A price I was prepared to accept.’

And there it is, pretty much.

In all its glory.

‘But…’

‘Yes?’

The knot in Conway’s stomach tightens a little more.

Gilroy shuffles from one foot to the other, obviously struggling to formulate his question. ‘Are you… talking on the record here? Am I going to be able to quote you as a source? Because otherwise -’

‘How do you prove any of it?’

‘Yes.’

He’s right, of course. It’s all very well to spill this stuff out, but what happens then? Who follows it up? Who takes responsibility?

Conway feels a stinging sensation behind his eyes. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he says quietly, ‘no, I’m not talking on the record.’

‘Why not?’

‘Look…’ How does he explain this? ‘I can’t prove any of it either. Yes, I can tell you what happened, and maybe even why, but I have no real evidence.’

‘Then why bother talking to me? Why not tell me to fuck off?’

Conway closes his eyes.

Because, he thinks, you’ll find evidence. Sooner or later. I know you will. It’s there. You’ll dig it up. And you should. It’s your job. But I don’t want to be around when you do. Because I’m tired. I’ve had enough.

He thinks of Ruth and the children.

They won’t want him to be around either.

And who’d blame them?

He opens his eyes again. They’re still stinging, but he’s got them under some sort of control. He takes a step forward. ‘Look, Jimmy. You’re going to have to come at this from a slightly different angle.’

Gilroy sighs, exasperation showing. ‘Angle? What angle?’

Conway clears his throat, hard, bracing himself. ‘Listen,’ – he knows this’ll have to be quick – ‘in the week after the crash I had a couple of conversations with Larry Bolger, but we didn’t talk about what happened, not directly, we avoided it, it was a combination of embarrassment, I suppose, and fear, but early the following week he called and told me he’d received some information from a senior garda source, someone in Harcourt Street.’ He takes a deep breath here. ‘Apparently, a security guard who worked for the helicopter leasing company was making claims that he’d seen something or that something wasn’t right at their hangar facility in Kildare. Given the sensitivity of the issue this was passed up the line, and now Larry was in a state about it. I tried to reassure him, but he was frantic, he felt that if there was an investigation, if anything came out, if there was even a hint of involvement, or of collusion, or of cover-up, or whatever, he felt… well, that he’d be crucified. At first, I reckoned he was over-reacting, but then I gave it a little thought, and maybe he was right, once something like that got out, there’d be no way of containing it, it’d be guilt by association, and not just him, I was there, too. I mean, fuck, I had deals in the pipeline, relationships with people, arrangements.’

Gilroy looks at him with a mixture of horror and dread.

Where is this going?

‘So I made a phone call. I found a number for Don Ribcoff and I called him.’

That’s where.

‘And?’

‘Day or two later the security guard disappeared. Without a trace. Missing person. End of story. Then Ribcoff called me back, said something about the Wicklow hills, local methods, not to give it another thought.’

This proves too much for Gilroy, who deflates right there in front of him. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘Jesus Christ.’

Conway nods, I know, I know. He feels almost hysterical at this point, unhinged, or drunk, like he could reach out to Gilroy and hug him.

But then he hears a gentle tinkling of bells.

A fucking ringtone.

It’s not his.

He watches as Gilroy fumbles, reaches into a pocket and extracts his phone.

Then the shift in expression, the apologetic nod.

Yeah, go on, Conway thinks, take it.

‘Hello… Maria?’

Because I’m done here.

Except.

He holds a hand up, waves it.

Gilroy is flustered. ‘Sorry… just a sec,’ he says into his phone, and holds it against his chest.

This’ll have to be whispered.

‘One quick thing,’ Conway says, ‘two… two quick things. That security guard? There was a body found in the Wicklow hills a couple of weeks ago, it was in the papers, check up on that. And…’ – this is a long shot, his fucking heart thumping now as he realises he hasn’t actually mentioned the second call to Don Ribcoff, made only last week – ‘has anyone had a look at the CCTV footage?’ His mind goes blank for a second. Gilroy is paralysed, staring at him. ‘At the hotel in London, at the what’s it, the Marlow? Look at the CCTV footage.’

He then nods at the phone and mouths, Go on, take it.

Slowly, almost mechanically, Gilroy brings the phone back up to his ear.

Conway steps forward, and around him, pointing, I’ll be over there.

‘Maria…’ Gilroy says. But it’s the only word Conway hears him say, because he’s not listening anymore. He’s moving too fast. He’s already gone.

The stairwell is in almost complete darkness, and when he’s halfway up the first flight and looks back he sees nothing, hears nothing.

He moves on, moves upwards, feeling his way with the metal rail.

Counting.

When he bursts through the door and out onto six, he is breathless, but keeps going, muffled voices coming from somewhere, like a chorus deep inside his head. He feels his way along the dark, dusty corridor, tapping the wall until he comes to an open door…

Light floods out of the room, early evening light, a bit muted, but that’s good. It’s enough.

It’s all he needs.

He looks around. This is the same room he was in the last time, the bare plastered walls, the damp, acrid smell… the sliding glass door to the balcony still open, the way he left it.

As he crosses the room, a current of cool air ripples past him. He swallows, almost gags, that knot in his stomach tighter now than he can bear. It’s big, and growing, like a tumour.

He steps out onto the balcony.

He did feel relief, getting all of that stuff off his chest, it was good, but it was fleeting. It’s not what he’s feeling now.

You don’t want to know what he’s feeling now.

He steps forward, and turns. He leans back against the rail, facing into the empty hotel room. He takes out his phone and looks at it. For a second he considers sending a text to Ruth… but that would be too much, too appalling.

He wants to say something, though, to someone.

He taps out a message, fumbling over the keys. He presses Send, waits, drops the phone.

He leans back a little further, balancing there for a second. Then loses his balance.

Surrenders it.

Falls.

10

ON THE RETURN FLIGHT TO NEW YORK, Rundle sits alone in the cabin of his G650, staring out the window.

He’s picturing the moment – tomorrow or the next day – when he walks into Vaughan’s office, or his library, or the Modern, and nods, yes, yes, everything’s fine.

A small gesture of triumph.

Then – unable to help himself – he pictures another moment, maybe ten minutes later, in front of a bathroom mirror, or the mirror of an elevator car, but a fucking mirror nonetheless.

The inevitable come-down.

Elation, followed by self-loathing.

How do you get them in balance, he wonders.

Then – perhaps not coincidentally – he thinks for a minute or two about Nora, and in cinematic detail, with credit-card production values, but… no joy.

No lead.

He reaches for his laptop.

J.J. will have to do.

Since the other day Rundle has been obsessively tracking his brother online. He never used to. Not like this. He was always aware of what was going on, always somehow kept up to date, but not like this.

First he checks his web page, then Facebook and Twitter, but he doesn’t get very far with those. Then he does what he usually does which is look him up on Google News, where he finds there are two hundred and forty stories speculating that Senator John Rundle is about to file papers to form a presidential exploratory committee.

The fact that it’s speculation must mean it’s a leak – because J.J. wouldn’t do something like this without telling Rundle first, without discussing it with him at least.

Which doubtless means it’ll be the first order of business when they next speak.

Rundle closes the laptop.

In his opinion it’s too soon. He can see what J.J. is doing, cashing in on the publicity from last week, but it’s a risky strategy all the same. The extra attention can only increase the chances that someone will blow a massive hole in the Paris story. It seems incredible to Rundle that the non-appearance so far of the ‘motorcyclist’ hasn’t raised more – or, indeed, any – media suspicion.

And it’s not J.J.’s exclusion from the presidential race that Rundle is worried about – although, admittedly, he has been getting comfortable with the idea of his brother in the Oval Office – no, it’s the corollary, it’s people asking, well then, what the fuck did happen to his hand?

And where?

Rundle turns away from the window, in need of distraction. He glances around the cabin.

Empty.

In theory, there could be eighteen people up here, getting served drinks, and… what? Cuttlefish, with kimchee, and black radish? Some shit like that.

The mile-high boardroom.

But he actually prefers it this way.

With that thought in his head he drifts off to sleep.

A few hours later, not long after they land in New York, J.J. calls.

Rundle wants to tell him about Kimbela, rub his nose in it, but he doesn’t. They talk about the speculation, the exploratory committee.

Though it’s clearly more than speculation now.

‘So,’ J.J. says, ‘next Wednesday morning. Are you up for it? The Blackwood Hotel. It’s a business thing, an address I’m giving, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to make the announcement official.’

Rundle approaches his waiting car. The driver is holding the door open. Once he gets off the phone with J.J. he’s going to call Vaughan. ‘Yeah, of course,’ he says, rubbing his stomach. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

Jimmy sits at the window of his apartment, holding his third cup of coffee since he got up.

Staring out at the bay.

Seagulls squawking and the faint sound of the tide lapping up onto Sandymount strand.

Early morning traffic streaming past.

What you might call a semblance of normality.

Fuck.

But since he got up? Strictly speaking it’s not as if he was ever asleep. He’s been like this the whole time – awake, alert, bug-eyed, like someone on crystal meth – his brain running what happened last night on a continuous loop.

He didn’t corner him, did he? Didn’t put him in an impossible position? Didn’t push him?

No.

Conway more or less volunteered all of that information, and it even seemed as if he needed to. But having volunteered it, he clearly then was in an impossible position.

At which point Maria Monaghan called.

In a bit of a state.

Apparently after Larry Bolger’s sudden death, she felt remorse for the way she’d behaved. What right did she have to expect anything of Jimmy? He’d been offered something better, something more important, and naturally -

But he had to cut her off there, switch frequencies again, because Conway was walking away, disappearing into the dim shadows.

Was he leaving?

Jimmy took a step forward.

Something wasn’t right. The rushed tone at the end there, packing everything in.

It was all too -

Jimmy took another step forward, but he couldn’t see properly, couldn’t see where Conway had gone. It was too dark. So he just stood there, not moving.

It took him a while to realise what he was doing.

He was waiting.

He didn’t know what for exactly and when it came – the dense, resonant thud – he was glad to be facing the wrong way.

He immediately turned and went outside. The sight of the body splayed on the concrete was both shocking and horribly compelling – the unnatural configuration of limbs, the blood seeping out from the fractured skull – but already a couple of youths on the far side of the square were on their way over. Some instinct kicked in and he ran.

When he got back to his motorbike on Tara Boulevard he was glad he hadn’t locked it and within a matter of seconds was out on the main road again, heading in towards town.

After he got back to the apartment, Jimmy didn’t know what else to do except sit around in shock and periodically check for news updates. When the story eventually broke – a few hours ago – he was almost relieved.

On one site it was:

Property developer jumps to his death.

On another:

Embattled tycoon Dave Conway takes his own life.

Then, a little after seven o’clock, one of the presenters on Newstalk referred to 1929 and the pinstriped bankers queuing up to leap from the window ledges of Wall Street office buildings.

Which meant that a clear narrative was already emerging, and not one with much chance of being influenced or shaped in any way by what Jimmy heard last night.

When another commentator on Morning Ireland refers to Conway as an unfortunate ‘casualty’ and traces everything back to ‘the fuse lit by the fall of Lehman Brothers’, Jimmy’s impulse is to scream. What he does instead is turn the radio off and go over to his desk. He starts making notes, which is something he should have done hours ago – but it’s all still fresh in his memory. On the back of what feels like a second wind he sketches out an alternative, more complex narrative than the one taking hold over the airwaves and online.

But when he’s finished and he re-reads it… it doesn’t seem that complex after all.

So before he loses this sense of there being a bigger picture, a comprehensible one, and before his energy levels dip again, he decides to call Maria.

He checks the time and picks up the phone.

As it’s ringing, he tries to imagine what he might say to her if she answers.

He can’t.

‘Jimmy.’

‘Maria…’ He hesitates, his mind blank for a second. Then he rallies. ‘Look, I’m sorry I hung up on you last night, but I had no choice, I was in the middle of something really intense, and not… not unconnected to…’ He sighs. ‘I think I’ve discovered what happened.’

He didn’t mean to say that quite so directly – or at all, in fact.

Not without a bit of preparation, a bit of lead time.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I think I’ve discovered what happened to Susie, to all of them.’

‘Jimmy, please.’

‘No, listen. I’m not insane. Everything is connected… me stopping the book, taking on the Bolger thing, it’s the same people… I was put under a lot of pressure, and… even that guy last night, who jumped off the building, Dave Conway, have you heard about that? He was there, at Drumcoolie Castle, he -’

‘Jesus, Jimmy, stop.’

He does.

But not for long. ‘Maria, please, let’s meet. Believe me, you’re going to want to hear what I have to say.’

There is a long silence. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy, but you sound deranged.’

‘Maybe I do. I’ve been up all night. But listen to me.’ He starts whispering. ‘The helicopter was sabotaged. The target was the Italian guy, Gianni Bonacci. He worked for the UN. The others were collateral damage.’ He pauses. ‘It’s very complicated, Maria’ – he hadn’t been going to say this either, not yet – ‘but you have to understand, it wasn’t Susie’s fault.’

Unpaid leave.

Effective immediately.

If that isn’t code for fuck you, you crazy motherfucker, hit the road and don’t come back, then Tom Szymanski doesn’t know what is. That’s the downside of working for a PMC, no job security, no guaranteed deployment – and no back-up services either, no Walter Reed.

No tea, no fucking sympathy.

Just a one-way ticket to JFK and make your own way home after that, thank you very much.

Fuck you very much.

He rolls over on the bed and faces the wall.

But come on, six months of having the inside of your head pounded in the Congolese jungle and you’re supposed to just ease back into civilian life and switch it off?

Szymanski himself, though, never actually had it switched on – not over there, that was his thing, his chilled exterior, the quality he was most proud of, like guys who professed to have big dicks or still had hair. But then this bastard Lutz thought he detected… what? Early signs of stress, a disproportionate reaction to what had happened? Didn’t want his unit contaminated with any hint of darkness? With feelings of remorse or grief or guilt? Didn’t want anyone having nightmares?

Good luck with that.

Asshole.

The irony, however, is that in the week he’s been back all Szymanski has had has been fucking nightmares.

With the neat accompanying trick of never actually seeming to fall asleep.

Chilled exterior, I don’t fucking think so, not anymore.

He hasn’t told anyone he’s back yet, and isn’t going to either, not for the moment. Instead of taking a connecting flight on to Cleveland he got the AirTrain and then a subway into Manhattan and has been holed up in a hotel here ever since, two hundred bucks a night, and all the junk food, tequila and hookers midtown can throw at him.

He doesn’t want to go home. That’s why he signed up with Gideon Global in the first place, after his three tours in Iraq – anything to avoid his folks, his ex-wife, his two kids, the ghost of his former life as a solid citizen of C-town.

So maybe he did react, so what? Watching that poor sap get shot in the head at point blank range was pretty fucking intense.

Ashes.

Ray Kroner.

And then those women and kids he’d just smoked.

Fuck me.

What is it, you see hundreds of incidents, roadside bombings, IEDs going off, firestorms, shootings, all sorts of trauma and injuries – plus some of that other stuff in Congo, holy shit – and you ride it out, you even laugh some of it off, as a survival mechanism. But then one thing comes along, a particular incident, and it may not even be such a big deal, if you’re looking at it as a scale of one-to-ten sort of thing – intensity-wise, body count-wise – but it sticks.

In your brain.

And that’s it, you’ve got it for the rest of your life, like a fucking tattoo, this single image that keeps coming back at you – when you close your eyes, when your mind drifts, when the booze wears off, when your cock goes limp again. It’s like what some couples have – our song, listen honey, they’re playing our song – well this is your song, motherfucker, all yours, and don’t you forget it.

In Szymanski’s case – with due respect to those two women and the three little kids – it’s Ray Kroner’s twisted face lying in the mud, twisted because of how the bullet stretched the top of his head off to one side.

He’s never going to get that image out of his mind. He didn’t know Kroner that well, and didn’t even like him, but now he’s stuck with him.

And you know who he blames?

Szymanski rolls over, gets off the bed and goes to the window. Some view. The back of another hotel, a much taller one, stacked rows of windows and AC units as far up as he can see. Down to the left there’s an alley-way with a thin shard of early morning street action just visible at the end of it – cars passing, MTA buses, yellow cabs, regular New York shit.

He saw him on TV a few days after he got back, on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, Meet the Press or Face the Nation or Suck my Dick, one of those, he doesn’t remember, he was flicking around, hungover as shit, waiting for room service, and up he pops on the screen, with a brace on his hand, and they spin this… this fucking fairy tale about an early morning accident on the streets of Paris. But he doesn’t want to talk about it, no, of course not, he wants to talk about the issues.

That’s who he blames.

The guy on TV.

The guy they were protecting and who Ray Kroner should have blown away when he had the fucking chance.

That’s who.

Senator John fucking Rundle.

Maria Monaghan can’t meet Jimmy until lunchtime.

Which means he has a few hours. He looks at his watch. Three hours, give or take.

So maybe he should…

Have some breakfast. Establish a little structure.

He eats a bowl of cereal. After that he takes a shower. He gets dressed. He puts on more coffee. Then it’s down to work. He has to concentrate. His impulse is to give in here, to let it all overwhelm him – exhaustion, revulsion, confusion – but unless he can clarify certain points, and gather some evidence, he will remain the deranged person he was on the phone a short while ago to Maria.

So.

First. A body found in the Wicklow hills. He locates the story from a few weeks ago. There are reports in four different newspapers on the same day.

Couple out walking their dog.

Remains of a body found in a ditch.

There was some speculation, apparently, about who it might be, but no names were mentioned and no official identification was made. He keeps searching.

These are the only references to the story that he comes across.

He does another search, with a specific date range, and finds the missing person story from three years ago. Thirty-one-year-old Joe Macken, a security guard. He went missing. That’s it. No detail about where he worked. No known criminal associations. He had a wife and baby. A further search using his name turns up very little, just two or three other references in more general stories about people who have disappeared.

Is it him? Have they identified him yet? Presumably when they find a body they cross reference it with their database of missing persons.

DNA, dental records, finger prints, stuff like that.

And what if it is him?

Conway said this guy had seen something or had felt that something wasn’t right at the place where he worked, the Leinster Helicopters maintenance hangar in Kildare. But what specifically? And now that he’s dead – which is presumably why – how is anyone ever going to find out?

On to phase two.

Jimmy picks up his phone again.

He calls the Missing Persons Bureau. He calls Leinster Helicopters. He calls a guy he used to work with who is now a crime correspondent for a local radio station. He calls a few other people. He leaves messages. He even gets a couple of callbacks.

But what comes from all of this is… nothing.

The crime correspondent tells Jimmy in the strictest confidence that although it hasn’t officially been confirmed yet the body that was found in the Wicklow hills a few weeks back is probably that of missing Dolanstown drugs kingpin Derek Flood. The woman he talks to at Leinster Helicopters barely remembers Joe Macken and when she checks with a colleague it turns out that Macken worked for an agency in any case. A further inquiry reveals that about a year after he disappeared Macken’s wife remarried and emigrated to Australia.

It’s as if everything has evaporated.

As for the CCTV footage in the London hotel where Bolger died, what is that, conceivably, going to reveal? And how is Jimmy Gilroy, unemployed journalist, supposed to get his hands on it in the first place?

He looks up from his desk and out across the room.

Let’s hear it everybody for the deranged person.

‘Housekeeping.’

Tom Szymanski turns to face the door, groans.

‘Yeah,’ he says, half shouting it, ‘five minutes.’

He stands up from the bed, flicks the TV off and throws the remote onto the pillow.

There’s less work these last few mornings for housekeeping to do. What is it? He looks around the room. He doesn’t know. This is Friday. The last time he had a hooker up here was Sunday or Monday. The last time he got properly shitfaced, with all the concomitant fallout, beer bottles, ashtrays, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, was… night before last? Or night before that again?

He’s not sure.

Last night he did nothing.

Watched TV, smoked a little weed, looked out the window.

It’s not that he’s getting bored or anything, because if you’re a vet, an experienced one, you don’t really get bored. You don’t have the luxury. There’s no longer any unoccupied territory in your brain where that can happen.

But you have to keep busy all the same – either working, or overloading your senses – because you are fighting something, and if it isn’t boredom, maybe it’s antiboredom. Like antimatter.

Or whatever that shit is.

Dark matter.

Dark boredom.

Fuck.

Can he stop this, please?

Outside, Szymanski walks around for a while – up and down Fifth Ave, between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second. It’s a nice day and there’s something easy about New York. It’s frenetic and ceaseless, but if you don’t bother the place, it won’t bother you.

He stops in at a diner for some breakfast.

He takes a booth by the window and sits down. Beside him, there’s a newspaper. He picks it up. It’s a New York Post. Today’s. Someone must have left it behind.

He lays it out on the table in front of him.

Waitress comes. He orders coffee and -

It’s really all about the coffee.

Coffee and pancakes.

‘You want some OJ with that today?’

No, I want it tomorrow, you stu-

Easy.

He nods. Goes back to the Post. He doesn’t buy newspapers. Doesn’t believe in them. All the shit you’re expected to eat.

Sports coverage maybe, but even that.

He reads a thing about City Councilman Tony Rapello (D-Bronx), who wants to introduce legislation forcing bar and nightclub owners to install a minimum number of security cameras. He reads about a newborn baby that was found abandoned at a subway station in Queens, left in a bag next to a fucking MetroCard machine.

Jesus.

Then, as his pancakes are arriving, he sees it.

Run, Johnny, run.

That motherfucker.

John Rundle is rumoured to be setting up an exploratory committee for a possible presidential run next year…

Szymanski nearly chokes on his coffee.

Accompanying the article there’s a photo of Senator ‘Johnny’ Rundle, complete with prominent hand brace, standing next to some bearded guy outside an unidentified office building. Although Rundle isn’t quoted directly in the article, an aide says that the senator will be attending a reception in the city on Wednesday, at the Blackwood Hotel, and that an announcement may be made then.

The article goes on to explain that the senator sustained a serious injury while on a recent trade delegation to Paris. He was coming to the aid of a motorcyclist, who had collided with a barricade, when his hand was crushed underneath the hapless Parisian’s chopper.

Szymanski laughs at this.

Again.

And this time out loud.

Which gets some looks.

He starts his pancakes, and re-reads the article.

What was it Lutz said the day of the incident? That the senator’s brother owned the mine at Buenke? That they were a ‘big’ family? And that consequently Ashes had picked the wrong day to go crazy?

Szymanski leans forward and studies the photo again.

It’s well known that politicians lie all the time, but it’s not every day you get to catch one out in as blatant and incontrovertible a lie as this.

He pushes his plate aside and drains his coffee.

What day is this? Friday?

He air-signs check to the waitress.

Maybe he’ll hang around the city until Wednesday, see what happens.

See what kind of a day that is.

Walking along Wicklow Street on his way to meet Maria Monaghan, Jimmy’s phone rings.

He pulls it out and checks the incoming number.

‘Phil?’

‘Jimmy.’ Phil Sweeney’s voice is quiet, muted. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m in shock. I’m sure you are, too.’

‘Yeah, I actually can’t believe it. I knew he had financial difficulties, but Jesus, he was always so -’

‘That’s not why he did it, Phil.’

‘What?’

‘I was there last night. I was with him. Not when he jumped, but up to a few minutes beforehand.’

In the silence that follows, Jimmy slows down and stops. Standing now by the side window of Brown Thomas, he waits. But the silence goes on so long that he eventually has to interrupt it.

‘Phil?’

‘Yeah. I’m here. Look, this is weird. We have to meet.’

‘I’m not so sure about that, Phil. I’m in the -’

‘Jimmy -’

‘I don’t have -’

‘JIMMY.’

‘OK. Fine.’ He clears his throat. ‘Of course.’

There is silence for a moment, and then in quiet tones, almost whispering, they make an arrangement to meet.

Tomorrow evening. The Long Hall on George’s Street.

Jimmy’s head is reeling as he puts his phone away.

Ten minutes later he’s in Rastelli’s sitting down opposite Maria Monaghan.

It takes him a while to adjust. He’s also distracted by how Maria looks. There’s something different about her, and he’s not quite sure what it is.

A girl comes over and they order coffees.

Jimmy is hungry, but this isn’t a conversation he wants to have while he’s eating.

‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ he says. ‘I realise it must seem a bit…’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it does.’ She studies him for a moment. ‘You look like shit, Jimmy.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So what’s going on? You made some pretty big claims on the phone there. You’d better explain yourself, because I’m not staying here any longer than I have to.’

Then it hits him what it is. She’s not dressed for work. She’s in jeans and a zip-up sweater. And she’s slightly paler-looking, too, no sign of any make-up.

She seems more relaxed.

‘Not at work today?’ he says.

‘I’ve taken some time off. I was due a few days.’

He nods, delaying.

‘Jimmy?’

‘OK.’ He launches into it. He may look like shit, and feel like shit, but the one thing he can’t afford to be accused of here is talking shit. What he says has to make sense, and not just to her, to himself as well. Which it does, largely. But as he proceeds, as he talks, as their coffees arrive, it occurs to him that all he’s doing is describing a sequence of conversations he’s had – and private, unrecorded conversations. It doesn’t help that two of the people he spoke to are now dead. Nor does it help that what he got from the others – from Gary Lynch, from Francesca and Pia Bonacci – was little more than conjecture and speculation.

Jimmy wants Maria to believe what he’s saying, partly because he believes it, and partly because he hopes the knowledge that Susie wasn’t to blame for what happened will bring Maria a certain degree of solace.

But he’s not going to convince her with this.

What’s to stop her from thinking he’s deluded and has made it all up?

Nothing.

It’s only when he gets to the end that he sees a flicker in her eye, a response to something he’s just said.

He leans forward. ‘What?’

Maria doesn’t answer.

He glances around, thinking back for a second, going over it in his mind. He’d been telling her about the mine in Congo, about Dave Conway trying to sell it, about the deposit of thanaxite they’d discovered.

About Buenke.

And BRX.

Clark Rundle.

Gideon Global.

‘What?’ he says again, looking directly at her.

She’s pale, even paler than before.

‘Maria?’

She swallows. ‘Did you say thanaxite?’

‘Yes.’

She holds his gaze, but doesn’t speak.

‘What’s wrong? Have you heard of it?’

She nods her head very slowly. ‘Susie mentioned it in that text she sent me from the hotel, before she left. I had no idea what it meant. It seemed like nonsense. I mean, the whole text, it was -’

‘What did it say?’

Maria hesitates. This clearly isn’t easy for her. Some of the texts that Susie sent to people that morning were leaked to the media and quickly became infamous – evidence that she wasn’t in a stable frame of mind. She sent one to her agent screaming, Get me a decent fucking job before I go completely FUCKING insane!!!! She also sent a couple to a friend in Dublin in which she said some fairly scurrilous things about a well-known broadcaster who had recently interviewed her.

But the text she sent to Maria that morning has always remained private.

She leans back in her chair. ‘It said, I can’t remember exactly, it was about going on the helicopter ride with some of the guys, along the coast, and then, Thanaxite baby, that’s where it’s all at, we’re heading for the blood-soaked motherlode.’ She shrugs. ‘I never knew what that meant. But it was just so Susie, you know, it was typical, she was a messer, she spoke in code, yo this and yo that, rhyming slang, song lyrics, made-up Dublin rap, whatever. It could have meant anything. Plus she was clearly high as a kite. So it didn’t strike me as significant at the time. And after the crash, what did anything matter? She was dead.’

Jimmy nods, ‘Yeah. Sure.’ He lowers his voice a notch. ‘But doesn’t this corroborate what I’m saying? What Dave Conway told me?’

Maria nods back, reluctantly.

Jimmy can see it in her face. She was sceptical before, impatient even. Now she’s putting the pieces together and they seem to fit. ‘If what you’re telling me is true,’ she says eventually, ‘then this whole chain of events, from Susie’s death right up to what happened last night, it’s all the result of a desperate scramble to protect ownership of a mining concession?’

‘Yes.’

She holds her hands out in disbelief. ‘Is that… could that possibly be true? I mean…’

‘Well, there seems to be an awful lot of money involved, so on balance I’d say yeah, it could.’

But Maria is barely listening. ‘My God. Poor Susie. You know, I think I’m almost glad Mum and Dad didn’t live to hear this. It’s too awful. It’s -’

And then she stops, as something obviously occurs to her. She looks at Jimmy. ‘What happens now?’

He isn’t sure what to say here. He looks down at his coffee, which he hasn’t touched. ‘I don’t know, Maria. I wanted to tell you this, and I wanted you to believe it. That was important to me. Who else is going to believe it, though? On what conceivable basis could any official investigation of this go forward?’

‘On the basis that…’ She stops, trying to think it through, the ramifications.

But he sees it dawning on her.

‘There’s no evidence, Maria. Nothing at all. Two of the principal witnesses are gone. If Susie hadn’t sent you that text, with that word in it, which in itself hardly qualifies as evidence, would you believe it? Would you even still be sitting here?’

Maria considers this, looks at him. ‘You’ve described a conspiracy to murder six people, Jimmy. Including my sister. That’s insane. Can these bastards simply be allowed to get away with it?’

‘Well…’

‘What?’

Jimmy clicks his tongue. ‘Leaving aside for a minute the issue of resources, and the fact that I don’t have the backing, the protection, of an official news organisation, there is another avenue of approach here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Two of the people who were at the table that night in Drumcoolie Castle are gone, yeah? Larry Bolger and Dave Conway.’

Maria nods.

‘But there were three others. The ones who actually had the incriminating conversation, and who presumably carried through on it.’

She nods again.

‘Clark Rundle, Don Ribcoff and… some old guy.’

11

AT AROUND NINE O’CLOCK ON SATURDAY MORNING Rundle and Eve are having coffee in the kitchen of their fifty-seventh-floor apartment in the Celestial Building. They’re talking about Daisy, about Oxford, about England, and when Rundle’s phone rings he resents the intrusion.

It’s Don Ribcoff. He’s downstairs in his car and needs ten minutes.

Rundle could ask him to come up, but he’s not going to.

‘I’ll be right down,’ he says into the phone, and makes an apologetic face at Eve.

She’s used to it. Twenty years of marriage to Clark Rundle and what’s she going to do, start getting snippy now?

She reaches for her own phone as he gets up to leave.

Descending in the elevator, Rundle feels relatively relaxed – happy to be back from his trip and looking forward to dinner with Jimmy Vaughan tomorrow night.

Outside, he strolls across the wide plaza towards the kerb, keenly aware of the monolithic slab of bronze-tinted glass shimmering in the sunlight behind him. As he gets near the parked limousine, a door opens, and Ribcoff emerges.

The two men stand on the sidewalk, traffic whipping past.

‘Some weird news,’ Ribcoff says. ‘From Dublin. Dave Conway killed himself on Thursday night. Jumped off a sixth-floor balcony.’

Rundle is surprised, and shows it. ‘That is weird. Any fallout we need to be concerned about?’

‘Maybe. Our asset there is working on it. It turns out someone was with Conway before he did it. The two of them were seen talking, and then this guy was seen leaving. In a hurry. By some local kids.’ He pauses, reluctant to go on. ‘It might’ve been that journalist.’

‘Might have been? I thought you had him under surveillance?’

‘We did. But not round the clock. I mean, we checked him out, went to his apartment, trawled through his shit, but there was nothing much there. He wasn’t deemed a risk.’

‘And now?’

‘We’re looking into it.’

Rundle glances around. ‘What’s the take on Conway? What are people saying?’

‘Debts, bankruptcy. He was in for a couple of hundred million. Victim of the recession. It seems to be straight up.’

Rundle nods. ‘Fine, but this journalist prick talks to Bolger, then he talks to Conway… we have to assume he knows something. Or thinks he knows something. We have to assume he’s a risk.’

‘Yeah. But from what our asset could find out the guy is more or less unemployed. Until recently he was working on a book about that actress who was killed in the helicopter crash. That’s how he got caught up in this.’

‘And that doesn’t make him a risk? Jesus, Don.’

Ribcoff looks around, nodding. ‘OK. I’ll get our asset to take another look at him.’

‘Not just another look, Don. Sit on the bastard. We don’t want any surprises here.’

‘Right.’

Rundle is anxious to get away. ‘That it?’

Ribcoff nods.

‘Keep me posted.’

‘OK.’

As Rundle is turning to go, Ribcoff says, ‘By the way, have you seen Mr Vaughan yet? Since we got back?’

‘No,’ Rundle says, feeling a slight impatience at the question. ‘I’m seeing him tomorrow night.’

Back in the elevator, he takes out his phone and calls Regal.

Unfortunately, Nora is not available today. They’re about to suggest someone else, another escort, but Rundle hangs up.

As he walks along George’s Street on his way to the Long Hall, Jimmy keeps turning and looking behind him. He can’t shake the uneasy feeling that he’s being followed. No one in his line of vision offers themselves up as a likely candidate, but then…

He wouldn’t expect them to.

Stepping into the pub, Jimmy glances around and spots Phil Sweeney sitting alone at the bar.

He looks tired. There is a glass of whiskey in front of him.

‘Jimmy. What’ll you have?’

‘Pint of Guinness, thanks.’

Jimmy sits on a stool, facing straight ahead, and puts his hands on the bar. ‘I’m sorry about Conway,’ he says.

‘Yeah.’ There is a long silence. ‘So, what happened?’

Jimmy gets straight into it. Since talking to Maria yesterday he has refined the narrative somewhat. He tells it quickly and leaves no room for interruption.

Sweeney visibly wilts as Jimmy is speaking. At the end he takes a couple of sips from his glass.

Jimmy’s pint arrives, but he doesn’t touch it. The two men sit for a while without speaking.

Eventually, Sweeney turns to Jimmy. ‘I had no idea. I knew some stuff, but…’ He shakes his head. ‘I thought he’d had a fling with Susie, that it was all about covering that up. Keeping the papers out of it. Saving the marriage. I knew there was a business angle as well, but… you know, it was business. You learn not to ask awkward questions.’

Jimmy doesn’t say anything. He keeps staring at his pint.

‘Look, Jimmy, I know you have nothing but contempt for me and for what I do, for the company, and for… whatever, I don’t want to bring your old man into it, but believe me, what I do, what we did, it’s not this, not what you’re telling me.’ He reaches for his glass. ‘What you’re telling me? Way out of my fucking league.’

‘OK,’ Jimmy says.

‘I mean, Conway and Bolger? Whatever bullshit they got involved in that weekend, they kept it a secret all this time. I certainly knew nothing about it.’ He drains his glass and makes a sign at the barman. ‘But I have to tell you, Jimmy, I’ve heard some ugly shit in my day, but nothing like this. And I don’t like it. One fucking bit.’

Jimmy is beginning to wonder how much drink might be in the equation here.

‘Look Phil,’ he says, fully expecting to be pounced on, ‘let me be straight with you. This is a big news story and I intend to pursue it. My only problem is that the two main sources for it are now dead.’

Sweeney looks at him and nods. ‘Yeah, I can see that’d be a problem all right.’

‘So,’ Jimmy goes on, ‘I’ve decided, I’m going to New York. On Monday. See if I can get anything out of BRX.’ He pauses. ‘See if I can get near Clark Rundle. I’ve booked the flight. Did it yesterday.’

Sweeney’s eyes widen. ‘Wow. I don’t know if you’re insane, Jimmy, or just stupid, but…’ He stops for a moment. ‘You won’t get anywhere near Clark Rundle. Guys like him operate in a parallel universe. It’s like they live in a bubble.’

‘I know. But I have to try. It’s a start.’

‘He mightn’t even be in New York.’

‘I know.’

Sweeney stops again. He seems to be considering something. ‘OK, but you know what… you’re going to need contacts over there, assistance, help.’

‘I don’t have any contacts.’

‘I do.’

The barman arrives with the fresh drink. He places it in front of Sweeney, who picks it up and swirls it around gently.

Jimmy isn’t sure what’s being said here. ‘You’ll help me?’

‘Yeah.’ Sweeney puts the drink down. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you yet. I got a text the other night. From Dave. It must have been just before he did it.’

Jimmy turns and looks at him.

‘It was fairly cryptic. I didn’t know what to make of it. I mean, it’s bloody obvious now, I suppose, but at the time I thought maybe he was drunk or something. We hadn’t been on the best of terms lately, so I didn’t reply and I wasn’t in the mood to call him.’ Sweeney takes a sip from his drink. Then he takes a deep breath. ‘He said Help Jimmy Gilroy any way you can.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

As Sweeney repeats it, Jimmy closes his eyes. He feels a stabbing sensation in his stomach. After a moment he opens his eyes again and says, ‘What else was in it?’

Another deep breath. ‘No hard feelings. Tell Ruth I’m sorry. Then the bit about you.’

‘Fuck.’

‘I know, I know.’ Sweeney exhales loudly. ‘But I was pissed off at him, Jimmy. I barely looked at the damned thing. It made no sense to me. Until the next morning.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, I never thought he’d do something like that, not in a million years. I can see why now, though.’

Jimmy picks up his pint for the first time and demolishes half of it in one go.

He lets it settle.

There is silence for a while.

‘OK,’ Sweeney then says, ‘I can make a few phone calls, media and PR people over there I know, people I’ve worked with. It might help. It might be the difference between…’ He waves a hand in the air. ‘I don’t know. It might afford you some protection. It’ll be a buffer zone. Because you do realise how dangerous this is, Jimmy, potentially? I mean, given what you’ve told me.’

‘Yeah. By definition. It’s what the story is about.’

Sweeney half smiles at this. He leans over and pats Jimmy on the arm. ‘It’s quite a story alright. I’ll be putting my credibility on the line with these people, that’s for sure.’

‘Yeah, Phil, I know.’ And then Jimmy can see it, up close like this, what he suspected before. Sweeney is not well. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘Right,’ Sweeney says, turning back to his drink. After a moment, he adds, ‘And one last thing. I’m not doing this because Dave Conway asked me to. You know that, right? If I’m doing it for anyone at all, Jimmy, I’m doing it for your old man.’

‘So, how is our friend, the colonel?’

Rundle steps out of the elevator and extends a hand to Jimmy Vaughan. They shake.

‘He’s good, I guess. He talks a lot.’

‘Yeah? What about?’

‘Well, it seems he has a thing about the Chinese. Thinks they work too hard.’

‘Oh.’

‘He prefers our way of doing things.’

‘I see.’ Vaughan holds out an arm and indicates for Rundle to follow him. ‘That sounds promising.’

‘Indeed.’

They cross the entry foyer. Vaughan is slightly stooped and moves slowly.

‘On your own tonight, Jimmy?’

‘Yeah. Meredith’s away, in LA. Mrs R is here, though. She’ll look after us.’

Mrs Richardson is the cook, has been for as long as Rundle can remember.

They enter the dining room. Two places are set at one end of the long mahogany table.

‘Please, Clark, sit down.’

Rundle stands at his place and waits for Vaughan to take his.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Vaughan says, looking at his watch, ‘we’re going to eat straightaway. Otherwise I’ll get cranky. This is what old age is like, Clark. And it turns out you don’t have a choice in the matter.’

Rundle laughs at this. ‘No?’

‘No.’ Vaughan shakes his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He puts his hands on the table. ‘So. Tell me everything.’

Rundle does as instructed. He winds up by expressing the view that Kimbela’s hold over the Buenke region appears to be precarious at best. ‘We could lose access to the mine from one day to the next. A single swipe of a machete and the balance of power shifts.’

‘I know, I know, you’ve got all these Mobutu wannabes tearing around the place and it’s just a mess. We had an amazing run with him, though, three decades, at least.’

We?

Rundle leans forward, ‘Look, there’s a good five- to ten-year offload at Buenke. The latest imaging shows the seam is deeper than we thought. But as far as I can see what we’re involved in over there is a smash-and-grab operation, essentially, and it has been from the start.’

‘Of necessity, Clark, you know that.’

‘Yeah, but’ -

Buenke is only the second place on earth where thanaxite has ever been found and BRX has managed to keep that fact a secret for over three years. Even Kimbela thinks that what they’re extracting is coltan. This is because it’s extremely difficult to distinguish between the two without sophisticated testing.

– ‘… the mine is so primitive. They practically extract the shit by hand. That’s not how BRX usually operates. We need to get in there with proper machinery and infrastructure and do this right.’

It’s a conversation they’ve had before.

‘We couldn’t do it without breaking cover, Clark, and then we’d risk losing everything. We draw attention to ourselves like that and Kinshasa, the Ministry, Gécamines, they’d be down on us like a ton of bricks, then the UN, Global Witness, Amnesty, then Beijing, then every fucking mining company in the world. It’d be a new Klondike.’ He pauses. ‘Besides, even if we managed to keep a piece for ourselves, it would take too long. It’d slow things down.’

Rundle looks at him for a moment. ‘Slow what things down, Jimmy?’

He hadn’t intended to go along this route, but he’s getting frustrated. He’s also beginning to accept that he probably has considerably more leverage with Vaughan than he previously imagined. It’s a simple equation. Rundle has access to something Vaughan wants, and seems to want badly, so Rundle should be able to call at least some of the shots.

Vaughan drums his fingers on the table. Then he looks up. ‘Ah, Mrs R.’

Over the next few minutes food arrives and there is a considerable amount of small talk with Mrs Richardson. Vaughan also needs to concentrate when he’s eating and tends to go silent for extended periods. Rundle finds the whole business a little trying.

‘Slow what things down, Jimmy?’ he repeats, at the earliest opportunity.

Rundle has worked closely with Vaughan on the Buenke project since the beginning, he’s been happy to – flattered even, to have the old man place his trust in him like that – but now he’s tired of being shut out, of not knowing the full story. BRX sets the supply chain in motion, but once the thanaxite gets to the processing plants in Europe or the US Rundle has no further involvement with it. What he suspects is that the thanaxite is finding its way to a company, or companies, owned by the Oberon Capital Group, but as to what it’s being used for specifically, he has no idea.

And Vaughan has never been inclined to discuss it.

‘What do you know about robotics, Clark?’

Until now, maybe.

Rundle leans forward. ‘Come again?’

Vaughan puts his fork down and dabs his lips with his napkin. ‘You heard me. Robotics.’

‘Well, I…’

‘It’s the fastest-growing sector in technology today. Development is exponential. I mean, think Moore’s Law, then multiply it by ten.’ He puts his napkin down. He reaches for his glass of water and takes a sip. ‘But as with most new technologies, where do we look to find the best ideas? To the cradle of war, that’s where. Predator drones, Reapers, PackBots, medbots, unmanned this, that and the other. It’s a wonderland of possibilities.’

Rundle had been about to say that he actually does know quite a bit about robotics, given that mining is an area where the technology is making a significant impact – in tunnel crawling, for example – but as is often the case with Vaughan, he’ll throw a question out there and not really expect or want an answer.

It’s annoying but you get used to it.

‘In Afghanistan and Iraq,’ Vaughan continues, ‘back at the start, there were maybe a couple of dozen robotic units in operation, and only on a trial basis. Now there are literally thousands of them being used every single day. It’s quite simple, Clark. Automation is the future of modern warfare.’

Rundle nods along, fork suspended over his plate.

‘Anyway, a few years ago Jack Drury at Paloma Electronics was contracted by the Pentagon to get something into development – along with almost everyone else in the industry, let it be said. They’re all at it now, lining up at the drawing board to strut their stuff.’ He pauses. ‘But what Jack’s guys have come up with?’ A smile steals over his face. ‘Knocks it out of the park. This thing they have, it’s a multipurpose combat UGV, lasers, sensors, antitank rockets, thousand rounds of ammunition, it’s amazing. They’re calling it the BellumBot. Gives new meaning to the phrase killer app.’

Rundle, listening carefully, puts his fork down.

‘But that’s not all.’ Vaughan’s smile has become a beam now. ‘Because get this. They’re also designing the damn things to think for themselves.’

Rundle leans forward. ‘Think?’

‘That’s right, Clark. Battlefield management systems that can operate autonomously. They’ve developed a range of algorithms using game theory and probability models that enable data to be collected in the field, processed and then actually shared. We’re talking about the holy grail of robotics here. I mean picture it, swarms of units out there collaborating, making decisions, optimising uncertain combat scenarios. And no egos in the mix, no sentiment, no interference. It’s beautiful.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘Yeah, and Paloma have just received a billion-dollar contract to put the first run into production, five, six hundred of them by Christmas.’ He lets that sink in. ‘And it’s just the start, Clark. In terms of where this is going? We’re only at the Model T stage.’

Rundle is almost speechless. ‘And… you’ve been… helping them? On the supply side?’

‘We’ve been helping them, Clark. BRX has. Gideon, too. Thanaxite is essential to the success of this. It allows capacitors to operate at low power levels but extremely high temperatures, which is apparently an unusual combination and criticial for advanced weapons systems. For connectivity and… speed. I don’t know.’ He waves a hand dismissively. ‘Look, I’m not going to pretend I understand the technical side of this, I’m eighty-two years old, for Christ’s sake. Talk to Jack Drury about it. But one thing I do know, that grey powder gives us a serious competitive edge.’

Rundle sits back in his chair and makes a whistling sound. Then he leans forward again, as something occurs to him. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

Vaughan sucks his teeth. ‘Different reasons. I appreciate your continuing loyalty. Your discretion, as well. And your willingness to take on the Kimbela situation. The timing is also right, with this production deal going through. And now, maybe’ – he looks Rundle directly in the eye – ‘with J.J. stepping into the ring, I mean, who knows? It might work out. It certainly couldn’t hurt.’

Rundle stares at Vaughan. ‘J.J.?’

‘Yeah, you can’t have too many friends in high places, if you know what I mean, when it comes to… certain matters, policy matters, awarding contracts, that kind of thing.’ He pauses. ‘And by the same token, I’m sure he could use some solid backing.’

‘Sure, but…’

‘What? I know I’ve been critical of him in the past, but he’s made quite an impression recently. I mean, did you see him this morning, on Face the Nation? Man.’

Rundle nods. He saw it all right and J.J. was indeed impressive, with something new about him, a look in his eyes, a touch almost of rapture.

‘He’s a perfectly credible candidate, Clark.’

Almost as though he’d been the one who was bitten.

‘I know. He is.’

But not crazy or anything, not hysterical, just the right side of that.

‘And if you want to tell him I said so, go ahead. Consider it an endorsement. Tell him I might even show up on Wednesday.’

Rundle is taken aback by this, but he nods vigorously and says thanks.

A little later on, in the back of his car, he tries to get everything into perspective. On one level, Jimmy Vaughan’s gall, his ego, is breathtaking. From his Park Avenue apartment, in his old man diapers, he seems to believe he’s personally directing the flow of thanaxite out of Congo and all the way along the supply chain to a privately contracted military robotics programme in Connecticut. He also seems to believe he can personally engineer the process of nominating a presidential candidate for the next election.

And yet…

He’s Jimmy fucking Vaughan.

The man is a legend.

And Oberon does own Paloma Electronics. It doesn’t own him, BRX, but that hardly matters, Rundle has been in thrall to Vaughan since he was a kid and would do anything for the man. As for political influence, that’s hard to quantify, but suffice it to say the chairman of the Oberon Capital Group has been at or near the centre of power in Washington, in one capacity or another, for the best part of fifty years.

And a quick glance at Oberon’s current and past board members reveals a dizzying array of luminaries, including former presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of the treasury, other cabinet members, five-star generals, prime ministers, Nobel laureates and media barons. Manna to conspiracy theorists, the Group was founded in the early 1970s and since then has woven itself into the very fabric of the economic, social and political life of the country. With hundreds of defence, aerospace, telecom and health care companies in its portfolio, Oberon is supposedly responsible for everything from the price of jellybeans to largely shaping US foreign policy over the last thirty-five years.

The car pulls up at the foot of the Celestial.

All of a sudden, Rundle is excited.

He has always craved a closer working relationship with Vaughan and now this is stepping things up several notches. It may well be his last chance, too. Because Jimmy is old and has a slew of medical conditions, all under control, fine, but any one of which, at any time, could flare up and kill him.

Rundle gets out of the car and strolls across the plaza.

The BellumBot.

Fucking incredible.

Jimmy gets into JFK a little after two o’clock local time on Monday afternoon. He takes a cab into the city, to the West Village, and checks into his hotel, the Stanley. Even though it’s small and a little dingy, the Stanley is pretty expensive, and Jimmy can’t really afford it. In fact, this whole trip, along with the one last week to Italy, is being paid for out of the remaining half of the advance he got to write the Susie Monaghan bio – an advance he’ll be expected to return in full when his editor finds out he’s no longer actually writing the book.

But Jimmy was in a hurry, rooms were available and the West Village is a part of the city he’s familiar with, having once shared an apartment there for a couple of months when he was a student.

He arranged the whole thing online in about ten minutes flat. But that was the easy part.

Now that he’s here he has no clear idea what to do.

Phil Sweeney gave him some numbers to call, so that should probably be his first task, but for some reason he’s reluctant to get started. He’s not sure what it is, a lack of confidence maybe, or a fear of being found out? When he expressed doubts like these on Saturday evening, Phil Sweeney told him to feck off, that all he had to do was say he was a freelance journalist working for the Irish Times or the Guardian.

Or the BBC.

That it was a confidence trick, like most things in life.

That he’d be fine.

Jimmy takes a shower. Then he goes out to walk around for a while and think about getting something to eat. It’s hot for April, at least hotter than he expected, and he’s overdressed. Life on the streets here has a familiar feel to it, by turns frenetic and chilled out, with lots of smells and colours. He spends some time sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park. A guy comes up and offers him some weed. Jimmy shakes his head and the guy wanders off.

Some skaters roll past.

Jimmy looks around.

What the fuck is he doing in New York?

How does he get from here, a park bench, to the fiftieth or sixtieth floor of one of those glass towers up there on the midtown horizon?

And something else he idly finds himself wondering: is he still being followed?

It was a feeling he couldn’t shake the other night.

On one level it seems preposterous – deluded, paranoid. But given what he’s discovered about these people, what he’s been told, isn’t it the least they would be doing?

Jimmy turns and looks over his shoulder.

Evening has begun to fall and is enveloping the expanse of downtown.

Suddenly, he’s hungry.

Behind him here, there are dozens of places he could eat at. He’ll find one… but in a few minutes.

He reaches for the phone in his pocket.

First he needs to make a couple of calls.

‘What do you want, a nine mil? I got Sigs, Glocks, Berettas, Mausers, whatever you want.’

Tom Szymanski studies the guy for a moment. This isn’t how he’d normally do this. How he’d normally do this would be to stand in a gun store and shoot the breeze with the gentleman behind the counter, a retired serviceman probably, and then proceed to the transaction – only problem here is he doesn’t have a licence and in New York City getting one takes time.

So it’s back channels, it’s a bar on Avenue C, it’s sitting in a booth opposite this jittery little spic fuck and hoping for the best.

‘You got a Beretta M9?’

‘Yeah, I got everything, my friend.’

I’m not your fucking -

‘How much?’

Haggle, haggle, and then it’s back here in half an hour. And half an hour after that again Szymanski’s back in his hotel room, loaded M9 on the bed, plus a bag of weed and a gram of coke. The drugs he bought because he could, they were right there in his face.

I got everything.

And it was the minimum he could have bought, really, because this guy had things Szymanski’s never even heard of, so-called research chemicals that are guaranteed to…

But Szymanski didn’t give a shit, he was just being polite.

He’s actually not interested in getting high. It’s not how he’s feeling at the moment, not where his head is at.

Where that is exactly, however, he isn’t too sure either.

Since he read about Senator Rundle in the paper before the weekend he’s had a strange laser-precision focus on everything around him. It’s like he’s already high. It’s like he’s somehow wired into this, with the story seeming to pop up on his grid every few hours or so – mentions on TV, for example, interview clips, a magazine cover at a newsstand he passes, snatches of a conversation he overhears in a store or in an elevator.

Hey, what do you make of that Senator Rundle?

And each time, in his mind, it jerks him back to Buenke, to this blubbering fuckwad framed in the doorway of the SUV, staring bug-eyed as Tube walks right up and pops one into the side of Ray Kroner’s skull. Then Ray’s body on the ground, in a heap, his twisted face visible, the top of his head.

Fuck.

Szymanski looks at the gun on the blanket, stares at it, concentrates.

Then Rundle being huddled away, past the other bodies, into a car, on to the airstrip, back to Paris… the big lie no doubt already forming, the stench of it everywhere within hours.

Jesus, how long can this go on? How intense can it get? And what if… what if Rundle secures the nomination? What if he goes on to win the election, for Christ’s sake? Four, possibly eight years of this shit?

Szymanski lowers himself onto the edge of the bed.

And every day? Every time he turns on his TV? Or goes online? Or walks out on the street? Or wakes up? No fucking way, Jack. It’d be intolerable, that’s what it would be.

He stretches out his arm.

It would be intolerable, so he’s not going to let it happen. It’s that simple.

He picks up the gun.

It has to be.

Jimmy spends most of Tuesday morning walking around midtown, familiarising himself with various locations – the BRX Building on Fifth, another office building on Lexington (one where he’s read that Gideon Global have their headquarters, even though he sees nothing there to indicate that they do), and a restaurant near the Flatiron where he’s meeting Bob Lessing, a friend of Phil Sweeney’s from what both men referred to, in separate conversations, as the ‘old days’.

Jimmy doesn’t know how useful any of this is going to be, but it makes him feel like he’s doing something.

The restaurant near the Flatiron is French and casual, and Bob Lessing is a guy in his late fifties wearing a grey suit and a bow tie. Apparently, he and Phil Sweeney worked together in the eighties and have been friends ever since. Lessing runs a PR firm here and specialises in strategic communications and risk analysis for large companies working overseas.

Of the three people Jimmy called yesterday evening, from the numbers Sweeney gave him, Lessing was the only one available to meet at such short notice.

‘So, Jimmy,’ he says, taking a piece of bread from the basket on the table, ‘how is the big man these days?’

‘He’s good. I don’t see him that often, but he’s good.’

Jimmy doesn’t know if Lessing is aware that Sweeney is, or might, be sick. Jimmy himself doesn’t know, but he’s assuming – assuming cancer of some kind.

At the same time, Jimmy is agitated. He’s not here to talk about Phil Sweeney.

After a few minutes, Lessing seems to sense this and moves things on. ‘Phil told me you might need a little help.’

‘Yeah, I’m… I’m working on a story.’

Jimmy explains, but couches it in fairly neutral terms, keeps it general. He doesn’t make any direct charges against the ‘parties’ involved or mention the Africa dimension. Phil told him to do this, and that Lessing would read between the lines.

As they eat, Lessing asks a series of questions that demonstrate – to Jimmy’s surprise, alarm almost – that he has indeed read between the lines, and very adeptly.

When their coffees arrive, Lessing goes silent for a bit. Then he says, ‘OK, here’s the thing, I’ve never worked with BRX, or Gideon, but I can tell you something, you have your work cut out here. BRX is privately owned, so no shareholder meetings, no reports, no information, and that’s how they like to keep it. Clark Rundle is also notoriously media-shy. As for Gideon Global, what I hear is that they’re specialising a lot these days in competitive intelligence and domestic surveillance – NSA contracts mostly – so trying to penetrate them? Forget it. One whiff, and they’ll penetrate you, if you catch my drift.’ He stirs sugar into his coffee. ‘You see, I work on the opposite side of the fence from you, and a lot of what I do is actually keeping people like you at bay. Or subtly veering you in certain directions. Perception management. Therefore even though I don’t work for BRX my gut instinct here is to protect them, and to obfuscate. But one thing I will tell you, and this is something I’ve learned from being in this business more than thirty years, and it’s this… that people fuck up. All the time. They make mistakes, and do stupid things, and in big companies like BRX a huge amount of time and energy goes into covering these mistakes up. And people like you, if you dig hard enough, if you make enough of a pain in the ass of yourself, sometimes you get results. Sometimes.’ He nods at the waiter for the check. ‘So what I’m going to do is refer you to one of the biggest pains in the ass on your side of the fence. She’ll be able to help you with this, whatever this thing is you have. More than I can. Corporate watch, all that stuff, it’s her, er… her métier.’ He takes out his BlackBerry. ‘I’ve dealt with her a good few times, and she’s very smart. Ellen Dorsey.’ He looks up. ‘You ready? Here’s her number.’

Fifteen minutes later, sitting on a bench in the park in front of the Flatiron, Jimmy calls Ellen Dorsey. He’s heard of her, even read some of her stuff online – from Rolling Stone, The Nation, Parallax, Wired – and he’s intimidated.

Of course.

‘Yep? Ellen Dorsey.’

But that’s not going to stop him.

‘Hi Ellen, my name’s Jimmy Gilroy, I just got your number from Bob Lessing.’

Silence.

That’s what Lessing told him to say.

Then, ‘Call me back in ten minutes.’

Click.

Ten minutes. He does a quick Google search on his phone. She’s thirty-nine. From Philadelphia. There’s a roll call of articles she’s written, stories she covered, awards won. There’s a link to a clip of an appearance she once made on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but he can’t access it.

He checks the time and calls her back.

‘Jimmy Gilroy, yeah? So, Bob tells me you’ve got something. And he assures me that you’re not a plant. Bizarrely enough, I trust Bob, so shoot.’

Jimmy pauses. ‘Not over the phone.’

‘Of course, right. Not over the phone. You know what, let me give you my address. You come here. I’m working, but we can talk.’

This is all happening pretty fast.

She lives near Ninety-third and Amsterdam. He walks a few blocks over and takes the subway. On the train up, he wonders what Bob Lessing said about him on the phone. At no point did Jimmy make it clear to Lessing who he was or wasn’t working for. He deliberately left it vague and Lessing didn’t ask.

He gets off at Ninety-sixth and Broadway, goes back to Ninety-third and wanders along until he finds her building.

She buzzes him up.

It’s still hot and he’s still overdressed and as he walks up to the fourth floor he feels like he’s going to faint.

He doesn’t.

Ellen Dorsey is waiting for him. She’s small and lean and spiky, with short dark hair and blue eyes. She’s wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt.

‘Come on in.’

They shake.

‘Thanks for seeing me.’

She holds the door open for him. He walks into the apartment. In a weird way, and though a lot bigger, it’s not unlike his own. Books everywhere and a desk covered in shit. Hers backs onto a window, overlooking the street, so when she’s working at it, the idea is, presumably, she’s facing the room, less distraction.

She goes over and sits behind it now, and indicates for him to take the chair in front of it.

‘I’m in the middle of an article,’ she says, ‘with a looming deadline, so you’ll excuse me if I multi-task for a bit here.’

‘No, of course, fine, go ahead, I won’t keep you long anyway.’

‘Tea, you want some, or water, or -’

‘No. I’m fine.’

Ellen Dorsey nods and then starts clacking away at her keyboard, looking down at her notes. ‘So,’ she says, ‘talk.’

Jimmy starts, fixing his gaze on a knot in one of the floorboards.

He tells it pretty succinctly, and doesn’t hold back as he did with Lessing. He explains about the biography. He describes his conversations with Larry Bolger and Dave Conway. Then he spells it all out – the conference, the mine, the thanaxite, Gianni Bonacci, the helicopter crash.

BRX, Gideon Global.

At one point he realises that the clacking has stopped and he looks up.

Ellen Dorsey is staring at him. ‘Holy shit,’ she says, holding her mouth open. ‘Holy shit.’ Then she laughs and shakes her head. ‘You couldn’t make this up, so I’m assuming you haven’t.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ He shifts his weight in the chair. He realises he has made quite an impression on her. ‘My only problem,’ he says, ‘as you’ve probably guessed, is the lack of hard evidence.’

Dorsey nods. ‘Sure, sure, but still.’

First time he’s heard that.

‘The other thing I don’t have’, he goes on, deciding to lay all his cards on the table, ‘is a job. This started out as something else, a book about that actress who died in the crash. So I don’t have resources, or any kind of support.’ He pauses. ‘I came here to New York because it seemed like the next logical move.’

Dorsey considers this, swivelling in her chair. ‘Have you made contact with any of the principals? Do they know you’re looking into this?’

‘Not directly, but someone knows.’ He tells her about the break-in at his apartment. ‘Also, I’m not sure, but I have the impression I’m being followed.’

Dorsey laughs again. ‘Well, if you’re not, you certainly will be when you leave this place. I get a lot of attention from interested parties. You get used to it.’ She stops swivelling. ‘By the way, what’s the connection with Bob Lessing?’

Jimmy explains – the eighties, Phil Sweeney, his old man.

Dorsey seems to get it. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Look. This is an incredible story, and I’ll be honest with you, it doesn’t surprise me one bit. The scramble for resources in Africa has thrown up a lot of nasty shit going back for the last, what, hundred, hundred and fifty years? But the problem, as you say, is proving it. With companies like BRX, guys like Rundle, that takes a lot of work, a lot of digging, a lot of time. You don’t come at them head-on or they’ll crush you, in some cases literally. You gnaw at them, like a tiny rodent they can’t see until it’s too late. And that’s the thing about this job. It’s got a glamorous image, but most of the time it’s mind-numbingly boring.’

Jimmy wants to say, I know, believe me, but he holds back.

‘So, what have we got here?’ she says, shunting her chair forward and leaning on the desk. ‘I’m the one with experience and connections, you’re the one with the story, is that it?’

He supposes it is, and nods.

‘Well, you’re going to have to give me time to think about it, do a little background. How long are you here?’

Jimmy’s heart sinks. ‘End of the week.’

She clicks her tongue. ‘Hhhm. I got to finish this.’ She taps the pile of notes on her desk. ‘Let me call you tomorrow, OK? Then we can sit down and hammer it out.’

‘Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.’

She smiles. He stands up.

Back out on Ninety-third, Jimmy finds it hard not to be disappointed. Whatever expectations he had coming over to New York were clearly unreasonable. This is a big project, requiring time, and lots of it.

But how much time does he have?

He walks back towards the Ninety-sixth Street subway station – slowly, lost in thought. As he approaches the entrance stairwell, his phone rings. He stops and takes it out.

‘Hello.’

‘Jimmy? Ellen Dorsey. Listen, I’ve just been flicking around online and I came across something. Might be an opportunity.’

‘Yeah?’ He stands there looking out at the passing traffic.

‘Clark Rundle’s brother – you know, the senator? He’s speaking at some thing tomorrow morning at the Blackwood Hotel on East Fifty-eighth Street. Apparently, there’s a lot of buzz about it because people are speculating that he might be about to announce his candidacy.’

‘Oh.’

‘And if that’s the case, you should go along, hang around outside, because more than likely Clark Rundle himself will be there, supporting his bro. At least it’d be a chance for you to get a look at him. Might be the only chance you ever get.’

He can’t get a straight answer out of them. They say she’s just not available.

But what does that mean?

So when will she be available?

It’s not possible to say at the moment.

Jesus Christ.

Rundle slams the phone down.

Why can’t he just buy Nora, buy her outright, set her up in an apartment and have done with it?

Heading off now to have dinner with J.J. and Sally and Eve, he should be in a good mood, but he isn’t. He actually has to remind himself that things are going pretty well at the moment.

Tomorrow morning, for instance.

J.J. announces, then with any luck Jimmy Vaughan shows up, endorses, commits. And that’s pretty much it.

It all gets taken to the next level

Clark gets taken to the next level.

Because Vaughan has already brought him in on this Paloma robotics programme, and that’s a long game by anyone’s definition. On top of which, what, two years campaigning and maybe eight years in the White House? Outstanding. But Jimmy Vaughan won’t be around for most of that, which he must know, so Clark can’t help seeing this as a process being set in motion.

A sort of… succession mechanism.

Is it any wonder he’s a bit jittery?

Dinner at Quaranta proceeds nicely. J.J. has had a few good days – plenty of media exposure, his celebrity growing at a rate that can only be described as exponential. He seems to have an appeal, something indefinable the camera draws out of him when he’s sitting in a studio, an X factor for politicians you couldn’t pay for. Tomorrow morning’s announcement is set to ramp that up a further few notches.

During the meal, J.J. takes call after call on his cell phone. His staff are setting things up at the Blackwood and J.J. likes to micro-manage. Herb Felder even drops by with the latest draft of his speech, which J.J. asks Rundle to throw his eye over. Sally and Eve tease them about this.

The two brothers.

Echoes.

‘Any chance you’ll make Clark attorney general?’

The atmosphere at the table is light, even skittish, but everyone understands how this works. They have to be excited or it won’t play.

It’s a confidence trick.

Anything could happen between now and the nomination, let alone afterwards, so they might as well enjoy it while it lasts. At the same time, and up to a certain point, the confidence trick must also apply to themselves. Because if they don’t believe, and act as if, they have a reasonable stab at this, who else is going to?

At the end of the meal, as they’re finishing their coffees, J.J.’s phone goes off again. Then Rundle’s does, too. As they both reach out to answer them, the wives roll their eyes.

Rundle looks at the display and sees that it’s Don Ribcoff. ‘Don.’

J.J.’s eyes widen and he mouths something at Rundle.

‘Clark, I have an update. I need to talk to you.’

Rundle is confused. What? This across the table.

J.J. mouths it again. Jimmy Vaughan. He points at his phone, then sticks his thumb up.

Rundle’s heart skips a beat. Confirmation. This is fantastic. ‘Don, what is it, what do you need?’

‘Can we meet?’

‘No, Don, we can’t.’ Rundle rolls his eyes. ‘I’m having dinner. What is it? Tell me.’ He’s watching J.J. working Vaughan, the way he works a room, but over the phone. Confidence is such a weird thing, he thinks, self-perpetuating, self-regenerating, the more you have…

‘I don’t really -’

‘Jesus, Don, just tell me.’

‘OK. That thing we talked about the other day, the guy?’

What thing? What guy? Rundle is caught now between his excitement and a sudden burst of extreme irritation. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Don?’ he whispers into the phone. ‘Spell it out, would you?’

Ribcoff pauses, then sighs. ‘The guy? The journalist? Jimmy Gilroy? He’s becoming a problem.’ Rundle furrows his brow. ‘We took another look at him. He went to Italy last week. He spoke to Gianni Bonacci’s widow.’

‘What?’

‘That was before he met with Dave Conway. And that’s not all.’ Ribcoff pauses again. Rundle waits, the room around him going slightly out of focus now. ‘He’s here. In New York.’

‘What?’

‘He arrived yesterday -’

‘Jesus, Don.’

‘I swear to God, Clark, I’ve only just been given the report this minute.’ He sighs. ‘Look, there was a delay.’

Rundle can’t believe this, any of it. ‘He’s here?’

‘Yeah, we tracked his movements online. He booked a room at a hotel in the West Village, five nights. Arrived into JFK yesterday afternoon.’

Rundle gets up from the table, nodding, but not making direct eye contact with anyone. He moves away. ‘Are you on him? I mean, what’s he doing? Jesus.’

‘Yeah, we’re on him, but he doesn’t seem -’

‘Don, I don’t care how he seems.’ Rundle stops. He’s standing between two tables near the side of the room, facing the bar. Quaranta is generous when it comes to table spacing. Acoustics might be a different matter. ‘What can you do about him?’

There is a pause here, during which Rundle takes a quick look on either side of him. Sitting at the table to his left is Ray Tyner, baby-faced teen star turned serious-contender leading man. At the table to his right, judging from the get-up, is a Roman Catholic bishop, or a cardinal maybe.

‘Options are limited,’ Ribcoff says, ‘because there’s something else.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ The cardinal flinches. ‘What is it?’

‘He paid a visit this afternoon to Ellen Dorsey, she’s an investigative -’

‘I know who Ellen Dorsey is. Fuck.’

‘So, the point is, she gives him a little cover, some profile. Whatever about him, you don’t want her on your tail.’

‘Meaning?’

Ribcoff hesitates, then whispers, as though he can see the cardinal too. ‘We can’t just take the motherfucker out. We’ve got to be careful.’

Rundle swallows. He walks towards the bar and sits on a stool, but turns outward, facing the room. After a while he says, ‘You know what, Don? He doesn’t know anything. He can’t. Maybe he’s been told some stuff, but that’s as far as it goes. Has to be. It was three years ago. We’re covered. There’s no proof of anything. He makes a move, says a word, and we’ll get legal to shit all over him.’

‘OK.’

He catches J.J.’s eye from across the room and nods.

‘But don’t let him out of your sight, you hear me?’

12

JIMMY GETS UP EARLY and goes out in search of coffee. It’s another really nice day and he just about manages to dress appropriately. He walks along tree-lined, sun-dappled West Fourth Street and tries to imagine living in one of these brownstones. They’re gorgeous, but he could never afford the rents around here.

Besides, he’d miss the sea from his window.

He finds a coffee shop out on Sixth.

Convinced now that he is being followed, he can’t help feeling self-conscious, as though every move he makes, every gesture, is being watched and graded. A corollary of this, of course, is that his life might be in danger.

He stays in the coffee shop for an hour, until just after nine, sipping coffee and watching people as they come and go.

When he is out on the street again, he flags down a cab. He does this on impulse. He tells the driver East Fifty-eighth Street and they quickly join the flow of traffic heading uptown.

Jimmy half turns and looks through the rear window.

If he has a tail, could he lose it this easily?

Seems possible.

He turns around again, and looks ahead.

But it isn’t as if they’d have much trouble trying to work out where he’s going.

They.

Jimmy feels a surge of frustration here. Over three years ago six people died in a helicopter crash. They were murdered. He knows who was responsible, and why. He was told, and he believes it.

But that incident, and what led up to it, is locked away now, in a glass case, perceived by the public at large, and by the authorities, as a tragic accident.

So what does he think, he can come along and change that? He can smash the glass and replace what’s behind it?

With what?

The cab turns east at Fifty-seventh Street.

This event at the Blackwood Hotel is supposed to start at ten o’clock. He’ll arrive half an hour early and hang around. See what he can see. Without a press pass, he won’t get inside the door of the hotel, that’s for sure, won’t get near it, but he might catch a glimpse of Clark Rundle on his way in.

He gets the driver to pull over between Madison and Park. He pays and gets out. He’ll walk the rest of the way, one block north and two over.

From about half a block away he identifies the hotel, sees the marquee, and a small gathering of what look like photographers.

And security.

It’s a busy street, lots of midtown bustle, so no need to be overly self-conscious. He comes to One Beacon Court, and peers in at the glimmering, elliptical courtyard as he passes.

A few moments later, two or three buildings before the Blackwood, he stops and leans against some railings. He looks around, up the street, towards the hotel. There are more arrivals, technicians, a camera crew.

People standing around, random individuals like himself, free country.

He takes out his phone, but wishes he smoked, like his old man – standing there in the street, in a three-piece suit, busy with cigarettes and a lighter.

No questions asked.

Szymanski is tired. He feels like he was awake all night, but he must have slept periodically, five minutes here and there, enough to keep ticking over – micro doses, but never any of the deep stages, the REM, the restorative shit. That’s partly why he steered clear of the coke, which he’ll leave for housekeeping maybe. The weed he smoked some of, but most of it’s still in the bag.

He’ll leave that, too.

He checks out of the hotel at nine thirty.

He carries a canvas holdall with his stuff in it, but not a lot of time passes before he’s thinking about discarding it somewhere.

The day’s a little warm for the leather jacket he’s wearing, but the M9 fits perfectly in the lower inside pocket, so he needs it.

What has he got in the bag anyway? A couple of changes, toiletries, minor personal items. Nothing he couldn’t replace in a few minutes at a J. Crew and a Duane Reade. That was always the Gideon way, travel light, no excess baggage, leave it all behind you – including family, girlfriends, bosses, shitty jobs, whatever.

They didn’t have room, and weren’t interested.

Passing a construction site he tosses his bag into a dumpster.

There, gone, along with everything else.

But really this particular everything else – his everything else – he tossed a long time ago, when he signed up with Gideon in the first place.

Szymanski gets onto Fifth Avenue and starts walking north.

So that’s not what this is about, being unable, or unwilling, to go home to C-town – it’s about being unable to go back to work.

Unpaid leave.

Effective immediately.

That’s all he had left and now it’s been taken from him, and even if they’d acted differently, if they’d kept him on, it was all shot to shit anyway, as far as he was concerned, after what happened.

Ray Kroner.

Those people, the women and kids, the man at the wall.

What were their names? At least Ray had a name. And he got a body bag.

More than they got.

Szymanski turns right at Fifty-eighth Street. It’s a few blocks over.

He wonders about Ray’s family, out there in Phoenix, about what kind of an explanation they got, if any, and about the other families, the ones back in the DRC, in Buenke.

He knows they didn’t get any explanations.

They have to put up with Arnold Kimbela for Christ’s sake, day in, day out.

He slows down.

Man, some of the shit he saw over there, slave labour, systematic torture, systematic rape.

Explain that.

As he gets close to the hotel, Szymanski slows down even more, to a crawl. There’s security everywhere.

Naturally.

He’s assuming it’s all Gideon – their domestic division, the pussy squad, guys in suits, underarm holsters, earpieces. It’s unlikely that he’ll know any of them, or that they’ll know him. Unless Donald Ribcoff himself is around the place, which he probably will be. The CEO of Gideon is notoriously hands-on, especially when it comes to the high-profile jobs. He was in and out of Buenke all the time. But would he recognise Szymanski? Maybe, maybe not.

What does it fucking matter now, though, right?

Szymanski stands across the street from the hotel.

So this is it? He presses a hand against the gun in his jacket pocket. This is what it all comes down to in the end, the life of a spineless, deceitful bastard with a propensity to showboat on TV, who if he hadn’t been there that day, and hadn’t lied about it afterwards…

Szymanski finds the air around where he’s standing suddenly heavy with some local cooking smell. He realises his timing may not be the best, but he can imagine lying down now, there on the sidewalk, drifting off to sleep, falling into a pit of dreams.

He looks around.

People everywhere.

Just what exactly does he think he’s doing?

When Rundle arrives into J.J.’s Manhattan office on Third Avenue he’s surprised to see that Jimmy Vaughan is there, sitting on a couch in the corner shooting the breeze with some of the younger staff members. The idea was that Rundle and J.J. would head over to the Blackwood together, from here, wives in tow. Vaughan would show up whenever he chose – but over there, at the Blackwood.

Not here.

Rundle didn’t expect this.

‘Clark,’ J.J. calls from across the room. ‘Where’s Eve?’

Rundle walks towards him. ‘She’s down in the car, waiting.’ He looks at his watch, to reinforce the point. ‘Sally?’

‘She’s over there.’ He indicates another office behind him, door closed. ‘Some issue with her hair.’

A few feet away, in front of a desk, several of the senior staffers, Herb Felder included, appear to be tinkering – still tinkering – with J.J.’s speech.

‘We are all of us,’ one of them says, ‘we are each of us. Fuck. We are each of us. We are all of us.’

‘Try we are each of us,’ Herb Felder says.

‘OK, OK.’ Red pen on paper. ‘OK. Because we are each of us shareholders in this great democracy, we are each of us the bearers of a sacred trust -’

Rundle looks at J.J. ‘Everything under control?’

J.J. nods. ‘Yeah.’ He smiles, something he’s good at. ‘You know what? I think we can nail this thing.’

‘So do I.’ Rundle smiles as well. But his smile has an in-built smirk to it, always had. He glances over in Vaughan’s direction. ‘He thinks so too, apparently.’

J.J. widens his eyes in delight. ‘I know. Let’s go over and say hello.’

As they get to the corner, Vaughan looks up. ‘Here he is, the man.’

‘Mr Vaughan.’

This is for the benefit of the junior staffers. Clark and J.J. have known Jimmy Vaughan since they were kids. He’s like an uncle to them.

‘You ready for this, Senator?’

Vaughan is sitting at one end of the couch, legs crossed, looking small and slightly frail. But his flashing blue eyes mitigate this impression somewhat, and there’s no question at all about who’s in charge here.

‘Absolutely. Bring it on, that’s what I say.’ J.J. looks around, being inclusive, already working this, the first of the day’s, and the season’s, many rooms.

Sitting next to Vaughan on the couch is a pretty redhead and standing around in a semicircle are three nerdy-looking guys, all of them in their early twenties.

‘So tell me, Senator,’ Vaughan says. ‘I’m curious. Why are you running?’

J.J. laughs. ‘You want to know the truth?’

‘Good Lord, no.’

Everyone laughs.

‘OK then, because I want to make a difference, because I feel that -’

‘Fine, fine, give us the truth.’

More laughter.

‘OK, but you know what? It’s actually the same answer, maybe framed a little differently. Because the truth is, I’m tired of the senate. Doesn’t do it for me anymore. Being in the senate these days is all about gridlock and rules and obstructionist bullshit, it’s chasing the money and playing to the base, it’s exhausting commutes, it’s endless press and media and blogging and tweeting, Jesus, it’s -’

‘Whoa, take it easy there, bubba.’

‘No, the thing is, I want to be able to do stuff. What was it someone once said? It used to be that you spent two years as a senator, two years as a politician and two years as a demagogue. Now you spend the full six as a demagogue. It’s crazy.’

Vaughan nods. ‘Richard Russell.’

‘Right.’

There is a brief silence.

‘So, what are you telling me, that’s your stump speech? Maybe I should run.’

More laughter, but this time it’s a little tentative.

Rundle senses J.J. stiffen beside him.

After a moment one of the nerds steps in. ‘Can I ask you, Mr Vaughan, what is it that keeps you going? I read about your work rate somewhere recently, projects you’re still involved in, companies you’ve acquired, it’s awesome.’

‘Fear of death,’ Vaughan says immediately, and smiles. Then he points at the senator. ‘You think his stump speech sucks? Wait till you hear mine. It’s a real downer.’ He waves a hand in the air. ‘No, but seriously, son, seriously. When you get to my age you just want to grab on to the future, you know, you just want to hold it in your two hands and look at it. Now the thing is, most folks don’t get the chance to do that, but in my line of work, developing new companies, with new ideas, I sort of can.’

Rundle sneaks a glance at his watch.

‘Let me explain,’ Vaughan goes on – the nerds and the pretty redhead hanging on his every word now. ‘History, right? It’s there, undeniably, you can survey it, and mull over it, from the Pyramids to the Renaissance, from the Nazis to 9/11, it’s all laid out for us. But the future? You can only ever have access to the tiniest, slimmest portion of it. Beyond what’s left of your own life, of whatever few years you’ve got remaining, everything is a blank, right? It’s unreachable. It’s unknowable. And yet.’ He raises a finger in the air and wags it. ‘And yet. Today, more than at any other time in history, we can guess with some confidence what the future might be like. People always used to believe they lived in a time following a golden age, but now it’s the other way around. Now we always feel we live in a time just preceding one. You get me?’

Heads nod vigorously.

Some of J.J.’s other staffers, the senior ones, wander over to listen.

‘Right, now we’re in the infancy stages of various branches of scientific development – biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, that sort of thing – and since the rate of change in the next hundred years is probably going to equal or even exceed the rate of change in the last hundred, we can be fairly certain that no matter when we die it will be at a time when great advances are just about to take place. Which we won’t be around for. Which we’ll miss.’ He pauses. ‘Right? That’s the downer part.’

A ripple of nervous laughter.

Vaughan shifts his weight on the couch, shunts forward a bit. ‘But what I think, and what I try to do with some of these companies – and to answer your question – what I think is that if we work harder and faster, and redouble our efforts, and push, I mean whatever it takes, if we do that, we can get the jump on next season, next year, the next decade.’ He clenches his fist and raises it slightly. ‘If we imagine our way into the future with enough vigour and determination, we can somehow actually arrive there. It’s a bit like that old slogan from the World’s Fair, I remember it as a kid.’ He pauses. ‘Tomorrow, Now!’

‘Oh my god,’ the pretty redhead beside him says, hand on chest, clearly unable to help herself, ‘that’s so inspiring.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’ Vaughan turns toward her and nods in acknowledgement. ‘Clark there knows what I’m talking about. Right, Clark?’

Rundle is taken by surprise. ‘Sure, Mr Vaughan, yeah. Absolutely.’

At that point, Herb Felder intervenes, tapping his watch.

Minutes later, they’re all downstairs and piling into various cars.

Rundle sees Don Ribcoff on the sidewalk, but there’s no time to talk.

As planned, he and J.J. ride together.

When the car pulls out and joins the flow of traffic, J.J. exhales loudly and says, ‘What the fuck was that?’

Rundle turns to him, ‘Look, he’s always been like that. Despite what he says, the old man thinks he’s going to live forever.’ He turns the other way and looks out the window, Third Avenue flitting past, the corner of Fifty-eighth just up ahead. ‘But we know different, right?’

Jimmy glances up and sees what looks like a flotilla of black limousines and SUVs turning onto to Fifty-eighth Street from Third Avenue. He leans back against the railings, almost as though he’s standing to attention, and watches.

Around the entrance to the hotel there is a flurry of activity – positions are taken, equipment is prepped. On either side of the marquee burly guys in suits line up, enough of them to create an effective blockade, with photographers moving around and behind them, dancing like boxers, already pointing, clicking, whirring.

The flotilla moves along the street at a stately pace. It then pulls in and stops, one of the limousines flush with the hotel entrance.

Along the line of vehicles – an SUV, three limos and another SUV, Jimmy can see them clearly now – multiple doors open at once and more burly guys in suits appear, some on the sidewalk, others on the street.

Jimmy steps away from the railings and moves a few paces along to try and see better. But he doesn’t get too close. He’s assuming he’s still under surveillance and doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

Undue attention.

He doesn’t want to alarm anyone. Not that there aren’t plenty of other people around the place now for them to be worried about.

Passersby, civilians, gawkers.

As the back doors of all three limos are being opened, Jimmy senses a collective, almost gravitational pull, a jolt, like an implosion, towards them. This is accompanied by a noticeable increase in the level of clicking and whirring.

From the first car, two ladies appear, in their forties, svelte and elegant. These, Jimmy takes it, are the Rundle wives. From the second car – slightly harder to see now, with the scramble intensifying – the Rundle brothers themselves appear, the senator with the wire brace on his hand and wrist, Clark instantly recognisable from photos in that Vanity Fair spread.

They all move from the kerb onto a carpet under the marquee. The pace is leisurely, and Jimmy has the impression that someone from inside the hotel has emerged to greet them. This causes a delay, as there seems to be some handshaking and small talk going on. It’s possible they’re doing this for the benefit of the photographers and camera crews, but Jimmy doesn’t mind, because standing in his direct line of vision at the moment – through an accidental configuration of the crowd, and it surely won’t last – is the only person here this morning he’s interested in seeing, Clark Rundle.

The chairman and CEO of BRX is tall and distinguished-looking, but in a central casting sort of way. Jimmy would love to be able to read his expression, to decode it, to pick up on something in it, vibes or a signal that would explain, or illuminate, but nothing like that happens.

It’s the face of a middle-aged business executive.

What did he expect?

And when a security guy moves and cuts off Jimmy’s line of vision, the face goes with it, instantly forgotten, the slate wiped clean.

A second or two later, with a further shift in the crowd formation, Jimmy catches a flash of the senator – telegenic smile in place as he greets someone in the line, pointing at them in recognition.

But then something happens.

From the other side of the street, just up a bit, there’s a sudden movement. A man breaks away from a line of people at the kerb and comes rushing across the street in a diagonal line towards the hotel entrance. He’s shouting, ‘Senator, Senator.’

Everyone turns and looks. The man is big, in a leather jacket, with a buzz cut and mirror shades.

Reaction is swift.

Two of the security detail double back around the main limousine and head straight into his path, blocking him from getting any further.

‘Senator,’ the man continues shouting, ‘tell us the truth, tell us where you were, tell us what you were doing.’

The security guys push him back, as others arrive to help.

Jimmy and everyone else – including those under the marquee – watch in shock for a couple of seconds. Then, as the senator starts to move, bodyguards bundling him inside, the man lunges forward once more, pushing against the security guys, and shouting, ‘Tell us about your trip to Buenke, Senator. Tell us what really happened.’

Jimmy freezes.

What?

The security guys shove the man back again and this time he breaks loose, taking a few steps away from them. ‘Assholes,’ he says, standing in the middle of the street now and starting to straighten his jacket. The security guys remain where they are, looking over their shoulders.

Jimmy glances back towards the marquee.

Gone.

Everyone inside, everyone who matters, the rest filtering in slowly, the show over.

Jimmy looks out at the street again. The security guys are shaking their heads at each other as the man in the leather jacket retreats, walking backwards for a bit, but then turning and striding off in the direction of Third Avenue.

A woman in front of Jimmy says to her companion, ‘What did that guy say?’

‘I don’t know, but what a freak.’

Jimmy stares at the backs of their heads.

Buenke.

He said Buenke.

He said tell us about your trip to Buenke.

Before he knows what he’s doing, Jimmy has skipped out onto the street and is crossing to the other side.

He walks quickly, glancing back every couple of seconds. When he gets to the corner, he turns right, and scans the sidewalk in front of him.

There he is, half a block away, buzz cut, black leather jacket.

Forward motion.

Keeping his distance, Jimmy follows.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK.’

Standing at the light, waiting to cross at Fifty-seventh Street, Tom Szymanski’s insides feel like they’re being put through a meat grinder. He can’t believe it. That’s all he had to offer? That was his A game? Shouting out stuff like some fucking anti-globalisation protester at a G8 summit?

Really?

Jesus.

The light changes and he moves forward, no idea where he’s going, that stupid Lipstick Building a few blocks on making him queasy now just having to look at it.

What happened?

He was primed and ready and he could have done it, easily. Granted, there wouldn’t have been any fine marksmanship involved, but if he’d positioned himself across the street, up close, clear view.

One shot is all it would have taken.

To the chest, or head.

M9 sliding from his pocket, arm outstretched, element of surprise – it would have been a piece of cake.

So what stopped him?

He doesn’t know.

He’s too fucking self-aware, maybe, too analytical. Too able to see different points of view at the same time, a potentially lethal trait in this line of business.

He doesn’t know.

Too tired?

He tried to convince himself he was crazy – and he is, up to a point, sure, given what he’s seen – but he doesn’t have that extra bit of crazy that Ray Kroner had, the bit that presses too hard on whatever nerve ending it is that causes you to… flip. And maybe that’s it, to stand there in the street and shoot some bastard in cold blood you don’t even know, you’d absolutely have to flip. But for him, back there on Fifty-eighth Street, as he gazed across at the entrance to the hotel, fingering the gun in his pocket, he just knew it was never going to happen.

Not today, not ever.

Tom Szymanski, too sane to flip.

But where did that leave him? He still had his sense of outrage over Buenke, over the ‘incident’ and the subsequent lies, he still had his raw anger – so he ends up, what, powerless, screaming like a girl?

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so fucking tragic.

What actually is funny is that he’s now thinking about going back and retrieving his holdall from that dumpster.

Or looking for the nearest Duane Reade.

And it’s when he stops suddenly, and turns around, to scan this section of Third Avenue for the familiar signage, that something strikes him – it’s in his line of sight, a barely perceptible flicker, a reaction maybe to his own action of turning around. That guy at the kerb? The one over there at the camera store window?

Szymanski turns back and moves on.

Someone recognised him. He didn’t see Donald Ribcoff at any point, but so what?

Also, he said Buenke.

Which basically means he’s fucked. Because Szymanski understands how Gideon works. The company is like some primitive organism – it’s lean, it’s hungry, and self-preservation is about the sum total of what it knows. Walking on now, crossing Fifty-sixth Street, he can even imagine its physical presence, on his back – and not just eyes, human ones, tracking his every move, but laser pointers as well, from the surveillance equipment they’ll be using.

Having to deal with this was never part of the plan.

Because if he’d carried out the plan he wouldn’t be here. If he’d shot the senator, they’d have shot him.

No question about it.

Right between the eyes.

So what happens now?

He turns at the next corner, onto Fifty-fifth Street, and speeds up. About halfway along the block he spins around suddenly and comes charging back, straight into the guy who was standing at the window of the camera store on Third, young guy, maybe late twenties, startled-looking, but -

You make a calculation.

He grabs the guy by the lapels of his jacket, steers him to the left and rams him up against the window of a Chinese restaurant.

He ignores anyone passing by and they ignore him.

It’s ten thirty in the morning and the Chinese restaurant is closed.

But make this quick.

‘You fuckin’ following me?’

Stupid question, and when he looks into the guy’s eyes one thing he knows straight off. He isn’t Gideon.

‘Yes,’ the guy says, swallowing. ‘I am, was, following you.’

And that’s not the answer Szymanski expected either. He loosens his grip slightly.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a journalist. I heard what you said back there.’

Szymanski hesitates, screws his eyes up. ‘What are you, British?’

‘Irish.’

Another moment of hesitation and then Szymanski releases him. He stands back, catches his breath, glances up and down the street.

The guy straightens his jacket and rubs his shoulder.

‘OK, Irish,’ Szymanski says, staring at him now, ‘what the fuck do you want?’

Inside the ballroom of the Blackwood Hotel, sitting at tables and standing at the back, several hundred people listen attentively as J.J. thumps out what Rundle considers to be a pretty good speech. He knows it’s a good speech because he’s read it, not because he’s listening to it right now.

That’s something he can’t do.

Listen, focus.

And given what happened outside, he doesn’t know how J.J. can do it either – focus on the speech, let alone deliver the damned thing.

From his front-row table, Rundle looks up, cell phone in hand.

‘… so, friends, in the light of this long, unbroken tradition of public service, it has always been my impulse to get out there and get my hands dirty, to get into the community and get involved, to do the right thing.’

Not only deliver it, shit, but do so with such obvious conviction.

It’s impressive.

‘And for that very same reason, I am now running for president, because I want to get involved, because I want to go on doing the right thing…’

The crowd bursts into spontaneous applause.

Rundle glances at his phone. He has texted Ribcoff three times and is still waiting for a reply.

Where the fuck is he? And where is Vaughan?

He looks up again, left and right, around the ballroom.

Unable to focus, because… Buenke.

That man out there said Buenke.

‘But I know I’m not alone in feeling such an impulse. I know that in your own way you feel it too. And it’s not hard to understand why. There’s no mystery about it.’

But who was he? Who is he? Certainly not the young journalist from Dublin Ribcoff spoke about the other day – not looking like that, he couldn’t be.

So who?

‘It’s because, quite simply, we are each of us shareholders in this great democracy, we are each of us the bearers of a sacred trust. And so today, in New York City, I ask you to help me protect that sacred trust. I ask you to support the notions of integrity and accountability.’

Rundle’s phone vibrates. He looks at it.

‘I ask you to vote for truth, for equality, for justice. I ask you to join me in the greatest journey of our lives. I ask you to be right there by my side as we march on Washington.’

Need to speak, v. urgent, am in reception.

‘I ask you to embrace your destiny. I ask you, when the time comes, to vote for John Rundle. Thank you and God bless America.’

Putting his phone away, Rundle rises with the cheering crowd but immediately slips off to the side, head down, and makes for the back of the room, and the exit.

When he gets out to reception, leaving the rapturous applause behind, he spots Ribcoff straightaway. The two men move towards each other at speed, converging by a gigantic potted palm plant in the centre of the lobby.

‘The fuck, Don.’

Ribcoff looks furious, barely able to speak.

‘He’s Gideon. Motherfucker.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘He’s one of ours, that guy out on the street.’ Pointing. ‘He was there, in Buenke, when it happened. He helped save your brother’s life for Christ’s sake.’

‘I don’t -’

‘He seemed really stressed by it at the time, by the whole thing, I don’t know. They figured he might be unstable. So they put him on leave.’

‘Leave.’

‘But we’re not talking regular army leave, where you come back after a month.’

Rundle can’t believe this. ‘You fired him?’

‘More or less.’

‘Jesus. And now what? This is some kind of blowback?’

Ribcoff shakes his head, unable even to make eye contact. ‘We’d have taken him out already, except…’

Rundle waits. ‘Except?’

‘Except apparently right now he’s down on Fifty-fifth Street talking to Jimmy fucking Gilroy.’

13

‘SO YOU’RE WHAT, some kind of a journalist?’

Jimmy nods, seeing himself intermittently reflected in the guy’s mirror shades, and finding this disconcerting to say the least. They’re both standing at the kerb now, next to a fire hydrant. Every couple of seconds the guy flicks his head left, then right, checking out either end of the street. He’s agitated, and seems dangerous. It’s not just the buzz cut and the shades, he’s brawny and muscular and looks as if he could uproot this fire hydrant with one hand and smash it over someone’s head.

Jimmy’s, for instance.

But for all that, and the sense they both clearly have that they’re being watched, Jimmy feels strangely calm. There’s something here, he knows it, and he’s not going to let it go.

‘That’s right,’ he says, adopting a tone he hopes he’ll be able to maintain. ‘Investigative journalist. I’m working on a book about a helicopter crash that happened a few years ago in Ireland and which I believe,’ looking left and right himself now, ‘was perpetrated by some of our friends up the street here.’

The guy looks at him. ‘I don’t have any fucking friends here.’

Jimmy swallows. ‘Figure of speech. I’m talking about BRX, and Gideon Global.’

‘Oh really?’ the guy says and laughs sourly. ‘BRX and Gideon?’ He scans the street again, east, west, but when he looks back at Jimmy, he pauses, holding his gaze for a moment, as though weighing something up. ‘I could tell you some fucking stories about them.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’d like to hear them.’ Beat. ‘What’s your name?’

The guy hesitates, weighing this up, too. Then, ‘Tom.’ He shrugs. ‘Whatever. That’ll do for the moment.’

‘Tom. OK.’ Jimmy feels a spasm of excitement, giddiness almost, and can’t believe what he’s about to say next. ‘Do me a favour, Tom, will you, and take those fucking shades off?’

This would be the moment for Tom to uproot the fire hydrant, but to Jimmy’s surprise and relief he doesn’t. He takes off his shades and clips them to his shirt pocket.

His eyes are a deep blue, but a deep something else as well.

They stare at each other for a moment, traffic rumbling past, cars, yellow cabs, vans.

SUVs.

Then the guy extends his hand, ‘Tom Szymanski.’

They shake.

‘So, Tom,’ Jimmy says, ‘what do you say we go somewhere and sit down, get a cup of coffee, yeah?’

The car pulls into a space across the street from the coffee shop. It has tinted windows, but isn’t anything conspicuous, isn’t a limo or an SUV – there are enough of those around the place already.

In a booth along the side window of the coffee shop sit Jimmy Gilroy and Tom Szymanski.

Rundle can see them clearly from here.

They’re facing each other over cups of coffee, talking.

About fucking what, though? Because the thing is, how did they hook up?

Rundle has that horrible sensation of being in the middle of a dream you are aware of having but can’t direct in any way or put a stop to.

Next to him, Ribcoff sits with an open laptop, a Bluetooth headset and two separate phones on the go. Switching between devices, he taps keys, whispers instructions, waits, listens. There’s no point interrupting him. He’s doing his job.

Rundle has his own laptop open in front of him and is keeping an eye on developments more generally. J.J.’s speech went really well and is already being blogged about and dissected on various political websites. Only one blogger he’s come across so far has mentioned what happened outside the hotel, and that was a throwaway comment about no event in New York ever being complete without its requisite crazy person.

All the live feeds came from inside the hotel.

However, there must have been at least one camera crew outside that caught the incident – even though it only lasted a couple of seconds, even though they’d have been taken by surprise, even though they’d initially have been facing the wrong way.

The other straw he’s desperately clutching at is the fact that what Tom Szymanski said didn’t make much sense.

Because who’s ever heard of Buenke? If he’d said Congo, now that would have been different. Rundle feels his stomach lurch at the very thought of it. But Szymanski didn’t say Congo. And it’s unlikely anyone will have picked up on what he did say.

Which means that nothing really bad has happened.

Not yet, at any rate.

‘Don,’ Rundle says, glancing across the street now, a slight crack in his voice. ‘What’s next?’

‘We’re sending an asset in,’ Ribcoff replies, without looking up from the laptop. ‘He’ll be wired every which way to Sunday, so we’ll be able to see the subjects at close range and hear what they’re saying.’

‘But -’

‘And out in Jersey they’re working on background stuff, see what we can dig up. Just in case.’

Just in case what? They have to wage some kind of a PR offensive afterwards? When the dust settles?

That’ll be too late.

Jesus.

With the resources they have at their disposal, you’d think they could…

Rundle’s heart is thumping. ‘Look, Don, we know what they’re saying, or will be saying sooner or later, so…’

Ribcoff looks up. ‘What?’

‘This is an extreme situation. It requires an extreme solution.’

‘You think I don’t know that, Clark? But it’s also a live situation… it’s unpredictable, highly volatile, it’s unfolding in real time, and in an exposed, public location.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, midtown Manhattan? On a busy weekday morning? This isn’t fucking Baghdad here. Our options are very limited.’

The first twenty minutes are awkward, a period of adjustment. A lot of it is linguistic. Tom Szymanski is obviously smart, but he’s not familiar with Jimmy’s accent or with certain expressions he might use. And while Jimmy himself, like every other person on the planet, is exposed to the lingo here on a daily basis – he finds there’s something disconcertingly raw about the way Tom Szymanski speaks.

So, at first, they stumble over each other’s words.

‘What?’

‘Sorry?’

But then it settles down.

They stop at the first coffee shop they come to and take a booth by the window siding onto Fifty-fifth Street. The place isn’t that busy, there are only a few people dotted around, sitting at tables or at the counter.

The other four booths along by the window, two ahead of them, two behind, are empty.

The waitress is a grumpy-looking Latina woman in her forties.

Behind the counter two young guys work quietly, chopping and slicing – prepping, Jimmy imagines, for the lunchtime crowd later.

Coffees arrive, both black.

Jimmy takes the lead in offering up information. He’s a political journalist who has written for a national newspaper and is currently working on a freelance book project. A significant area of his research concerns the involvement of BRX in a mining concession in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Tom Szymanski nods along at this, taking occasional sips from his coffee.

‘So when we were outside the hotel back there,’ Jimmy says, ‘and I heard you refer to Buenke, naturally I was curious.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, it’s not exactly common knowledge that BRX is in there. They won’t talk about it, and certainly not to someone like me. So yeah. Of course.’ Jimmy pauses, trying to pace this, but aware, too, that time is short. ‘And you seemed to be implying that Senator Rundle himself has been to Buenke? Is that correct?’

‘I wasn’t implying it. I said it.’

‘OK.’

‘That lying cocksucker was there, let me tell you.’

‘How do you know?’ This sounds very abrupt. Jimmy braces himself.

‘How do I know? Coz I was there, too. I saw him.’

‘Really?’

Szymanski looks around, nods. ‘Yeah, for the last couple of years I’ve been working as a contractor for Gideon Global. Half of that time I’ve spent in Congo, shunting people back and forth between the airstrip and the mine. Or guarding the mine. Or escorting shipments of whatever shit it is they’re digging up out there from the mine to the airstrip.’

‘Wow.’

Wow? Jimmy needs to step it up here, to focus, and get some of this down. He reaches for his pocket. ‘Do you mind if I take notes?’

Szymanski shakes his head.

Jimmy pulls out his notebook and pen, flips to an empty page. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s a shithole of a place, believe me.’ Then he sighs, impatient at something, or exasperated. ‘Actually, that’s not true. It’s a beautiful fucking country, and I mean breathtaking, man, like nothing you’ve ever seen. And I’d hazard a guess that the people are pretty cool, too, but I never really got near any of them. I did see some of the shit they have to put up with, though, and that was enough for me. Basically BRX calls the shots, but the local heavy is a guy called -’

‘Arnold Kimbela.’

‘Yeah. Fucking dirtbag.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Anyway, that’s who the senator was down there seeing. The colonel. At his so-called compound.’

Jimmy stares at the page in his notebook. ‘When exactly… are we talking about?’

Szymanski laughs at this. ‘Two weeks ago, more or less.’ He holds up his hand. ‘This? The injured hand? It didn’t happen in fucking Paris. That was all made up. It happened in Congo. We were on our way back to the airstrip.’

As Jimmy continues staring at the page in his notebook, his brain tries to process the information he’s just heard, but its significance is almost too huge to take in at once – implications, ramifications, spin off it like pieces of shrapnel.

‘Quite a serious claim you’re making there,’ he says eventually.

Szymanski nods. ‘For sure. And that’s not all there is.’

No, of course not.

Jimmy is beginning to wonder now if this isn’t another of those conversations he’s been having recently that subsequently evaporates – unrecorded, uncorroborated, unconfirmed.

‘So,’ he says, a little wearily, ‘tell me more.’

‘I will. But first I want to know something from you. Tell me about this helicopter crash you were talking about and what it has to do with the mine at Buenke.’

‘Fair enough,’ Jimmy says, and launches into it. It’s like a party piece now, each time modified to suit whoever he’s talking to. In this version he holds back on certain specifics, Gianni Bonacci’s name, any mention of thanaxite, some other stuff.

As he’s talking someone enters the coffee shop, a business-looking guy in a suit, with a newspaper under his arm. He nods at the waitress and takes a seat in a booth by the side window, two down from the one where Jimmy and Szymanski are sitting.

Jimmy can see him over Szymanski’s shoulder.

The guy orders coffee and starts reading his paper.

Jimmy and Szymanski exchange looks, each thinking the same thing, but then Jimmy continues, huddling in a bit, lowering his voice, speeding it up.

He wants to hear what Tom Szymanski has to say.

He wants to get that far, at least.

‘… so this TV actress, the fact that she was there too basically sucked all the oxygen out of the story and meant that the real target, the UN inspector, hardly got a mention. Whether this was intentional or not, I don’t know, but from their point of view, it couldn’t have worked out better.’

Rundle is staring in disbelief at Ribcoff’s screen. The image is grainy and a little shaky, but it’s fine – the back of one guy’s head, and a partial view of the other guy’s face. The sound is what counts, though, and that’s very good. According to Ribcoff, it travels from inside the coffee shop to Gideon’s fusion centre in New Jersey – where it gets a quick ‘bath’, for interference – and then shoots back here to his laptop, and with only something like a five-second delay.

Otherwise, he says, it might be too hard to make out.

But it’s like Ribcoff is showing off, excited about how cool his equipment is – when all Rundle can think about is what they’re hearing.

‘… and you’re telling me this shit was to cover up their involvement in the mine?’

‘Apparently.’

There is a pause, then a whistling sound followed by, ‘Fuck me.’

‘And remember, according to my source, this comes direct from the top. Sitting at that table was Clark Rundle himself. As well as Don Ribcoff, and some other guy, I can’t remember his name.’

‘Yeah, but man, those two motherfuckers? Jesus Christ.’

Rundle and Ribcoff exchange a quick look, each registering the horror on the other’s face.

Then Rundle’s phone rings. He fumbles for it.

Shit.

It’s Vaughan.

‘What’s going on, Clark? I expected to hear from you by now. Tell me this situation has been contained.’

Rundle closes his eyes. Vaughan was there, too, outside the hotel, in the third limo, but Rundle wasn’t sure if what happened registered with him.

He should have known that nothing escapes James Vaughan.

‘We’re working on it,’ Rundle says, realising how lame that sounds.

‘Oh, I hope so, son, because you know what? Your brother scored big time this morning. A lot of people are talking already. I mean, in respect of fundraising? There’s an avalanche of money there, just waiting to be released. So don’t fuck it up.’ He pauses. ‘But Clark?’

‘Yeah?’

‘If you do?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You’re on your own.’

Click.

Rundle opens his eyes.

Putting his phone away, he sees that his hand is shaking.

He turns to Ribcoff. ‘Don…’

‘OK, OK.’ Hand on ear, clacking keys, another window opening up on his screen. ‘This is the plan. We’ve got… we’ve got to separate them, or wait till they come out and go in different directions, then we can act -’

‘Act?’

‘Yeah, we can grab Szymanski, that won’t be a problem, and we can dispose of him pretty easily. He’s more or less off the grid anyway, as far as we can tell. No contact’s been made with anyone in Cleveland since he got back, that’s where he’s from, and he doesn’t seem to have any pressing commitments. So we can chalk him up to Congo, put him on our casualty list, MIA, whatever. Gilroy’s a little harder, though, with this link to Ellen Dorsey. But if the circumstances are right we could arrange something, an accident maybe. Afterwards we bleach him, phones, laptop, then Dorsey’s got nothing.’

Rundle nods along. ‘Right, right.’ It all sounds so easy.

‘But first thing,’ Ribcoff says, hitting a key and pointing at the screen, ‘we’ve got to get them out of there, we’ve got to separate them, and we’ve got to do it fast.’

Rundle has a stabbing pain in his stomach.

Indigestion? Anxiety? Cancer?

He looks at the screen again. Tom Szymanski is hunched forward. ‘So, Irish,’ he’s saying, ‘let me tell you about our next president, yeah, and how he really fucked up that hand of his.’

‘… unpaid leave, effective immediately, which in a PMC like Gideon is code for, you know, go fuck yourself and don’t come back.’

Jimmy’s mind is reeling.

All along he’s been focused on the story of the helicopter crash – which is huge in itself, if only he could crack it – but suddenly he’s got this on his plate? It’s essentially the same story, of course, except that it’s an upgrade, and one with a much wider application. Instead of a UN inspector and a faked accident, it’s got a village massacre and a presidential candidate.

But the people involved are the same, and the motivation is the same.

As a journalist, Jimmy recognises this for what it is – the opportunity of a lifetime. He also knows from experience how easy it would be to let it slip through his fingers.

So he’s got to be careful.

But maybe – glancing around now – maybe they’ve gone beyond careful.

He looks back at Szymanski.

‘Then?’

‘Then they flew me to JFK.’ He shrugs. ‘After that I was on my own. If I hadn’t seen Rundle on TV peddling this bullshit about an accident in Paris, I don’t know, maybe I’d have gone home and forgotten the whole thing.’

Jimmy exhales. ‘Yeah, but… here we are.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what next?’

‘What next?’

‘Yeah.’

Szymanski lowers his head and shakes it into his chest for a moment. Then he looks up again. ‘Jimmy, do you… do you have any idea what kind of shit we’re in right now, the two of us, sitting here?’

‘I’ve been putting off thinking about it.’

Szymanski laughs. ‘Yeah, well, this is your chance, bro, because let me tell you… my fucking peripheral vision is clogging up on me. There’s a black SUV parked over there on the far side of Third. Don’t look. Then there’s this car just across the street here with the tinted windows. You see it? And.’ He throws his head backwards. ‘Even money, this prick sitting behind me,’ – Jimmy swallows – ‘who, chances are, has got a tiny camera concealed on him somewhere and a fucking mic that’s probably powerful enough to pick up your heartbeat. Though wait.’ He holds up a finger. ‘I think I can hear that myself.’

Jimmy makes a face, nervous.

Up to now being under surveillance has been almost academic. They were invisible. It was something he took on faith. But with Tom Szymanski talking like this, all of a sudden it seems very real.

And dangerous.

‘We’re in a public place,’ he says. ‘What can they do?’

‘They can wait. We’re not going to stay here all day, are we?’

‘And when we leave?’

‘Whatever. Neither of us will get very far.’

‘That’s insane.’

Szymanski leans forward. ‘Have you not been listening to this conversation? Have you not been listening to yourself?’

Jimmy looks at him. ‘Haven’t you?’ He leans forward as well. ‘This is a two-way street.’

‘Not as far as they’re concerned.’ Szymanski yanks up the side of his jacket to the table and partially opens it. With his eyes, he indicates, down here, look.

Jimmy looks. What he sees is the barrel of a handgun.

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘This is the only way I’m getting out of here.’

Jimmy shakes his head. ‘Yeah, but not alive. If you take that out, you won’t stand a chance.’ He pauses, then whispers, ‘Look, there is another way.’

‘What other way?’ Impatient, unconvinced.

Jimmy hesitates. He nods his head in the direction of the guy two places behind them and makes a face that says, nah, not if he’s listening in.

It takes a moment for Szymanski to catch on, but when he does – and to Jimmy’s shock – he gets out of the booth, stands up and strides back to where the other guy is sitting. With his back to the rest of the coffee shop, careful to conceal what he’s doing – not that anyone is paying attention – Szymanski takes out his gun, holding it discreetly, and whispers to the guy, ‘Get the fuck out of here. Right now.’

The guy doesn’t react for a second, then he gives an almost imperceptible nod.

This surely indicates that he isn’t what Szymanski might call – or what Jimmy imagines Szymanski might call – a civilian.

After a moment, the guy gets out of the booth, leaves a five-dollar bill on the table, picks up his newspaper and walks out of the coffee shop.

Szymanski returns to his place, sits down, and raises his eyebrows.

OK?

OK.

Jimmy breathes in. ‘Er… so, first thing, can you prove definitively that you were a Gideon contractor, and that you worked in Congo?’

Szymanski takes a moment to answer. Maybe he’s deciding whether or not he’s offended by the question, or if he’s going to dignify it with a response. Jimmy doesn’t know. But eventually, Szymanski says, ‘Fuck, yeah. There’s a paper trail. Pay cheques from Gideon, the contract I signed, my fucking passport. Plus, I’ve got a ton of pictures on my phone.’ He shrugs, dismissing it. ‘Was I there? Yeah, of course I was there.’

‘OK,’ Jimmy says. ‘Good. Now.’ He slides over to the edge of the booth. ’You order some refills. I’m going to take a piss and make a quick phone call.’

‘Where’s he going? Fuck.’

Rundle punches the back of the driver’s seat in front of him.

Beside him, Ribcoff is pressing one hand against his ear and holding the other one out, forefinger raised, looking for quiet.

‘He… he what? Jesus…’

He brings his hand down and turns to Rundle. ‘Szymanski has a Beretta M9.’ He shakes his head. ‘This is fucked.’

‘It was fucked already, Don. Gun or no gun. One Beretta M9 isn’t going to make any difference now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you… you’ve got to go in there and take him out, take them both out.’

‘But we don’t -’

‘Or at least take Szymanski out, Jesus, while he’s on his own, like you said. I mean, look.’ He points. ‘The guy is just sitting there.’

‘Clark, he has a gun. There are people in there.’

Rundle dismisses this with a flick of his hand. ‘People.’

‘Oh, so, what, you’ve got no problem getting into a firefight in a coffee shop on Third Avenue? That’s OK with you, yeah?’

Rundle explodes. ‘For fuck’s sake, Don, you heard them in there. I have to explain it to you?’ He punches the seat in front of him again. ‘There’s no turning back here. For either of us.’

Rundle knows this is easy to say, and saying it even provides him with some tiny measure of relief, but he does mean it. What route back from this could there possibly be? The weight of responsibility sits on him now like a boulder. In its distinguished, nearly 150-year history, the BRX Mining and Engineering Corporation has never once had to defend its name in court or in the press. For generations the company has been fiercely protective of its privacy and its reputation. And now, what? Clark Rundle comes along and allows it to be dragged through the mud?

The dissolute scion of a once-great family.

Rundle shakes his head. That last part is bullshit and he knows it, but still…

If it was just a little bit of corporate malfeasance, they could bring in the lawyers, tie things up for years with depositions and injunctions and all sorts of shit, but this? Allegations of, at best, collusion in two multiple homicides? To say nothing of the link to a discredited presidential campaign?

He glances left. ‘Oh great, he’s back.’

They both watch as Jimmy Gilroy sits into the booth again opposite Tom Szymanski, and then as the waitress arrives and refills their cups.

‘That was a chance there, Don, and we blew it. Who knows if we’ll get another one.’

‘We didn’t blow anything, Clark. Jesus Christ, we have to be careful.’

‘Careful? Please. Get me a gun and I’ll go in there and shoot those two bastards myself. I swear to God, I’m serious. Careful.’

Ribcoff exhales wearily, but says nothing.

‘Because you know what, Don? They will destroy us. In a fucking heartbeat. And whatever about us? BRX, I mean? Whatever degree of culpability we’re shown to have? You guys? Gideon? You personally? You’re going to jail for the rest of your fucking life.’

Ribcoff waits a beat, then snaps his laptop closed. He tosses it beside him and reaches for the door. ‘Give me a minute,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back.’ He opens the door and gets out.

Rundle turns and watches him scurry back up Fifty-fifth Street. He stops halfway and gets into a parked SUV.

Across the street in the coffee shop Tom Szymanski and Jimmy Gilroy are chatting away. Gilroy seems to be writing stuff down, taking notes. What’s he doing, conducting an interview?

Rundle looks away, stares ahead.

Degree of culpability.

Where did he get that one from? Too many billed hours spent in the company of lawyers, he suspects. With many more such hours in prospect, hundreds of them probably, Rundle feels a sudden wave of nausea. What might be beyond those hundreds of hours he can’t even contemplate. Because they’ll be bad enough in themselves, tedious, contentious, humiliating in the extreme.

And the weird thing is, in anticipating this humiliation the one clear, disapproving face he sees looking back at him is not Eve’s, or Daisy’s, or J.J.’s, or James Vaughan’s even – it’s the old man’s.

Not the Henry C. of legend either – the commanding presence, the head of the table, the chairman of the board. No, consistent with the same horrorshow logic unfolding here, it’s the Henry C. of that Saturday afternoon in the house out in Connecticut, in the study, when his heart failed him and he couldn’t reach his medication over there on the desk – couldn’t move, while his son Clark just stood in front of him and watched, not raising a hand to help, waiting, as he had been for many years… the chairmanship now within his grasp, his turn, his crack of the whip.

That Henry C.

Pale, horrified, desperate, beseeching…

Incredulous.

Yeah, degrees of culpability, Rundle thinks to himself, don’t get me fucking started.

The car door opens and Ribcoff gets back in.

‘OK,’ he says, reaching for his laptop, ‘here’s the new plan.’

‘And how long had you been working with this guy, this, er…?’

‘Ray Kroner?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Few months, I guess. On and off.’

‘And what was he like?’

‘Ray was OK, you know, but he was always wound pretty fucking tight, I’d have to say, and -’

Jimmy looks up from his notebook. ‘Maybe tone the lingo down a bit?’

‘Yeah. OK.’ Szymanski shuffles, repositions. ‘He was always wound pretty tight, but at the same time he was no different from plenty of other guys who get into this business, you know. When they’re over there they want to be back here, and once they finally get back here all they can do is dream about packing up and heading over there again. It’s the old story. But I mean, that was me, too, you get caught up in a cycle of it, and it’s just that, you know, you may as well earn good money while you’re doing it. Unfortunately, some guys never flush it out of their system, or else they never learn to control it.’

‘Right. And on that day?’

‘Well, Ray clearly flipped, but what you have to understand is that… in Iraq, in Afghanistan, there’s at least some semblance of a context, some sense that a war is being fought. But in Congo, it’s just totally insane. It’s not your war you’re fighting, there are no clear sides, and yet you’re in the middle of this epic shitstorm, six, seven, maybe eight million people dead in the last, I don’t know, fifteen years. You don’t have any compass, no flag, just an assault rifle and a fucking logo.’

‘A logo?’

‘Yeah, I mean, whether it’s Gideon Global or BRX or any of the others out there, that’s your point of reference. So it’s kind of hard to feel that any of it means anything. And when you witness some of the things we witnessed, well, I sometimes envy Ray Kroner, you know. What he did made no sense, not at all, it was… messed up. But in a weird way he escaped, he found release. You know what I’m saying?’

‘Yeah.’ Jimmy replies. But does he? Not really. He isn’t supposed to.

That’s what’s going to make this such a compelling story.

‘Good,’ he says, flipping over a page of his notebook, ‘let’s try another question. Can you tell me when you realised that the man you were escorting in your convoy was, in fact, Senator John Rundle?’

Szymanski glances out the window, then back at Jimmy. ‘Sure. It was afterwards. We were standing around waiting for backup, a few of us, and the company CO, guy called Peter Lutz, more or less told me straight out, he said he had to shoot Ray Kroner because did I know who that was in the back of the car, it was Senator John Rundle, for Christ’s sakes, brother of the guy who owns the mine.’

‘And you had previously seen this man that your commanding officer identified as the senator having a meeting with Colonel Arnold Kimbela, is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, Tom. That’s good.’ Jimmy looks down through his scribbled list of questions. ‘Right, let’s go over the incident again, especially the part where the senator’s hand got crushed in the door of the car.’

‘Sure.’

‘That part needs to be really clear.’

‘Yeah, I get that, but believe me, Jimmy, it’s clear in my head. It couldn’t be any clearer. I can see him now, screaming, leaning back, crying like a fucking baby.’

‘What’s the delay? Send them in.’

‘They’re not ready yet, Clark. They need a little more time. Jesus. This is an improvised operation. They have to be sure of what they’re doing.’

Rundle exhales loudly, refraining from further comment, and goes back to his laptop.

Fox and CNN, all they’re talking about is John Rundle.

Commentators, panellists, pundits, bloggers.

It’s a bit hysterical and hugely premature, Rundle realises that, but it’s still a great start.

They’ll need to build on this momentum.

He looks up again and across the street.

Assuming they get the chance, of course.

The next few minutes will be crucial.

It seems unreal to him, what’s happening – unreal that everything hinges on the suppression of a conversation two guys are having in some coffee shop on Third Avenue.

He closes his eyes.

Ribcoff’s plan is audacious. It’s based on causing a diversion. Three men definitely not looking like Gideon security contractors – and this seems to be what’s causing the delay – will show up thirty seconds apart. The first man will enter the coffee shop and go straight to the counter and order something. As the second man is entering, the first man will feign a seizure of some sort and draw as much attention to himself as possible. Using a gun with a silencer, the second man will then shoot and kill Tom Szymanski. At this point the third man will arrive and Taser Jimmy Gilroy, who will then receive a rapid, surreptitious and lethal jab in the back of the neck. The two men will remove Gilroy’s notebook and phone and will then carry Szymanski’s body out to a waiting vehicle on the street.

Amid the confusion, the first man will recover and leave.

What could possibly go wrong?

Right?

Well, apart from the first hundred most obvious things, Rundle did have one question.

Why leave Gilroy behind?

Logistics, was Ribcoff’s response, manpower, timing. Szymanski is off the grid, this keeps it that way. Gilroy’s disappearance might drag things out, not to mention dredge things up. By doing it this way it’s open and shut, he’s here, he’s dead – questions remain, but they’re unlikely ever to be answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

The whole thing should only take two minutes, max. Most people in the general area won’t notice a thing and those who do will inevitably have conflicting memories of it.

It’s high risk, no question about it – but really, do they have any alternative?

Rundle opens his eyes. He looks around, out the window, at his watch. ‘Come on.’

‘Few more minutes, Clark, trust me.’ Ribcoff texting with one hand, keying something onto his laptop with the other. ‘We didn’t come here today equipped for this. And the first guy who walks in there has to look like a civilian. Otherwise it won’t work.’ He pauses, nodding his head in the direction of the coffee shop. ‘Besides, look at them over there, yakking like two old ladies.’ He shakes his head. ‘No one’s going anywhere.’

His other phone rings and he picks it up. ‘Yeah?’

Rundle closes his laptop. He takes out his own phone. As Ribcoff is talking, Rundle dials the number for Regal. He faces away, gives his membership code in as low a voice as possible and asks if Nora is available.

She isn’t.

Nora is no longer with the agency.

‘What?’ Too loud. ‘Why not?’ Whisper ‘Where is she?’

They’re not allowed to give out that kind of information. It’s confidential. But they have many other beautiful and sophis-

He hangs up.

Shit.

Ribcoff looks at him, phone held to his chest. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘No.’ Rundle waves a hand at the window. ‘Except for this shit. When do we get moving?’

‘Now.’ Ribcoff says. ‘Zero minus thirty seconds.’ He nods at the screen of his laptop.

Rundle doesn’t understand. ‘What?’

‘There.’ Ribcoff points. ‘Asset number one.’

On the screen is a webcam feed from just around the corner, on Third Avenue. The man Ribcoff is pointing at is approaching the main entrance to the coffee shop. He’s of medium height, in jeans and a corduroy jacket, has longish hair, looks a little scruffy. A writer type, or an academic.

Looking to score some joe.

Surrounding him, flowing in both directions, are… people – woman with a buggy, two businessmen, a flock of Japanese tourists, others, random, nondescript, it’s all very quick, and as well, to the left, there is a blur of passing traffic.

Intermittent streaks of yellow.

Rundle’s stomach turns. Is this really happening?

The guy disappears in through the door.

Rundle lifts his head and glances across the street.

In the long side window of the coffee shop both men turn their heads for a moment, then turn back and continue talking.

‘OK,’ Ribcoff says, pointing, ‘here comes asset number two.’

Rundle looks back at the screen. From halfway along the block comes a second man. He’s of similar height to the first but is dressed all in black.

Baseball cap, shades.

Zero minus… what must it be now for this one? Twenty seconds? Fifteen?

Rundle stares intently at the screen.

But suddenly, his focus shifts – from the black-clad asset in the centre to a streak of yellow on the left, a streak that solidifies into a cab pulling up at the kerb.

Zero minus ten seconds.

The cab door opens. A man gets out, then a woman.

Seven.

Rundle lurches forward, almost vomits. ‘Stop.’

‘What?’

Five.

‘Abort.’ He elbows Ribcoff. ‘Abort. Stop.’

‘What?’

Three.

Moving across the sidewalk, striding with intent, the man and woman cut in front of the asset and get to the door of the coffee shop before him.

‘That’s Ellen Dorsey.’

‘Jesus.’

One.

Ribcoff raises a hand to his earpiece, squeezes it. ‘Abort,’ he says. ‘Repeat, abort.’

Jimmy stands up as Ellen Dorsey approaches. He extends a hand, whispering, ‘Shit, am I glad to see you.’

They shake. Dorsey has a laptop under her arm. She places it on the table. She turns to the man directly behind her.

He’s rugged and tanned, in his fifties.

Expensive-looking suit.

Something about him says lawyer.

‘Jimmy, this is Ned Goldstein. He’s with Reynolds, Fleischman & Brock.’ She pauses. ‘Attorneys.’

OK.

They shake, and then Jimmy introduces Tom Szymanski.

The next thirty minutes or so pass in a blur.

Dorsey sits opposite Jimmy, and Goldstein opposite Szymanski.

Goldstein, it turns out, specialises in whistleblower cases and has worked with Dorsey on several occasions in the past. The first thing he does is quiz Jimmy and Szymanski on what they perceive their current level of danger to be. Calmly and discreetly, Szymanski points out three parked vehicles in the vicinity that he judges to be Gideon surveillance units. He also outlines what he believes Gideon’s strategy would most likely be in circumstances such as these. Goldstein proceeds to grill Szymanski on his background, his history in the military and his subsequent employment record with Gideon.

While this is going on, Dorsey checks with Jimmy that he has prepped Szymanski for the interview, exactly as they’d agreed on the phone. Jimmy says he has but adds that Szymanski is adamant he doesn’t want to be filmed or photographed. Dorsey makes a face. OK. They go over the questions again and Jimmy outlines in general terms what Szymanski’s answers will be. When Goldstein has given the all-clear, Dorsey says, the interview should go ahead without delay. She will record it, simultaneously transcribing as much of it as she can, and will then immediately upload a text version onto her website and her Facebook page.

She says that given the incendiary nature of the central claim about Senator Rundle’s injury, the interview will be picked up straightaway and will go viral on Twitter in a matter of minutes. That level of public awareness will effectively provide cover for Jimmy and Szymanski, but she warns him that it will also be insane and unlike anything either of them has ever experienced before in their entire lives. Avoiding photographers and camera crews will not be easy.

Is he prepared for this?

Jimmy says yes. Nodding. He is. He also says he understands that the Senator Rundle aspect of the story will dominate at first, and probably for days, but that behind it is the even bigger story of BRX and Gideon Global, which is one he fully intends pursuing – all the way back to the hills of Buenke, and even further back, to the rugged coastline of Donegal.

‘Absolutely,’ Dorsey says, smiling, ‘I’d expect nothing less.’

‘And listen, thanks for everything you’re doing.’

‘Hey, this is your story, Jimmy, and I’m happy to help out – by doing this, by putting you in touch with people later if you want, whatever. These bastards deserve all they get.’ She pauses. ‘But remember one thing. If it all goes to hell for some reason, or turns out to be a crock of shit, it’ll still be your story.’

Jimmy says nothing, but acknowledges the point with a nod.

He looks at Tom Szymanski and wonders how he’s coping. This can’t be easy for him.

He seems to be coping fine.

Ellen Dorsey turns to Ned Goldstein. The lawyer shrugs his shoulders. ‘All looks kosher to me. I think we’re good to go.’

Dorsey opens her laptop. She takes a small recording device from her pocket, checks it and turns it on. She places it on the table between Jimmy and Szymanski.

She places her hands over the keyboard, poised. She looks up. ‘Gentlemen?’

Jimmy swallows.

As he is forming the first question in his mind, he notices the car across the street, the one with the tinted windows, starting up and pulling out of its place.

He closes his eyes. ‘Mr Szymanski, can you tell me first of all the exact date on which you started working as a private military contractor for Gideon Global?’

When Jimmy opens his eyes, the car has gone.

14

A FEW HOURS LATER – and a few blocks northwest of this Third Avenue coffee shop – James Vaughan opens his eyes and yawns. He takes an afternoon nap most days now. Doctor’s orders. It’s not the hardest thing in the world to do, an hour or so in bed after lunch, but he does find it interrupts his rhythm. Leaves him a little cranky.

He gets dressed and goes into the study.

There’d been no word from Clark by the time he was hitting the hay, and since his nap is sacrosanct, involving a complete communications blackout, Vaughan is anxious that he might have missed something. If there are any messages for him they’ll be here on his phone, but before checking he decides to go online first and see what developments there have been.

It’s pretty ugly.

On site after site, one story dominates.

Rise and fall, rise and fall…

When he heard that guy outside the hotel shout the word Buenke, Vaughan figured, at some level, that the game was up. Then when he heard the uncertainty in Clark’s voice a while later, he was left in little doubt.

He watches a couple of news clips, and winces more than once.

It’s not going to be easy for the Rundle boys, being hounded and savaged like this by reporters. But in a way they were asking for it.

Vaughan himself has never courted publicity. The very idea of it horrifies him, and always has. In fact – thinking about it – the first time he ever encountered the gentlemen of the press was at his grandfather’s funeral in the late 1930s, when he’d still only have been a small boy. He can see it now, the crowds on Fifth Avenue for the service, the carriage strewn with violets, the stiff collar and breeches he was made to wear and how uneasy he felt in the church having to file past the open casket. He clearly remembers the texture of his grandfather’s hands and face, too, bloodless and waxy.

That haunted him all the way out to Woodlawn.

But in the end, it was the press photographers he remembers most, the flashbulbs, dozens of them, all going off like so many tiny explosions, and then these grubby little men with their pencil stubs and notepads.

Who are these people, he remembers thinking at the time.

Who indeed.

He trawls through a few more reports. At this stage, the main focus is on J.J. and his trip to Paris. Was there really a motorcycle accident? Was there really a motorcyclist? The search is well and truly on now and that can only end one way.

In tears.

But Vaughan knows that the background stuff will come into focus as well, sooner or later, and that it won’t be long before the word Buenke is on everyone’s lips.

Thanaxite, too.

It’s a damn shame.

He checks his phone – a text from Meredith, who’s in LA for a few days, and due back tomorrow. Then three voice messages and four texts, all from Clark.

Oh dear.

He deletes them, and turns to go.

What exactly is it about the phrase You’re on your own, he wonders, that Clark didn’t understand?

Tom Szymanski paces back and forth between the window and the bed. In this hotel room he can do that, there’s enough space, unlike where he stayed before, in midtown, which was cramped, but at least there he was free to get shitfaced, bring a hooker back, whatever. Here he feels constrained, like he’s supposed to be on his best behaviour or something. It’s only been twelve hours since the interview in the coffee shop and already, already, he’s acquired an entourage – legal advisors, media handlers, a fucking bodyguard. He probably hasn’t gone about all of this in the best way possible – but in his defence, how was he supposed to know what to do, or say? This isn’t exactly the kind of shit he’s been trained for. Anyway, twenty minutes after Ellen Dorsey posted the interview on her webpage and did whatever Twitter shit it is that people do these days, a couple of photographers showed up, then a local news crew. Dorsey seemed a bit alarmed herself by how fast it was all happening, but then she tried to make out like it was better this way, that if he had his photo out there, his mug in the public domain, he’d be better protected, it’d be the perfect deflector shield against the very powerful and influential people he had chosen to go up against.

What the fuck?

He hadn’t chosen to go up against anyone, it had all just happened, and continued happening, inside the door of the coffee shop, then outside on the street, moving along the sidewalk, more and more people arriving, so that pretty quickly it became a circus, and he got separated from Jimmy Gilroy and Ellen Dorsey and her lawyer, and before he knew it… shit, before he knew anything this other woman was shoving a business card into his hand and asking him how’d he like to go on the Evening News with Katie Couric, or do 60 Minutes, or if the sound of a nice, juicy book contract appealed to him at all? If she hadn’t been so gorgeous he might have moved on, but really, this woman was like a fucking movie star, with the eyes, and the lips, and the hips, and the OMG rack, and before he could catch his breath he was sitting next to her in the back of a town car, riding up here to this hotel…

For a series of… meetings…

It crossed his mind at one point that she might be a Gideon plant, but no, thinking about it, Ellen Dorsey had been right – with the interview out there on the web, and his name, and his history, and pictures now too, actual footage of him on Third Avenue from that morning, BRX and Gideon wouldn’t be so stupid as to go anywhere near him.

This Zambelli woman was on the level, she was a bona fide PR princess with a pair of stones on her that would put any man to shame.

She’d nabbed him, for Christ’s sake.

Look at him.

Holed up in a fucking executive suite, waiting for a deluxe cheeseburger he ordered and watching himself on TV, while out there, in the other room, some grand strategy is being devised, tomorrow’s assault on the world’s media.

He stops at the window and looks out at the shimmering lights of Manhattan’s upper east side.

What’s he doing here? What’s his strategy?

He doesn’t know.

It felt weird bailing on Jimmy Gilroy and Ellen Dorsey like that, but then, what does he owe them? He did their interview, gave them their scoop.

He turns away from the window.

What does he owe anyone for that matter? What does he owe the various people who’ve been trying to contact him since early afternoon apparently, looking to hook up with him? So-called friends, family members – and obscure ones, too.

His ex-brother-in-law?

Jesus Christ.

He doesn’t owe them anything.

He looks over at the end of the bed.

He still has his gun. It’s in the pocket of his leather jacket there.

He could…

What?

Flip? Work himself up to it? An improvised frenzy, right here in the bedroom maybe? Or how about downstairs in the lobby? Or live on-air in some TV studio? Take his new movie-star girlfriend with him and go out in a blaze of glory?

Yeah.

He wishes he were that insane. It’d be a lot easier.

On Fox now they’re showing clips of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, some big hotel, streets, traffic.

The special correspondents, it would seem, are on the case, arriving into the city in their droves. It won’t be long before they start arriving in Congo as well, and chartering small private planes to take them as near to the remote village of Buenke as they can get.

And it won’t be long before everything Tom Szymanski said in his interview is checked and verified – Ray Kroner going postal and killing all those people, then Senator Rundle getting his hand crushed in the door of an SUV.

That chiefly.

But it won’t stop there, it occurs to him, the coverage, the attention, not by a long shot – and it’s going to take all his reserves of sanity to get through it.

All his reserves of energy.

Speaking of which.

He looks over at the door.

Where’s that fucking cheeseburger he ordered?

Over on the west side, standing at a window of his apartment on the fifty-seventh floor, glass in hand, Clark Rundle gazes down at the jewel-encrusted city spread out below like a vast, magnificent cache of pirate’s booty.

After a while, and abruptly, he shifts focus and gazes into his glass.

Single malt Scotch whisky. This is the fourth or fifth one he’s had, he thinks. He’s not a big drinker, but he knows that he’s reached a tipping point here, the sensation in his stomach – this little red-hot coal of euphoria, burning steadily now for maybe the last twenty minutes – is due to subside, and fade.

Inevitably.

Leaving him with the dying embers of…

Oh please.

There. You see?

It’s gone.

He drains his glass and turns away from the window.

The room before him is enormous, like a downtown loft space – furnished in a minimalist style, with wide, pine floorboards, a couple of bare leather couches, a tinted glass coffee table and two large, modernist canvases hung on walls at either end.

That’s it.

Is it any wonder no-one ever comes in here?

He goes over to the coffee table and puts his glass down beside the bottle of smoky Laphroaig.

Outside, the phone rings.

Again.

Eve is under instructions to screen all calls.

His own cell is turned off.

He looks down at the bottle.

Does he pour himself another one? He’s not sure he can relive – as he will inevitably have to, again and again – those final few moments in the car today beside Don Ribcoff… without some form of… of fortification. Especially that final moment, that very, very final moment, when he picked up his laptop and swung it sideways straight into Ribcoff’s forehead… withdrew it and swung it back, even harder this time, aiming better, the right angle of its corner ramming directly into the centre of Ribcoff’s now-turned and very startled face.

The bridge of his nose?

Definitely the bridge of his nose the next time, going by the sound, and no question about it the time after that, cartilage, sinew, muscle.

Blood.

Spurting, spraying… everywhere.

The few times after that? You’re talking fucking… serious laundry bills.

He picks up the bottle, hesitates, then pours himself another measure, a generous one.

He remembers getting out of the car somewhere down around Twenty-third Street and being met – taken in hand, transferred to another car – by some of his people. Luckily, the driver of the original car was one of his, too, and not a Gideon driver – well, he’s assuming luckily – because you never know.

And then?

And then it was busy.

All day.

He’s been busy… all day.

Talking.

To this one and that one.

Rationalising, explaining, making calls, responding. Earlier on, there was that very long shower he had to take, and then later – he’s a little muddled about the sequence of things at the moment – yeah, later, watching TV and checking news websites.

Because, Jesus Christ…

J.J.

His big brother.

All day he’s had to watch the poor bastard being crucified.

Vilified, ridiculed.

While knowing at the same time, that somehow – and sooner rather than later – he’s next in line.

For the hammer and nails.

And the cheap cracks.

He lifts the glass to his lips, well beyond that tipping point now. No euphoria anymore, just…

Oh Jesus.

He was so angry in the car today, about Nora… and with Ribcoff – for delaying, for maintaining that stupid pretence of military precision, when it was clear what they had to do.

Despite the enormous risks.

Just go in there and…

Because two or three minutes earlier and everything would have been different.

Everything would be different now.

Yeah.

He throws his head back and drains the glass, though this time feeling a little sick as he does so.

Like he’s had enough.

He stares at the plain wall in front of him, and then down at the floorboards.

How many messages did he leave today for Jimmy Vaughan? A lot. And that’s what makes him the sickest, that’s what -

Rundle looks up. The door is opening.

It’s Eve, looking gaunt and exhausted. She remains standing in the doorway.

‘Clark.’ She whispers it. ‘There are two police detectives downstairs. They want to speak with you.’

Rundle swallows. ‘OK.’ He shrugs. ‘Send them up.’

Shit. This is about Don Ribcoff, isn’t it? That driver today, he’s sure of it. Or one of the others maybe, one of the Gideon contractors. There were so many of them around the place, it was sometimes hard to tell who was with who, and -

Their loyalties would be with Ribcoff, wouldn’t they?

Clearly.

He shakes his head.

All they’d need is the laptop. Which of course he doesn’t remember taking with him from the car, and that’s because he didn’t take it with him, he left it there.

Do these detectives have it now? This choice piece of evidence?

Definitive, case-busting?

Rundle turns around and does something he’s been threatening to do all day. He steps forward, heaves loudly and throws up – all over one of the leather couches.

Half a pint of whisky.

The sum total of what he’s got.

And when he’s finished, he wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket.

Standing there, facing the window, he takes a few deep breaths.

A moment later, from outside, he hears the door opening, and voices.

A little after eleven o’clock the next morning Ellen Dorsey takes Jimmy to the offices of Parallax magazine on Forty-first Street. She introduces him to the editor, Max Daitch, an intense guy in his mid-thirties who sits behind a mahogany desk piled high with papers and books.

Within about twenty seconds he has offered Jimmy two things – coffee and a job.

When Jimmy doesn’t respond immediately to either offer, Daitch says, ‘OK, I can’t tell you much more about the coffee, it’s coffee, what do you want, but the job…’ He leans forward on the desk and clicks his tongue. ‘Or maybe, I don’t know, does the word job make you nervous? Would you prefer if I said commission?’

Jimmy smiles and says, ‘No, no, coffee’s fine, thanks. An espresso. Please.’

Daitch looks at him, waits, then says, ‘Oh, what are we, playing hardball here?’ He turns to Dorsey. ‘Ellen, help me out with this guy, Jesus.’

‘Shut up, Max,’ she says. ‘Do you have any idea what he’s been through in the last twenty-four hours?’

Jimmy has barely been able to process this himself.

‘That interview he did was broadcast all over the world, it was the lead news story everywhere and it totally burned up the blogosphere, but people want more, some kind of a follow-up, so he spent most of yesterday fighting off offers from editors and booking agents and people like Liz Zambelli. Who by the way appears to have more or less kidnapped Tom Szymanski, because no one knows where he is. But anyway, there’s a lot of interest out there, a lot of competition, network producers are salivating, and yet this guy, as you call him, chooses to come here.’

Daitch considers what she’s said, then nods. ‘OK. Fine. An espresso it is.’ He buzzes out to his assistant. Then he looks at Jimmy. ‘Great interview, I have to say. Really. It was. Every question, every answer, not an ounce of fat.’

Jimmy nods back. ‘Thanks. We were under a certain amount of pressure.’

‘No shit. But Ellen here tells me that you’ve got more, a whole back story to go with this. Is that right?’

‘Yes. What I’ve got, I think, is the story of how BRX got involved in this thing in the first place. I want to draw a direct line from that right up to yesterday. Right up to last night.’ He exhales and bobs his head from side to side, as though weighing it all up. ‘So, I don’t know, a ten-minute segment on a some news show…’

‘Couldn’t possibly do the story justice?’

‘Right.’

‘OK, but you only think you’ve got it?’

‘Well, I know what happened, but I need to work on it. There are a lot of gaps to fill in. I need to go to London to check out some CCTV footage. I need to go back to Italy. Ideally, I should go to Congo.’ He pauses. ‘Actually, I have to go to Congo.’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s murky stuff, and it goes pretty deep.’

‘Indeed. But you’ll need time. For travelling. And lots of money as well, presumably. For expenses.’

‘I suppose.’ Jimmy pauses again. ‘Look, I realise -’

‘No, no,’ Daitch interrupts, holding a hand up, ‘it’s fine. I get it. Time and money. That’s what you want. The two things we’ve notoriously run out of in this industry.’

Jimmy exhales. ‘So I keep hearing.’

Daitch stands up and moves out from behind his desk. He walks around to the front and then leans back against it. He folds his arms. ‘That’s the conventional wisdom these days, isn’t it? News has to be fast and cheap. It has to ride the clickstream to survive. So anything with the word “investigative” attached to it doesn’t have a prayer. Why? Because it’s expensive, it ties up resources, and more often than not it invites litigation.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s just the wrong model for the digital age.’ He leans forward. ‘Well, you know what? Screw that. Screw the conventional wisdom. When’s the last time anyone in this room paid attention to the conventional wisdom?’ He turns to Ellen Dorsey. ‘Am I right?’ Then back to Jimmy. ‘Look, my point is, Parallax is a national magazine, print edition comes out once a month, online edition we do what we can, and ad revenues are a constant struggle, a constant pain in the ass, but in the last couple of years you know what stories have made the most impact, where we’ve seen actual spikes in circulation? That’s right, longer, investigative pieces that we put time and resources into. Ask her. It’s pretty much what she does full time.’

Dorsey nods in agreement. ‘He’s right. The technology demands concision, the news reduced to a tweet, but people actually want more, enough people want more.’

Daitch stands up straight. ‘So, Jimmy, here’s the deal, if you have what you say you have, I’m prepared to let you run with it. We can at least talk terms and see where we stand, right?’

‘Sure,’ Jimmy says, ‘absolutely.’

He looks behind him. An assistant is coming through the door with a tray of espressos.

‘Besides,’ Daitch continues, walking over and taking the tray from the assistant, ‘this isn’t just some tawdry story about John Rundle getting caught out in a lie that we’ll all have forgotten about in a week. With Clark now up on a murder charge, it’s a lot more serious than that. It’s game on.’ He holds the tray out to Jimmy. ‘I think we’re in for the long haul on this one, don’t you?’

Later on, after he parts ways with Ellen Dorsey – temporarily, they’re meeting for dinner at a place called Quaranta – Jimmy takes a cab downtown.

He hasn’t been back to his hotel yet, not since he left it yesterday morning.

He needs to shower and change.

Last night he slept on Ellen’s couch.

Slept.

He didn’t sleep. He was too wound up.

Too wired.

Having been followed and harassed for most of the day, they had a difficult time at the end giving reporters and photographers the slip. As a reporter himself, Jimmy was, and remains, uncomfortable with this.

But still, as the cab glides along Fifth Avenue now – the Flatiron just ahead – it all hits him again, the sheer scale of what has happened.

And the fact that a little over an hour ago he accepted a job offer.

Or, at any rate, a commission.

For a series of articles.

What he can’t help thinking is how pleased the old man would be. Jimmy sees him now, reaching up to a bookshelf, pulling down a paperback, studying the cover for a few seconds, as though re-acquainting himself with something, and then handing it over with the words, ‘Here, read this.’

This being a primer, a window on a world, a form of code, an exhortation.

One of many.

The cab shoots across Fourteenth Street and Jimmy starts reaching for his wallet. He gets out at Eighth and makes his way over to Washington Square Park. It’s sunny and warm, with high blue skies. Was it only Monday that he sat here on a bench, facing uptown, trying to figure out what to do?

Three days.

It seems longer ago than that.

He sits on another bench now.

He still hasn’t figured out what to do, of course – not exactly. But he has a much clearer idea.

Just as he has a much clearer idea what direction his story for Parallax should take. It’s been forming in his mind for some time, coming into focus.

It’s a direct line all right, as he explained to Max Daitch, but one that goes far beyond the tawdry self-destruction of the Rundle brothers.

It’s a different route.

It’s the supply chain.

The blood-soaked motherlode.

Isn’t that what Susie Monaghan called it? In that last text she sent?

Which reminds him.

He takes out his phone, checks for messages – there are quite a few, with Maria at the top of the list.

He looks up, and gazes out over the square.

Where was he?

The supply chain. He needs to follow it. He needs to see where it leads. He needs to find out where the thanaxite ends up, who’s using it and what for.

Who has the most to gain.

There are other leads, as well. That third name, for instance – the old guy Dave Conway mentioned, and more than once. Who’s he? What was his role in what happened?

That’s definitely something Jimmy ought to chase up.

He holds out his phone, scrolls down for the number.

But first, before he gets down to work, there’s an important call he has to make.

Vaughan feels it already, creeping up on him as he opens his eyes, the post-nap crankiness – but today he has to fight it, keep it at an acceptable level, because Meredith is due back this afternoon. She’s been in LA attending a premiere, and she’ll be all sunny and starstruck, full of stories about celebs she met. The last thing she’ll want to encounter in her kitchen is a cranky old man whose idea of a movie star is John Garfield.

Not that he gives a damn, not really.

Vaughan was seventy-eight when they got married and she was twenty-six. He’d never been without a companion in his life, and at the time it had seemed like the right thing to do, affirmative, pro-active.

Or how about stupid?

It’s a vanity trap he’s seen plenty of other guys his age fall into – having a beautiful young wife on your arm when you’ve already got one foot in the grave. But then he went ahead and fell into the trap himself.

Trap.

It’s not a trap exactly, it’s an age thing. She talks a lot, which grates on his nerves, not that he blames her for that, and she spends his money – mostly on real estate, décor and clothes. But at least she isn’t a monster, like Jake Leffingwell’s twenty-four-year-old, Lisa, who insisted on getting involved in the business from the start and has dragged Leffingwell’s staid old company through the mud with all sorts of expensive and high-profile litigation. It’s ironic, he thinks, poor old Jake has aged about ten years since he married Lisa.

Vaughan goes into the study. He sits at his desk, and looks at the computer, but decides not to turn it on.

He’s had enough. All morning, wall to wall.

He thinks of poor Hank Rundle.

Henry C.

Talk about dragging a staid old company – and a respected family name – through the mud! By the time this is over, Clark and J.J. between them will have undone a century and a half of dedicated brand-building.

Pair of jackasses.

But as far as Vaughan himself is concerned, the damage is significant. There’s no question about that. At least it’s contained, though, it’s private.

No one is tweeting about the Oberon Capital Group.

Nevertheless, he will have to make a few calls and set something in motion. Paloma Electronics are on target for the first-phase rollout of the BellumBot, but to maintain any kind of competitive advantage they clearly need a new five-year plan, and a new source of thanaxite, one that doesn’t depend so heavily on the good graces of a nonentity like Colonel Arnold Kimbela.

Vaughan looks at the phone.

Time and tide, as it were.

He picks it up and dials the number for Craig Howley at the Pentagon. After the usual song and dance, he gets through.

‘Jimmy, how are you?’

‘I’m good, Craig, I’m good.’

‘My God, have you been following this?’

‘I know, it’s horrible, isn’t it?’ He wanders from his desk over to the window. ‘Just horrible.’

‘I mean, what the hell makes someone flip like that?’

‘I don’t know. And I guess we’ll never know.’ Vaughan is gazing down now at the passing traffic on Park Avenue. ‘But in a roundabout way, Craig, that’s why I’m calling. We need to talk. I want to have another look at Logar Province.’

Afghanistan.

Southeast of Kabul.

Although the discovery here a few years ago of a substantial thanaxite deposit was omitted from a recently published geological survey of the region, Vaughan has been reliably informed that it’s there. The trouble with mining in Afghanistan, however, has always been the country’s woefully inadequate transportation infrastructure.

But it seems as if that might be about to change.

The Chinese have embarked on a long-term project to establish a new trans-Eurasian corridor, a sort of modernised version of the old Silk Road. Vaughan’s idea is to get in early, establish a foothold in Logar. Fly under the radar for a while and see what happens.

He’s learnt that you have to take a long view on these matters.

‘Sure, Jimmy, of course. I’m actually going to be in New York at the end of the week.’

‘Oh?’

‘You want me to swing by?’

‘That’d be great.’

They make an appointment for Friday afternoon.

As he’s closing his phone at the window, Vaughan sees a car pulling up below.

The driver gets out. The doorman appears.

Showtime.

A few moments later Vaughan is in the entry foyer, and feeling, almost in spite of himself, a flutter of anticipation. But not just for the next thirty seconds and his wife’s arrival home.

For something more than that.

For the future itself.

The elevator glides open and Meredith steps out, followed by the doorman, who is carrying her bags.

She is wearing a figure-hugging royal-blue pencil dress and black patent leather stilettos. Radiant and fragrant, she also has a new hairstyle, a bob, short and boyish.

Vaughan likes it, likes it all.

‘Darling,’ she says, opening her arms to embrace him, ‘did you miss me?’