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  He felt an uncomfortable measure of guilt and responsibility towards Cleesh. That wasn't like him. He didn't like seeing her so low, and even though she'd put him in the frame for this, it felt like he was stealing something that should have been hers.

  He'd always been wary of playing in corporate grey areas, and this was certainly a bad neighbourhood, but that was precisely why the story was interesting.

  If the SO rumbled them, he would be rescinded. It could be a massive career wound he'd never recover from.

  The procedure sounded harebrained. If anyone could do it, it was GEO, but he fully anticipated an outright failure, or at least a truly pathetic realisation of the wonders Ayoob had been boasting about. Then again, that was the story too: the corporate machinations, the misadventure, the schadenfreude.

  He realised what was souring his excitement the most was the way Underwood had looked at his scrawny white torso when he'd taken his shirt off. The tone in her voice as she'd listed his deficiencies to Apfel. Contempt he could have handled. Disdain too.

  It had been pity.

  He reached his rental building, and unlocked the door under a porch light clicked against by orbiting blurds. The stairwell smelled of cooking, and his apartment was cold. He was on his second Scotch-effect when the buzzer went. It wasn't green hiker girl. The carry-out meal had arrived first: plycard punnets of Vietnamese from a half-decent hotel kitchen further up the street.

  Noma arrived about ten minutes later, grinning. She brought a bottle of sparkling wine.

  "What have you done?" he asked.

  "Nothing," she insisted.

  "You'd really better not have done anything."

  She wandered around his apartment.

  "Cosy," she said.

  He was about to tell her it was a hole and he was actively searching for somewhere better, when he remembered what she was living in.

  She took a glass of the sparkling wine. It was wine-effect, but the foil stopper wrap and the cork were at least real.

  "When do we move with this?" she asked.

  "I told you we'd have to wait, and we'd have to box clever."

  "So you've done nothing all day?"

  "It's going to take longer than a day," he replied. He began to split open the carry-out punnets. Warm food smells permeated the room, robbing away the aura of damp carpet and cold plaster.

  "I've actually begun to get somewhere," he said, "so there's all the more reason to keep a lid on this. It's a great story, and it could open up an even greater one. We do not want to crap on our own leads."

  She picked up a bowl and started to eat.

  "So tell me all about it," she said.

  "I can't just yet."

  "You're going to thieve this away from me, aren't you, you bastard?"

  "No," he said. "I was making a few very discreet enquiries this afternoon, and they led me to a very interesting place. You need to leave it with me for another few days. A week, maybe."

  "A week? Are you kidding me?"

  "A week isn't long. Not for something this good."

  "How good?" she asked.

  "It's either good good or bad good, but either way, we'll both walk away looking very pretty indeed. Just leave it with me. It's delicate. We mustn't jeopardise it."

  Fork rocking thoughtfully in her hand, she studied him. He felt as though he was being measured. He wasn't sure if it was for a new suit or a coffin.

  "I will cut you in," he insisted. "Full share. It's the kind of story that will need two POVs. We'll clean up. The bolide story
and
where it goes."

  "Tell me."

  "I can't."

  She took a deep breath.

  "I can place the story," she said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I spoke to some contacts."

  "For fuck's sake!" he said, and got up, dropping his bowl on the counter. "What did I tell you? One simple thing! What did I tell you?"

  "Oh, relax. I'm not stupid, Falk. I didn't tell anyone what the story was. I just touched base with some feature editors, sounded out things in theory. Jill Versailles at Reuters is very keen. Just in principle."

  "Jill Versailles is good," he admitted.

  "See? I'm not fucking about. Just a little careful groundwork. I didn't cross any line. I
am
trusting you."

  He nodded, but he could see it in her eyes. No matter how careful she'd been, how discreet, she'd got a whiff of the interest from Versailles, and from others, no doubt. A whiff of their hunger, a whiff of the money. She wanted that payday fast now it was in sight. A week was an eternity. She wanted the payday of the cash, the celebrity, the sudden ballistic ascent of her rep.

  A week was an eternity. She was going to get sloppy, cut corners to shorten that time. She was going to do anything necessary to punt the story into the back of the net. The thought, the very idea, that someone else might beat her to the punch, hurt like a physical injury. She could not allow it.

  "A week," he said quietly. "Just a week, and this will be better than you can possibly imagine."

  "Do you promise, Lex Falk?"

  His celf chimed. He turned away from the girl to take the call. It was Cleesh, blunt and unemotional, saying she might need to talk to him later. She cut off quickly. He looked around to see where Noma had gone.

  The problem with giving someone a nickname based on an item of clothing was that it became less and less appropriate the better you got to know them. Her name was already starting to eclipse his tag for her.

  He realised he could never really think of her as green hiker girl again now that he'd seen her naked.

It was an inducement. It was her way of keeping him onside. He woke up in the middle of the night still riding the tail-end of the endorphin wave, but he was already getting head-spin sick from too much fizz and Scotcheffect. The buzz would soon wear off completely, and he'd be left more aware than ever before of his aches and deficiencies. What would abide would not be a memory of her pliant, stripped enthusiasm, but rather the look in her eyes. Pity, same as Underwood's. She'd been good at minimising it, but she hadn't been able to hide it altogether. He was a means to an end, just as others had been the means to his ends in the past. It probably wasn't for the first time, but it was the first time he'd known about it.

  She was asleep. Unsteady, he got up and caught his reflection in the window. A guy like the one standing in the city lights did not get a girl like the one lying on the bed without there being something in it for the girl.

  He found his glass and drank some Scotch-effect to try to restore his postcoital high, but it was far too late. This is a moment, he thought, this is one of those moments of self-realisation that you get four, maybe five times in a lifetime, that changes your world view, and shows you that you're not the person you used to be, and proves that you never can be again, and leaves you broken in a ditch beside the highway.

  He was washed-up and no kind of catch. He was a long way past being the good-looking guy who could charm the pants off anyone, and his way into any story. The idea that he was still using those moves, making himself look like a total asshole, made him feel nauseous.

  His celf rang.

  He realised it must have rung already. That was what had woken him. He went into the bathroom so he wouldn't disturb her. Some bleary-eyed, haggard old fucker looked back at him out of the bathroom mirror.

  "What?"

  "Lex, it's Cleesh."

  "What time is it?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "What?"

  "It doesn't matter, Falk. It's got to be now. You've got to come now."

  "Fuck that," he replied. His hip throbbed. He was fairly sure he was going to hurl. "Call me in the morning. We'll set up a time to–"

  "It's got to be now, Falk. Things are moving too fast. If you want to be part of this, get here now."

TEN

"Here" was a suite on the thirty-eighth floor of the Hyatt Shaverton.

  "Why not the GEO mast?" Falk asked Apfel when he came to meet him at the elevator.

  "Plausible deniability," said Apfel with a smile that suggested he thought the concept actually carried some currency.

  "So it's not the chicken-effect parmigiana?"

  "That's just an added bonus," said Apfel. They walked down a carpeted hall with high, backlit glass brick walls. Piped musak was being used in some insane effort to counteract the smell of Insect-Aside, like the mutually annihilating collision of shit and anti-shit.

  Apfel ushered him into the first big room of the suite. Double-height ceiling. Falk could smell machines, the scent of warm plastic and electricals. There was also a dash of pine disinfectant and salt. He could hear the hum of fans venting warm air. Outside, through the one-way windows, floor-to-ceiling deep, Shaverton lay under cover of an amber night, studded with lights and striped with the luminous needles of other glass masts.

  The carpets had been removed, and replaced with the rubberised matting that Falk had seen in SOMD field hospitals. The walls had been spray-lined with matt-white rubber like the inside of the truck in the park. The configuration of the internal walls and the light fitments had been altered. One side of the suite was a raised platform facing a wall of boxes and high-end informatic consoles. The screens of all the boxes were busy, flickering, scrolling: text, data spreads, multi-views. Cleesh was sitting in a specially adapted roller chair, sliding up and down the consoles, making adjustments. She looked over her shoulder at him, but said nothing and allowed her face no expression. She adjusted her headset and turned back to her job.

  Behind the platform was a large medical space, some big floor-mounted modules that looked like repurposed military hardware, and a set of shutters into the next part of the area. The nondescript man from SO Logistics was standing near the modules, talking to two people Falk didn't know. Underwood was working in the medical area.

  "You look like death warmed up," she said.

  "I'm wealthy, thanks," Falk said. "Entirely wealthy."

  Underwood shot a raised eyebrow at Apfel. She was wearing a surgical smock so box-fresh it smelled of clean.

  "If we could just–" she started to say, but Falk walked past her towards the shutter.

  "Falk?" Apfel called.

  "Tell me all about it," Falk replied, over his shoulder.

  "I will," said Apfel, coming after him. "Just sit down and we can catch up."

  Falk slid the shutter open. Over-warm air flooded out. It felt like a steam room. The levels of light were much lower. Falk was reminded of a deep-sea aquarium. Four large metal pods sat in a scaffolding frame. They were dull grey and shaped like eggs. Cables and feeder tubes spooled off them like hair matting from coconuts and connected to overhead arrays. Ayoob was halfway up one on a walkway, checking a side panel.

  "He's here?" Ayoob called down to Apfel. "Is he ready?"

  "Not yet," Apfel replied. "Mr Falk is showing himself around. Falk?"

  "That's a Jung tank, is it?" Falk asked.

  "Yes," said Apfel. "Can we get you back to the med area? Time is tight."

  "Why is time tight, Bari? You told me the Letts incident had moved the timing up, but you implied there were still a few days to play with."

  "It's got to be tonight."

  "I'm not ready. I've got things to put in place, and–"

  "Explain them to Cleesh," said Apfel. For the first time in Falk's experience, he sounded impatient. "She can handle whatever you need. The whole Letts thing has escalated everything. We have to move while our Jung Guns are still accessible."

  "Your what?"

  "That was me," said Ayoob. He had come down from the tank side to join them. He shrugged apologetically. "I kind of came up with it. A joke. It sounds pretty stupid now everything's so serious."

  "Ayoob's referring to the subjects selected for the embed process," said Bari. He looked over a data display that had just been sent to his celf. "They're all SOMD, of course. We recruited carefully, quietly approached a few suitable candidates who seemed prepared to make a little extra money on the side. We have contracts, agreements to provide in the event of injury or dismissal."

  "How many candidates?" asked Falk.

  "Nine," said the SO Logistics man. His role in the whole thing was becoming clearer.

  "He's your finder? Your talent scout?"

  "Yeah," said Apfel.

  "Nine ground troopers?" Falk mused.

  "Yes."

  "How will mine be selected? When do I meet him?"

  "The match is based on a number of variables," Underwood began. "There's a bunch of biological issues, synaptic patterning being the–"

  Apfel cut her off.

  "Actually, right now, it's about availability. And you don't get to meet him."

  "Now wait–"

  "Thanks to Letts, the SOMD is mobilising a major taskforce response. Just about everything's shipping out. Every single one of our nine possibles will be in the field by lunchtime tomorrow, and embedding will be impossible. It would take us weeks to presearch and shortlist replacements. Unless we move right now, we can forget being operational for at least six months."

  Falk walked over to one of the medical couches and sat down. He leant his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face with the flats of his hands, eyes and mouth wide. His head was rushing so much, he barely felt the pain in his hip.

  "What's his name?" he asked.

  Apfel looked at Underwood and nodded. She took up a folder from the cart beside her, opened the cover and searched for the answer.

  "Bloom," she said. "Nestor Bloom, private first class. Age twenty-six."

  "Is he ready?" asked Falk.

  "We've got him prepped in a mobile just outside Camp Lasky," said Ayoob. "Another forty-five minutes, and he's expected to report for mobilisation. That's all that's left of our window. We miss this, we miss him."

  "Okay, okay," whispered Falk.