‘So he keeps doing it and I keep ragging him, but all the time I’m thinking, What the fuck – y’know?’

Chuck blinked. He knew.

‘Then, out of the blue, he gets that little Suzuki Jeep. I mean, this is a guy who borrowed money off me for pizza! The fucking mooch!’ Jeff’s outraged indignation was almost funny. He was quiet for a moment, his jaw working in annoyance, his eyes narrowed under sandy brows, his fingers toying with a short stack of Post-it notes.

‘So I followed him. Followed him in here. Into Engineering. Saw him steal these. Just a couple at a time. One from this pad, one from another. They’re supposed to be logged an’ all but, fuck, these people are slack. Every fucker’s slack, y’know? Don’t matter if they’re pulling down a hundred grand or working for food. Every fucker’s slack.’

Chuck nodded. Every fucker was slack. Even him, eventually, he realized with a pang.

Jeff got up, tiring of his own tirade. ‘So, anyway, I figured, if he’s getting something out of it, I’d better get something out of it too.’ His eyes met Chuck’s and he grinned broadly. ‘You understand?’

Chuck saw his lips moving but the roaring of blood in his ears was such that he could barely hear the words.

‘So when Lyle left, I figured you’d be stepping into his shoes. Young. Stupid. Greedy.’

The words stung Chuck. He was better than Lyle! Better than all of them! Yet young, stupid and greedy seemed to sum him up perfectly at that moment.

‘Don’t make me come get you, boy.’ Jeff seemed a little angry now, and waved a beckoning hand at him.

Chuck understood perfectly, even though he didn’t hear so well. He could feel his heart pumping in his throat. The ARC pad lay on the girl’s desk between him and Jeff. That bitch. If she hadn’t stolen his job, he wouldn’t be standing there now, squeezed so hard between his job and his theft and the Lucky Eight and his disappointment and Jeff – who was now watching him with unseemly hunger – that he could hardly breathe.

Chuck had come top of his class at Texas State. That meant he was at least smart enough to know he had no way out. As Lyle had discovered before him, he couldn’t report Jeff. Even if he stopped stealing the certificates for the fidgety guy with the gun, Jeff could get him fired. If he got fired, the Lucky Eight would suck him in like quicksand. He’d never get the smell of fried pork out of his clothes and he’d be married off to the gaunt child he’d been pointed out to in the old village – a child with lice in her hair and shit stains on her thighs.

So, at last, it was Chuck’s 3.9 grade point average that made him slowly walk round the desk towards Jeff.

Jeff smiled and hitched open his belt.

Chuck kept his eyes on the desk where the pad and the tampons mocked him.

That whore. Somehow he’d make her pay for this.

20

KITTY LOOKED UP and smiled at Tom for about the twentieth time. She was starting to look strained.

Tom didn’t smile back this time, just shrugged. He knew Pete was deliberately keeping him waiting. And the longer he waited, the more shit he knew he was in. If he’d needed any further clues, he had only to look past the smile to the pity in Kitty’s eyes.

However, if Pete was hoping to put him on the defensive with a game of corporate chicken, it wasn’t working. The longer Tom sat in the low vinyl chair, the angrier he got. He could feel it happening to him and could do nothing about it. He was angry at Pete for the forty-minute wait when he’d left Ness at LAX to fly here, straight after arriving from South Africa; he was angry at whoever had run them off the road and murdered Pam Mashamaete and the others; he was angry at every leak in every pipeline and tanker between DC and Anchorage; he was angry at Lenny Munro for being the egotistical tight-ass he was; and he was angry at himself for pretty much everything else that was shitty in his life. For some odd, unbidden reason, this included making Lucia cry. And when that thought popped into his head, it made him so angry he wanted to shoot someone. His own conscience was fucking betraying him now! She was history, and not even a big piece of history – a tiny, sharp pebble in the shoe of his memory that made no difference to the whole but pricked at him nonetheless. Why the hell she kept cropping up in his far more urgent mental processes, he was at a loss to explain. He wished fervently he’d never met her so that he wasn’t wasting energy on thinking about her.

The phone on Kitty’s desk buzzed and she murmured into it, then looked at him.

‘They’re ready for you.’

As he passed her desk, she said, ‘Play it cool, Tom.’

Her voice was serious and Tom knew she was only looking out for him but, right at that moment, it was water off a duck’s back to him. He shrugged a noncommittal answer and yanked open the door.

Pete and Lenny Munro were sitting on the same side of Pete’s desk, like Munro was some kind of familiar.

‘Hi, Tom,’ said Pete, and he sounded tired.

Munro said nothing, just fixed Tom with a cold glare.

‘Hey, Pete. Lenny.’

Munro flinched at Tom’s easy tone and Tom mentally chalked a mark up to himself. Munro wanted Tom grovelling on his knees, begging Pete for forgiveness. Well, fuck him, thought Tom, with another comforting little bolt of anger: he might be brought to his knees in this meeting, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to start out that way. He and Munro theoretically were equals. Munro probably thought he was the superior right now because Tom was in job-limbo, but Tom figured he’d always have the edge on Munro on brains alone, so he wasn’t about to give him any undue respect just because he was getting twice the money, all the work, and was so far up Pete’s ass that only the soles of his shoes were showing.

Tom knew he was meant to take the uncomfortable seat in front of Pete’s desk that completed the triangle, so instead he wandered across to the bookcase on the opposite wall and leaned against that.

Pete sighed. ‘Tom, you know why you’re here.’

‘Actually, I don’t.’

Munro’s face reddened. ‘Don’t play the innocent, Patrick!’

‘Thank you, Lenny. I’ll chair this meeting,’ said Pete, a little sharply, and Munro pursed his lips tightly.

‘The Pride of Maine.’

It sounded oddly old-fashioned to hear the plane’s whimsical name uttered in the context of an official investigation. ‘Pride of Maine’ sounded like something that had gone down with Orville Wright at the helm.

‘What about it?’ said Tom, flatly.

‘You’ve been conducting a wholly unofficial investigation into probable cause.’

‘What about it?’ he repeated.

‘Probable cause has already been established in that case, as well you know.’

‘So the paperwork shows,’ he said blandly.

Munro shifted and Tom saw his fingers tighten on the arms of his chair. The chair Tom was supposed to be sitting in did not have arms: that was another clue about the hierarchy in this room, his objective mind thought distantly.

Pete was full of sighs today. ‘Tom, whatever your personal feelings about the LAX case, you have overstepped the mark. Simple as that. You have disregarded the wholly legitimate findings of a fellow professional, calling his judgement into question, you must have groundlessly raised the hopes of Mr Stern’s friends and family, and you have most certainly pissed off the staff of CalSuperior, who have made an official complaint about trespass, industrial espionage and wanton destruction of property.’

The espresso attack. Tom almost smiled.

‘All this,’ Pete continued, ‘on top of your existing probation for previous infractions.’

NTSB-speak really ratcheted Pete’s vocabulary up a notch or two, thought Tom, simultaneously realizing he’d barely been listening to the tongue-lashing. He only knew it was a bad one from Munro’s smug look. Bastard. The flames of anger licked higher in his belly.

‘You’re a fucking maverick, Patrick,’ Munro spat, finally unable to hold onto his own anger.

Pete turned to him immediately. ‘Lenny, would you wait outside?’

‘What? Why?’

‘Please?’