"Well, you're paying, pet."
"Yeah, I'm paying." An expensive treatment to wipe the memory of that broken man with the bowed head in Josh Laren's dim echoing office. Buying off her own guilt.
This time it was a pub in Longthorpe, a long wood-panelled, glass-fronted room originally built to serve the Thorpe Wood golf-course as a clubhouse. Now it looked out over the Ferry Meadows estuary where the golf-course used to be. Taylor Faulkner had taken a window table, staring across the grey-chocolate mud-flats which the outgoing tide had uncovered. He was dressed in an expensive white tropical-weave suit, toying with a tall half-pint glass of lager.
Suzi slid on to the bench opposite him. The barman had glanced at her when she came in, drawn by her size, about to object to a schoolgirl waltzing in, then he met her gaze.
"We hadn't heard," Taylor Faulkner said. "It's been very quiet in Newcastle."
"You want combat, find yourself a general."
"No offence."
"For seven hundred K, offend away."
Taylor Faulkner looked pained. He held up a platinum Zurich card, and showed it to the Amex which Suzi produced, using his thumb to authorize the transfer. She watched the Amex's grey digits rise, and smiled tightly.
"May I see what I've bought?" he asked.
"Sure." She scaled a palm-sized cybofax wafer across the table to him. "The code is: Goldpan. No hyphen. Anything else will crash wipe, OK?"
"Yes." He pocketed the cybofax.
"Nice knowing you, Mr. Faulkner."
He turned to the window and the gulls scratching away at the mud.
Suzi rose and made for the door. The sight of the figure in black cotton Levi's standing at the bar drinking German beer from a bottle made her stop. Leol Reiger, another tekmerc commander. They'd worked together on a couple of deals, hadn't got on. Not at all. Leol fancied himself as very big time. He was into running spoilers on kombinates, burning Japanese banks. Rumour said he'd even snatched data from Event Horizon. Suzi knew that wasn't true; he was still alive. And he hadn't been there when she came in.