The Administration Series (222 page)

"To talk. That's all." Keir turned back to Carnac. "And now we're done, so you can leave."

Sara disappeared from the doorway and he heard her calling for McLean. The watchdogs were clearly still in residence, which was fortunate.

"You can leave, Carnac," Keir repeated, and again Carnac felt the distance between them, a gulf that could never now be bridged. His own fault, to a certain extent, but how much more Toreth's fault.

It angered him to think of Keir wasting his life pandering to the crippled needs of someone so far from being his equal; it made him almost as angry as did the existence of I&I. The scale of the outrage differed, but the core was the same — it was a perversion of the way the world should be. The anger gave him the resolve to do what had to be done. It was dangerous, but a necessary risk, and his last gift to Keir — his freedom from Toreth.

Even as he repeated the justification to himself, he felt the sting of anticipation.

Sara and McLean appeared in the doorway, and the cast was complete. Payment time. He stood slowly, savouring the moment.

"I had no intention of anything more intimate than tea." He smiled pityingly at Toreth. "Not, of course, that I imagine that makes you feel any less insecure or afraid of the idea of my being alone with Keir."

He heard Sara draw her breath in sharply, and Toreth said, "I'm sick of your fucking games. You don't know a single fucking thing about me." Then he frowned slightly — deja vu, perhaps, and pathetically predictable.

Carnac took a few steps towards the door, and turned. "Oh, really? Let me see. I know that you like your steak medium rare. I know that you sleep on the left-hand side of the bed. I know that you've come with my name on your lips."

"Carnac —" Keir said warningly. Carnac ignored him, this prepared speech at least unrolling smoothly.

"I know the details of the diagnosis in your psych file. I know that your parents never gave you a second's acknowledgement or approval that didn't also remind you of your failure to satisfy their impossible demands. I know how deeply, and understandably, they resented their misfortune that you survived when your brother died. I know that because of them you trust exactly two people in your life, and that the only way you are capable of understanding that feeling is by trying to own them."

He glanced round the room. They stared at him, goldfish expressions, paralysed by the sudden attack — even Keir. Terrified of the truths they all danced around. Pitiful, all of them.

Turning back to Toreth, he lowered his voice. "I know that you want Keir to — "

"No! You
fuck
." Sara, suddenly shocked out of stillness, and he wondered if she had guessed what he was about to say. "Leave him alone!" She started across the room towards him, Toreth moving a split second later.

Carnac didn't have a great deal of personal experience of violence, so he always found it interesting. In fact, except for the pain, he enjoyed it. He particularly liked the way that time seemed to slow, allowing one to appreciate the finer points.

Keir appeared to have been expecting this turn of events, so he intercepted Toreth before he had gone more than a few steps. Because there was simply no way he could hold Toreth back, he had to hit him. If Toreth had had the least expectation of his doing it, he could have stopped him easily. As it was, the blow caught him just below the ribs and he staggered sideways against the wall, eyes wide — not surprising, given his prior injury in the area.

It was, thought Carnac, a beautiful sight, although he was under no illusion that it would incapacitate him for long, or that Keir would be able to hold him by force alone.

McLean, caught completely unawares, only managed to get hold of Sara a couple of feet before she reached Carnac. He pulled the bottle from her hand and it exploded on the floor, spraying the room. Sara froze, eyes wide, and McLean wrestled her back across the kitchen towards the door, having, in Carnac's judgement, the easier of the two jobs. Winded as he was, Toreth was struggling to get away from Keir and it was a struggle he would win before long.

"Let
go
of me." Toreth was hoarse, barely audible over Sara, who was screaming abuse with impartial fury at McLean and Carnac. "I'm going to break his fucking neck, like I should've done a long time ago."

"No, you're not; he's not worth it."

As Toreth glared at him over Warrick's shoulder, flushed with murderous fury, Carnac caught his gaze, and smiled. He continued speaking, directly to Toreth, ignoring the commotion around them.

"I know that you want Keir to love you —"

"McLean, get her out of here."

"— more than you have wanted anything in your adult life —"

"Then if he's still here, call the others in."

"— and that the uncontrollable need makes you sick with terror."

Keir spared him a brief glance over his shoulder. "And you —
you
have one chance to get the fuck out of my home before the rest of the security team arrives and I have you thrown out."

Carnac decided to cut to the end, regrettable as it was to lose any of the effect. It would be enough. He put every ounce of conviction he could summon into his voice, driving the words home like knives.

"And, finally, I know that in the end the pathetically little you have to offer Keir will no longer be enough, and he will leave you. And when that day comes, there is nothing you will be able to do to make him stay. You're not
that
good a fuck and, really, what else do you have?"

That was it, that was everything. He heard Sara, shrieking elsewhere in the flat, but in the kitchen the only sounds were breathing and the softly fizzing pool of champagne.

Perfect. Absolute perfection, at last. "I'll see you at work tomorrow, Toreth." He turned his back on them and strolled off out of the kitchen, in no hurry at all, glass crunching beneath his feet.

Warrick held Toreth until he heard the outer door close, although Toreth had given up resisting. When he released him and stepped back, Toreth stayed leaning against the wall, his hand to his side, his breathing laboured.

After a long silence Toreth said, "Thanks."

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Fine." His voice was distant, his eyes fixed on the spot where Carnac had delivered his speech. "Killing him would have been stupid. Although that said, I really wanted to do it and — " He took a deep breath and winced. "Fuck."

"I'm sorry about that — I forgot about your ribs in all the excitement."

"It doesn't matter. I'm fine. Should tell the SimTech security trainers they did a good job with the corporate target self-defense." Silence fell over the room again and Warrick could hear voices faintly outside — Sara and McLean. She seemed to have calmed down, at least.

He should say . . . something, but for once he had no idea what. Acknowledging that he had even heard Carnac's barbs might be the worst thing he could do. The smell of champagne filled the room, overwhelming and slightly nauseating.

"Look, I have to go," Toreth said, sounding almost as though he were asking permission.

Warrick moved away from the path to the door, avoiding the glass. "What I said before still stands — you're free to go, whenever and wherever you wish. You always have been. But I'd very much like you to stay."

Toreth shook his head, but he didn't move away from the wall.

"Carnac was here to talk, that's all." Even as Warrick said it, he knew that it didn't matter this time.

"I know. I know he was. You wouldn't fuck him. I
know
that." Toreth's voice held a hint of anger that came as a relief.

"I realise I never should have let him in." He began an oblique approach to the topic. "It was stupid of me not to guess that he would have some unpleasant parting shot planned. I'm sorry that — "

"No. No need to be sorry. Wasn't your idea, was it? You didn't want anything to do with it. Bloody good plan as well."

"Toreth —"

Toreth pushed himself away from the wall and walked past him out of the room, still not looking at him. "Goodbye."

Warrick stood, debating whether to go after him. On balance, forcing him into a confrontation would do no good. Still, when the flat door opened and closed, it took all his self-discipline not to go after Toreth.

It was only as he started to sweep up the expensive mess on the floor that the thought occurred that in all the years they'd been together, he could never recall Toreth saying 'goodbye'.

They heard the door to the flat close behind Carnac, and after a few seconds Sara said, "You can put me down now."

McLean looked down at her. "Are you sure?"

She wasn't at all, and he didn't look sure either. He certainly didn't feel sure, arms tight round her, and after the scene in the kitchen it was a welcome feeling. However, he didn't do anything more than hold her — waiting for a cue from her.

"Well . . . you don't have to put me down." She looked up at him, thinking absently that he must be almost exactly the same height as Toreth. "But I'm not going to go chasing after Carnac with a carving knife."

He kissed her once, then let her go. "I'm still on duty until two."

"Oh. Okay." Well, that sounded promising. "Would you like a drink? I'd like one — a large one."

"I'm still still on duty."

"Well, Warrick's probably making coffee. He usually does when something like this happens." Not that something like this happened often. She strained to catch something from the kitchen, but she couldn't hear a sound.

"What are you going to do now?" McLean asked.

"Do?" The question sounded more significant than she could imagine a reason for. "Wait to see what happens here. I was supposed to be going to a party, but I'm not really in the mood now. So I'll probably go home, go to bed and get some beauty sleep. I've got to go to work tomorrow. Or if you — " His expression stopped her. "What?"

"I thought you worked for Toreth?"

"Well, I'm his admin, but I work for I&I. Why?"

"I thought that . . . well, he won't be going back there, will he?"

So she wouldn't either, and the problem of her job was neatly solved.

"Of course he will. Carnac will be gone in few days. There's no point in him sticking around any longer. He's lost and he knows it. That was just a goodbye present." And a beauty at that. Still nothing from the kitchen, but as long as Toreth was here, things couldn't be that bad.

McLean nodded. "And you'll be going back with him."

"Yes. He couldn't manage without me — he's hopeless on his own, to tell you the truth." She looked at him consideringly. "So I suppose the conversation is over, right?"

"Sara, it's not that —"

"Don't." She suddenly felt tired. He kissed nicely, but not nicely enough for her to try to get out gently this time, not when there was so much else to worry about. "Let's just stick with 'it never would've worked'. One comfort fuck isn't worth a whole post-mortem."

She watched, mildly curious, as his professional blankness covered up the hurt in his eyes. "If that's how you feel, then obviously I
respect
that."

Ouch. She almost said something else, but then she heard footsteps, quick and decisive, and Toreth saying, "Goodbye." By the time she stepped into the hall, the door was closing behind him.

On the way down to the car park, Carnac found himself walking more quickly, suddenly in a hurry to get away. Once in the waiting car, he had barely taken his seat before nausea swept over him. He wrestled the door open again in time to be wrenchingly sick. When he was done, he wiped his mouth and dropped the soiled handkerchief into the gutter. Then he slammed the door shut, desperate to be gone, only to discover that he was shaking so badly he couldn't operate the control panel, and the system wouldn't recognise his voice print.

He occupied the ten minutes it took to finally bring himself under control in mentally drafting his letter of resignation from I&I and from the new Administration in general. Now seemed like a strategic moment to distance himself from Int-Sec — he doubted they would take kindly to a threat to expose one of their agents.

Besides, he had had his fill of politics. The short-sighted fools wanted to keep the interrogators — very well, then they could rot in the hell of their own making without him. He only hoped that he was still alive when the morons who had congratulated him on his great success at I&I found themselves strapped into a chair down in the interrogation levels, screaming for death. He accepted now that nothing less than that would make them finally see the truth.

At which point, of course, it would be far too late to do the smallest particle of good to anyone.

At least they had cancelled his training debt, and he had the paperwork to prove it, signed by everyone who seemed even slightly relevant. He was free of them, finally, of their idiotic demands and breathtaking stupidity.

Altruism was a fool's game.

Being thrown out of a bar wasn't a complete novelty for Toreth, but it happened rarely enough that he felt indignant now.