She was served a drink in seconds. She turned around, and saw him looking at her across ten metres of smoky half-light. He stared, still unable to believe it was really her. Far away, just beside his ear, he heard Dafyd call out delightedly, ‘Cat!’ The woman gave a heart-stopping smile and walked over.
Jordan moved faster than the others to make a space for her. She gave him a nod and a quick, tentative smile, and sat down beside him. She reached over the table-top to Dafyd and Stone and grabbed their hands.
‘Hi, guys. It’s great to see you again.’
‘You too, Cat.’
‘Been a long time,’ Stone said. He grinned at her. ‘We missed you.’
‘No you fucking didn’t!’ Cat stretched out her left arm, showing a plastic cast. ‘You hit me!’
Stone looked back, untroubled. ‘Business is business,’ he said.
Cat smiled. Even from the side, Jordan could feel the warmth.
‘Yeah, that’s OK, come on.’ She shrugged, retracting her arm, and took a sip of her drink.
‘You get the tangle with Moh sorted out?’ Dafyd asked.
‘Oh,’ said Catherin. ‘Yeah, I have. How d’you know about it?’
Stone guffawed. ‘Moh told us. Eventually. Even if he hadn’t, we’d have heard.’ He laughed again. ‘What an idiot. Where is he now?’
Stone, Jordan noticed, was looking at Cat intently.
‘Off somewhere with his lady scientist,’ Cat said. Her tone was vague and light, as if passing on a piece of idle gossip. Stone frowned, looked away from her, and seemed to see Jordan for the first time since Cat had come in.
‘Ah, Cat, this guy here is Jordan Brown, he’s staying with us for a bit—’
‘I know,’ she said. She turned to Jordan. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ She put down her drink. ‘I’m Catherin Duvalier,’ she said, holding out her right hand.
Jordan felt like kissing it. He shook it.
‘You’ve been looking for me?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
Jordan’s whole face felt like a beacon. He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘I’ve been looking for you, too.’ His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of beer.
Catherin laughed. ‘Looking, hell,’ she said. ‘You found me!’
‘Yeah, well, you weren’t—’
‘Hey.’ Cat ducked her head forward, then looked up, pushing the hair back from her eyes with her wrist and grinning at him mischievously. ‘That?’
‘That.’
‘Smart.’ She shifted in her seat, half-turned away. ‘But it wasn’t that. It was the way you got to that.’ Her narrowed eyes looked at him sidelong.
‘Oh, the—’
Cat raised a hand quickly, edge-on to the others, spread palm facing him. ‘Later.’ Her eyes flicked away; she caught her lower lip momentarily in her teeth.
Stone looked from Cat to Jordan, frowning. ‘What’s goin on here?’
Cat rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her knuckles. ‘None of your business.’ She smiled brightly at Dafyd and Stone. ‘So…how is business?’
Dafyd shrugged. ‘Still running on the kind of contracts you didn’t like,’ he said. ‘The movement stuff’s drying up a bit, but there’s plenty of site-protection work coming in. What you doing yourself?’
‘Nothing risky.’
‘Ah,’ said Stone.
‘I didn’t come here to look for a job,’ Catherin said. She leaned further across the table. ‘What you said about movement work drying up – how d’you explain that?’
‘People holding back,’ Stone said. ‘You know why.’
Dafyd grunted. ‘The ANR’s talking about the final offensive. Mind you, they did the same five years back and it was just a few raids came of it. Wouldn’t account for all that’s going on – or not going on, more like.’
‘Loss of confidence in the political-violence industry,’ Jordan said, feeling he should make a contribution. ‘Why shell out on bombing today what’s gonna be bombed tomorrow?’ He dropped into a cockney girn. ‘Bad for business, innit, all this talk about final offensives. Leads to stockpiling. Hell, some outfits are gonna be putting streetfighters out on the streets.’
He laughed at their uneasy laughs.
‘You got it,’ Catherin said, turning to him. ‘It’s part of the plan. Tactics, comrade, tactics.’
‘Huh?’
‘Think about it. “Streetfighters out on the streets.” They’re not going to sit around with their comm helmets upside down beside them and a bit of cardboard saying “Out of ammo – please help”.’ She waited for their smiles to fade and continued. ‘Actually…there is something coming in. Don’t know when, but any day now. The ANR and the Alliance – I don’t know which is intending to use the other as a cover, but they’ll both hit at the same time. This is fac.’
Jordan thought over what he’d learned and what he’d already known about the forces and dispositions of the fragmented opposition. Difficult to quantify, given the Representation of the People (Temporary Provisions) Act, but between them they could probably muster about a third of the population, and history showed that was enough when it wasn’t votes that counted. Hairs prickled down the back of his neck.
‘You know, if this offensive comes off, we’re talking about a revolution,’ he said to Catherin. He said it unself-consciously, just imparting information.
She nodded, just as seriously.
Jordan felt his eyes sting.
‘Yee-hah,’ he said.
‘You pleased about this?’ Stone asked. ‘I heard you tonight. Thought you were against fighting.’
Jordan stared at him, shaken at how easy it was to be a bit too subtle.
‘I’m gonna have to work on that,’ he said sourly. ‘What I meant was, I’m against all the stupid fighting that’s going on now. Fighting to end it, that’s different. So is not fighting to keep it all going, which is what I was trying to suggest.’
‘The war to end war,’ Dafyd said dryly.
Cat turned her head sharply. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Precedents aren’t too good,’ Stone said. ‘World War Three, for starters.’
Jordan choked briefly on his beer.
‘You should read books,’ he spluttered. He snorted hop-smelling froth out of his sinuses, grinning apologetically. ‘Ah, forget it. You been on the net recently?’
Stone and Dafyd shook their heads. Catherin was watching him. He glanced at her only occasionally as he talked, or so he thought at the time; afterwards, looking back, all he remembered of the conversation was her face and a vague recollection of what he’d said. At the time everything was clear: all the bits of information he’d picked up on the net and the street coming together, the buzz that was suddenly so loud in the aching silence left now the ANR had gone quiet. He spun a story of the shifts he’d noticed, in a way that he thought would make sense to the two (or three? what was Catherin into?) politically motivated fighters. And all the time he knew he was winging it, that it was in part guesswork which he could only hope was inspired.
‘Something’s happening,’ he concluded. ‘Happening fast. People are changing their minds, making up their minds by the hour. And they’re coming down on the side of the ANR, or at least against the Kingdom and the Free States.’
Catherin looked interested, Dafyd and Stone sceptical. Jordan spread his hands. ‘Check it out, guys.’
They started to argue. Jordan got another round in. Cat moved over, not looking at him, still arguing, and he sat down beside her, on the outside of the seat this time.
‘No point us talking about it,’ Catherin was saying. ‘You’ve been out on active for a week, and out of your heads when you weren’t, yeah?’
Stone and Dafyd acknowledged the justice of this with hoots.
‘So go and talk to somebody else, OK!’ she said. Something in her fierce stare made the two men suddenly notice some comrades at the bar. They left to join them.