Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘W-e-l-c-o-m-e,’ said Mungo, opening his arms and swaying. ‘Cyber-greetings to you and your tribe.’

  ‘He’s with me,’ said Bryn to the security guard. ‘Believe it or not.’

  He frogmarched Mungo through the turnstiles and up to Listoff’s office. Mungo rolled his head in disapproval. ‘First rule of cyber-trespass. Leave no footprints, take no prisoners. Shouldn’t have tried the third time. Look at that. Security code frozen. F-r-o-z-e-n. Frozen.’ Mungo began to repeat the word in a variety of accents, which a better-educated mind than Bryn’s would have recognised as the principal bad-guy accents from Dr Who. ‘Frozen. Frozen.’

  ‘Mungo, can you do anything to help?’

  Mungo cocked his head and blinked slowly at Bryn, wagging an authoritative finger. Then, realising he hadn’t either said or done anything, he rooted around in his enormous trousers and emerged with a diskette which he slipped into Listoff’s disk drive. He rebooted the PC, halting it before the configuration had been completed, then dropped into MS-DOS and began to pull up sheets of program code. ‘FROZEN. Frozen’. After about two hours during which time he managed to drink his entire bottle of water and urinate three times, he began to shake his head disapprovingly.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No worries. Be happy,’ sang Mungo, making Bryn instantly nostalgic for the days when music had tunes, knowing that old age was when music you’d never stopped listening to had become fashionable once again.

  ‘Have you run into a problem?’

  ‘No, man. It’s sorted. It’s a bit casual, this place. You’d think with all this money lying about’ – here Mungo gestured grandly around the room – ‘they’d be a bit more careful, like.’

  ‘It’s sorted?’

  ‘Yeah. Buried a sleeper. Wait a coupla days, then dig it up, see what we’ve got.’

  ‘We need to come back?’

  ‘Coupla days, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s a sleeper?’

  ‘A sleeper? It’s like, you know, buried. A sleeper.’

  ‘We can’t come back.’

  ‘No com-ee back, no collect-ee sleeper.’

  ‘Mungo. This sleeper, what does it do?’

  ‘This sleee-per records all the keystrokes from the keyboard and stores them in memory. When we come back, we have a look in the memory, and just read off the password. Then we’re in. What they should have done is build in a memory sweep, which clears –’

  ‘Mungo, focus, please. I nicked a security card to get in here. By Monday, that card will have had its security clearance deleted. I can’t go on nicking cards, added to which if we come in here on a weekday, our chances of being caught are way too high. They’re high enough as it is.’

  ‘Can’t be too high, man.’

  ‘Not you, Mungo, the risks. Focus. We need access tonight, or we need to get access from outside.’

  ‘Can’t get it tonight. For one thing it’s hardly even night. For another, you’re f-r-o-Z-e-n, frozen, frozen.’ Mungo belched for emphasis and looked as much like a disapproving librarian from the 1950s as it is possible for a twenty-year-old ecstasy-popping cyber-head to look.

  ‘Then how about getting in from outside?’

  ‘Remote access?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  Mungo’s gravely wagging finger came out again.

  ‘That would appear to be our only option.’

  It was six fifteen in the morning.

  7

  Their only option was a desperate one, and the extent of their desperation became apparent as daylight consolidated its grip on the sky outside. The graveyard shift on Saturday was always quiet, but Sunday mornings were actually a popular time to come into the bank. Hell.

  At seven ten, Bryn interrupted Mungo’s diligent work.

  ‘How’s progress?’

  ‘Mm, OK.’ Mungo’s concentration had returned as his brain punched a way through the chemical fog. ‘You don’t know how the Gandalf port is configured, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what a Gandalf port is.’

  “S OK, I can check.’

  More keystrokes. More pages of program code. Bryn’s eyes hurt with the glare. As often in Mungo’s presence, he felt old. He thought of his dad losing his strength, and felt doubly old; doubly old and with no marriage, no kids to show for it. He thought, randomly, of Cameron. Jesus, that Meg could think he and she should … Things weren’t that bad, surely. Across the room, more workmen joined the group who had come in a while before, and the floor was now noisy with banter and the sound of power tools as the group began to dismantle and move some internal walls. Seven twenty-five.

  ‘Done,’ said Mungo. ‘Sweet.’

  ‘Done? We can get out of here?’

  ‘Chill, man. The port’s configured, now I just got to check some things, and we’re out of here.’

  Seven twenty-eight.

  Bryn, swore that he would be gone by eight, ready or not. An hour previously he’d been swearing he’d be gone by seven. He thought again about the possibility that there was a mole inside the clinic and felt queasy at the idea. The staff was large and rapidly expanding. Virtually any of them could have been bought by Corinth. But how to make certain?

  Seven twenty-nine.

  8

  Just as Bryn checked his watch for the seventh time in twenty minutes, something prompted him to look up. Half a dozen bankers in casual dress were strolling towards him, holding brown paper bags of coffee and pastries. Bryn tumbled to the floor under Listoff’s desk, dragging Mungo after him. Even a cursory inspection had revealed that at least three of the new arrivals knew him – not well, but well enough to know he shouldn’t be there.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell!’

  As they grovelled down amongst the carpet tiles and forgotten pennies, the door to Listoff’s office opened and feet, visible to Bryn under the rim of the desk, walked over to within a couple of feet of his nose. Bryn had to restrain Mungo from tickling the banker’s ankle with a paperclip.

  ‘Bernie takes it black, no sugar, right?’

  A voice outside agreed, and a coffee was dumped on the desk above.

  ‘How come his computer’s on? I thought you came in with him.’

  ‘I did. He’s just coming.’

  Oh shit.

  The voices drifted away. Bryn peered out from his hiding place and found nothing to console him. Bernie Listoff had come in and was chatting with a colleague by the main doors, about forty feet away. The group that Bryn had first seen was spreading out at a meeting area about fifteen feet from Bernie’s door. Meantime, the workmen were busy on the far side of the floor, so that one way or another, virtually the whole area was under surveillance.

  Beneath his breath, Bryn began to use swearwords he hadn’t used since his rugby-playing days. If Bernie was coming, then they had to get out, no matter what the consequences.

  ‘Do you need to close what you’re doing?’ he hissed.

  Mungo shrugged, and Bryn yanked the power cord from the PC as Mungo retrieved his diskette. For a couple of seconds he tried to think of a clever way of exiting Bernie’s office. There wasn’t one. He crouched at the door, peeped out, saw people coming, going, filling the aisle. Opposite him, there was a secretary’s cubicle, and to its right another aisle intersecting the floor. ‘Follow me. Quietly.’ Bryn leaped. His leap took him to the cubicle, and a couple of paces swung him round into the aisle, out of sight of the bankers.

  He paused briefly to hear if he’d been spotted, but if he had been, they were quietly phoning security and not shouting about it. Mungo followed, an apparition in luminous orange, his fluorescent headband falling off during flight. If anyone saw him, they obviously didn’t believe their own eyes.

  Followed by Mungo, Bryn raced, panting, along the aisle, keeping his head below the level of the partitions, and crawled into another cubicle away from view. Temporarily they were safe, the way a man on a one-foot-high sand dune is safe, until the tide turns a
nd one-foot-high becomes ten-foot-under.

  Think.

  They had to leave. The main doors were directly in view of Bernie Listoff and his merry men, and it would be approaching suicide to walk out under their eyes. They could try simply making a run for it – but Bryn was as certain as he could be that their escape would be cut off before they’d even made it downstairs. That only left the fire exits, which Bryn knew to be connected to the building’s alarm system.

  ‘Wow. This is like Escape From Alcatraz, only without the Germans.’

  ‘Colditz,’ muttered Bryn, as the tide notched up a few more inches until he could feel the cold salt sea sloshing around his ankles.

  ‘How ‘bout a tunnel, man? Or didn’ one of them Colonel Mustard chappies escape by building a glider out of toilet rolls?’

  The workmen’s voices grew closer, and at the end of the aisle a couple of men dumped paintpots and ladders, preparing to renovate the wall behind. Bryn and Mungo were crouched down beneath the cubicle’s worktop – a certain sign of guilt. A flurry of ideas raced through Bryn’s mind, all of them stupid, but one less stupid than the rest.

  ‘You got a light, Mungo?’ he asked.

  ‘You want to smoke? Now?’ Flapping around in his ballooning pockets, Mungo came away with a cheap disposable lighter and handed it over. ‘I don’t have any tobacco, but I’ve got some really good –’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  Bryn checked the aisle one more time. The paintpots were still at one end, although the workmen were now off in another corner. But at the far end of the aisle two bankers were standing, talking. Damn.

  Bryn withdrew back into the cubicle and dug around in the waste bin and desk drawers for supplies. He found a sheet of paper, some cotton wool, a rubber band, and a box of staples. Excellent. Taking a sheet of paper from the bin, he rolled it into a taper and lit it, cradling the flame till it burned strong and steady. Satisfied, Bryn wrenched the top off the lighter, and splashed a bit of lighter fluid over the cotton wool before loosely setting the top back on to the lighter. He wrapped the cotton in the paper, weighting it with the box of staples and securing the bundle with a rubber band. He hefted it for weight and shape. It was good.

  He poked his nose out again, careful to keep his burning taper alight. The bankers were still there, still chatting. He was pinned in the cubicle, water at his knees, paintpots still thirty feet distant. A long way, thirty feet. He took a deep breath, and threw.

  First the lighter, which struck the paintpots and overturned, leaking fuel into the carpet tiles. Next he lit his cotton wool and staple firebomb, and threw that, too. For a moment, he thought he’d missed his aim, then bingo! A blue flame flickered almost invisibly, then climbed to the paintpots and clung there. Don’t go out, damn you, don’t leave me now.

  The blue flame flickered, hung, then disappeared.

  It disappeared in a boom of yellow fire, as heat ignited the paint and the paintpots exploded open, splattering walls and ceiling with flame. Already, within a second, the smoke was unbelievable, the fire roaring away like a team of demons on piece rate. Smoke alarms were screaming and the sprinkler system leaped into operation. Fire and water. Shouldn’t there be a rainbow?

  There was no time to lose. The sprinklers would soon overwhelm the flames. Expanding his lungs like bellows, Bryn drank a bellyful of clean air, took a bodily hold of Mungo, then dived into the path of the fire and out again on the other side. If he was singed he didn’t notice. A group of workmen stood like statues as he emerged. If they moved or spoke, he was moving too fast to notice. Next to him, Mungo was tearing along, an ecstatic expression on his face. ‘Sod this,’ roared Bryn to the workmen, plunging towards the fire exit.

  He crashed the door open, causing an extra alarm to sound over the noise of the smoke alarm. A loudspeaker system somewhere was telling people to clear the floor and not to panic. Bryn and Mungo clattered down the stairs into coolness and silence, not stopping until they’d reached street level, bursting the exit door open, crashing out on to the placid silence of Sunday morning London.

  ‘Wicked entertainment,’ said Mungo, with bright, delighted eyes.

  9

  And just a few hours before Bryn and Mungo tumbled headlong into the morning streets, elsewhere in London two women left a nightclub. One, shorter and chestnut-haired, was in the company of a man who held her loosely in the crook of his arm. The other was without a partner, but pink with alcohol and excitement.

  ‘See you Monday, Cammie,’ said Meg, climbing into a taxi with her partner for the night.

  ‘Yeah, sure, see you,’ said Cameron, sleek-haired and little-black-dressed. Another cab stopped for her, but she waved it away, walking out of the grey heart of London into the living green of St James’ Park. It was the first of June, and the grass was cool and inviting. She pulled off her shoes, and walked on the dewy lawn beneath the plane trees. A couple of male joggers assessed her with their eyes as they went past. She smiled at them. As the night had passed, she’d begun to enjoy it. The nightclub wasn’t her scene, but, as Meg had said, that was the point. ‘Think of it as safe play, Cammie. Flirting for fun, like poufs in a harem.’ And so she’d flirted. She’d smiled lots, made eye contact, ran her finger round her lips, and allowed men to buy her drinks. She’d even let herself be lured out on to a dance floor where the very, very best that could be said of her dancing was that it was uninhibited.

  And as the grass pressed its cool green into the soles of her feet, one of the songs from the evening floated into her semi-conscious and remained there, playing itself again and again. It was Nina Simone, a husky black voice from a different continent and a different age.

  ‘I’m a woman,’ sang Cameron. ‘Don’t you know what I am?’

  SIXTEEN

  1

  How high can you build a house? Answer: as high as the foundations let you.

  How big can you build a business? Answer: as big as your capital permits.

  And how do you build a business that encircles the globe, racing a hundred-billion-dollar corporation to the Patent Office, when that same hundred-billion-dollar corporation has its hands round your baby’s throat, depriving it of the vital cash it needs to grow? Answer: you can’t, it’s impossible, forget it.

  2

  Monday broke hot and heavy over London. In the centre of town, an invisible brown fog collected, fed by a million car exhausts, the waste products of seven million people living one on top of the other with barely a patch of green to interrupt the grey. As the day drew on, the sun baked the toxic stew until nitrogen dioxide levels stood at five times World Health Organisation limits, carbon monoxide at more than four times. In the concrete rat runs, sun and shadow competed for mastery, cars honked at pedestrians, while those famously polite British pedestrians made V-signs right back.

  Out in Fulham, beside a sluggish brown river, the air is better, and at least there are smells in the air other than those of a planet killing itself for gain. There are smells of weed and water, smells of rotting wood and rosebay willowherb, smells of elderflower and mud. Even with the doors and windows propped open the boathouse sweltered, and it was with relief that Bryn and Kati burst outside at lunchtime to eat sandwiches on the roof of the barge, shoes and socks off in Bryn’s case, shoes and socks never even on in Kati’s. At the end of the barge, Tallulah hopped around, practising the vocabulary that Meg had been so carefully teaching her: ‘O-shi’, ‘Matey’, as well as her most recent achievement, ‘Uddy ell’.

  ‘Heard anything from Cameron?’ mumbled Bryn, throwing a wedge of what passed for pastrami in Fulham into the water.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Kati shook her head, finishing her mouthful before continuing. ‘And how about Meg?’

  ‘They went out clubbing together, believe it or not. Heard nothing since.’

  ‘Clubbing? Does that mean the same thing in London as it does in Vancouver?’

  Bryn nodded.

  ‘Wow …’ Kati paused to contemplate the idea. ‘It’s
hard to picture that somehow.’

  ‘Yeah. You think Meg persuaded her to take off her labcoat?’

  Kati laughed. ‘Or if her dancing partner got lectures on immune modulation … Mind you, that nickname she used to have in Boston, Dr Dynamite – it does sound like a DJ’s stage name.’

  They both laughed. Kati was wearing a dark-blue summer dress sprigged with red and white roses. Bryn rubbed her on the back of the leg, pushing her skirt up a few inches. He left his hand there, both of them enjoying the warm sun. A minute passed, then Kati rolled over on to her side, dislodging Bryn’s hand. Tallulah came close to pick up any stray crumbs.

  ‘You know my friend’s flatmate I was telling you about?’ she asked.

  ‘Thierry somebody-or-other of the gorgeous brown eyes? Yes.’

  ‘He’s asked me out.’

  ‘Ask as in date, ask?’

  ‘Yeah, ask as in date.’

  ‘And you said sorry, but you were desperately in love with this hunky businessman who lives on a yacht and operates a multi-million-dollar healthcare concern.’

  ‘You know, I totally forgot to mention that.’

  ‘You said yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Bryn put his hand out again, not on Kati’s unattainable brown thigh, but on her back in a spot where good friends are allowed to touch. He gave her a rub and a kiss high up on her temple, a long, long way from her rosebud mouth and cute little seashell ear. Her dark-brown curls tumbled about her head, Bryn’s property no longer. Tallulah hopped on to Kati’s back, as though to guard her from any more of Bryn’s marauding hand.

  ‘I’m really pleased for you. Hope it goes well.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. He’s cute.’

  Bryn gave her a smile, which was meant to be full of big-brotherly encouragement, but which ended up a bit more pained than that.