The Business

by Iain Banks

  'Really.'

  'Still, it's true what they say, isn't it? You're more likely to be killed in a car than a plane.'

  'Not when you're in the plane, Uncle Freddy.'

  'Oh, well, I suppose. If you're going to look at it that way.'

  'Right, just thought I'd check. How are things in Yorkshire?'

  'Bit rainy. GTO needs a new big end.'

  'Does it? Right. Okay.'

  'You sound a bit tense, old girl.'

  'Ha! Really?'

  'Try having a snooze.'

  'A snooze?'

  'Works wonders. Or get absolutely filthy drunk. Of course, you have to do that a good while before the flight.'

  'Uh-huh?'

  'Yes. Equip yourself with such a bloody awful hangover that a fiery death in the mangled wreckage of an aircraft seems like a merciful release.'

  'I think I'm going to ring off now, Uncle Freddy.'

  'Right you are! Get some shut-eye. Good idea.'

  The final precipitous roller-coaster descent into Thuhn was even more terrifying than I remembered. For one thing, I could see it this time; on the previous occasion we'd been in cloud until the last thousand feet or so and I'd ascribed the wildly uneven flying of that part of the flight to yet more severe turbulence. Approaching in mid-afternoon on a clear day, it became all too obvious that going into a succession of stomach-churning nose-dives and standing the Twin Otter on its wingtips was simply the only way for the tiny craft simultaneously to lose enough height and avoid a succession of towering knife-sharp obsidian cliffs and seemingly near-vertical boulder fields full of vast rocky shards like ragged black shark's teeth.

  It was probably just as well there was an air of unreality about the flight. I felt woozy. I had the beginnings of a headache; it was probably the altitude and the thin air. They said it was better to take your time getting to somewhere as high as Thuhn; drive up, or take a donkey, or even walk. That way your body adjusted gradually to the thinning air. Flying in from sea level was precisely the way not to do it. Still, at least we were. descending now. I shivered. I'd dressed in jeans and a cotton blouse and kept a few clothes by my side which I'd gradually put on during the flight — a plaid shirt, a jumper, gloves — but I still felt freezing.

  The plane levelled out in that last thousand feet of its approach, if you can call hurtling down at an angle of about forty-five degrees levelling out. I watched a stone shrine, a stupa, flashing past the window on a spur of rock level with the plane. I looked down. If we were at forty-five degrees, the slope was at about forty-four. I did not need to be a geometrician to know that the brown blur of broken ground was getting closer all the time.

  The shadow of the plane — worryingly sharp and close to life-size — flickered over rocks, lines of prayer flags and straggling walls made from rough round boulders. Some of the tall bamboo masts anchoring the lines of prayer flags were about twice as far off the ground as the Twin Otter. I pondered Uncle Freddy's words about the siting of prayer flags, and the possibility of dying in a plane crash caused by well-meaning believers hoisting a fresh set of flags in the last obvious space around the airport, only to snag the plane and cause the disaster they were hoping to avert.

  Suddenly there were buildings underneath, opposite and above us — I glimpsed an old man looking down at us from a window and could have told you the colour of his eyes if I'd been paying attention — and then I was terribly heavy, then light, and then there was a thump and a furious shaking and rumbling that meant we'd landed. I opened my eyes as the plane rattled and banged across the landing ground, raising dust.

  There was a cliff edge about three metres away, and a drop into a deep, wide valley where a white-flecked river wound through sinuous fields of grey gravel, its banks terraced with narrow fields and dotted with sparse trees. Grey, black and then utterly white mountains rose beyond, their peaks like a vast white sheet hooked in a dozen different places and hauled sharply up to heaven.

  The plane wheeled abruptly, engines roaring and then cutting out. That left only the roaring in my ears, then. The co-pilot appeared, looking pleased with himself. Through the plane's windscreen, not far in front, I could see a set of soccer goalposts. He kicked open the door, which whammed down and jerked on its chain like a hanged man. 'Here we are,' he said.

  I unbuckled, rose unsteadily and stepped out on to the dusty brown ground. I was suddenly surrounded by a sea of knee- and thigh-high children kitted out to resemble small cushions, while a crowd of adults dressed in what looked like colourful quilts appeared and started congratulating the flight crew on another safe landing. The terminal building was still the fuselage of a USAAF DC3 that had crash-landed here during the Second World War. It was closed. A wind as cold and thin and sharp as a knife cut across the landing strip, raising dust and goose pimples. I patted a selection of worryingly sticky little heads and looked up past the jumbled buildings of the town to the steep slope of chaotically fractured rocks over which we had made our final approach. Prayer flags everywhere, like bunting round a used boulder lot. Beneath my feet were the markings for one of the football ground's penalty boxes. One of the male quilt-people came up to me, put his hands together as though in prayer and bowed and said, 'Ms Telman, welcome to Thuhn International Airport.'

  I successfully resisted the urge to laugh hysterically in his face.

  'I say, did you know that you can count up to over one thousand just using your fingers?'

  'Really?'

  'Yes. Can you guess how? I bet you can't.'

  'You'd…use a different base, I suppose, not ten. Ah, of course; binary. Yes. It'd be…one thousand and twenty-four.'

  'One thousand and twenty-three, actually. Zero to one thousand and twenty-three. Gosh, though, well done. That was very quick. I must have bored you with this before. Have I?'

  'No, Mr Hazleton.'

  'Then I'm impressed. And you know my name, and here I am and I've very rudely forgotten yours, though I'm sure we were introduced earlier. I do hope you'll forgive me.'

  'Kathryn Telman, Mr Hazleton.'

  'Kathryn, how do you do. I do believe I've heard of you.'

  We shook hands. It was November 1989, in Berlin, the week the Wall came down. I'd squeezed myself into a Lufthansa flight from London (jump seat, snooty stewardesses) just that day, determined to be there for a bit of history that had seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. A whole bunch of the more adventurous Business high-ups had had exactly the same idea — Tempelhof and Tegel must have been double-parked with executive jets for those few days — and as a result almost by default there was a sort of impromptu meeting of various Level Twos and Ones set up for that evening. I'd decided to try and gatecrash that as well, and succeeded.

  We were sitting down to dinner in a private room in the Kempinski after a chaotic evening in a collection of limos and taxis, touring the various places where people were swarming over the Wall, attacking it, demolishing it, wheeling bits of it away and pocketing it. Everybody was a bit drunk, and, I suppose, infected with the heady, almost revolutionary — make that counter-revolutionary — atmosphere of that particular time and place.

  I had indeed been introduced to Hazleton at the reception before dinner. He was a Level Two at the time, but marked out for still greater things. He'd looked me over in an automatic, unfocused way. I was twenty-nine, already a Four, thanks to my inspired guesses about computers and IT. I looked pretty good; better than I had at nineteen. Hazleton might have forgotten my name but he hadn't forgotten what I looked like. He'd made straight for the seat at my side. Well, fairly straight: he bumped a couple of gold-painted chairs on the way.

  He'd just nodded at me as he'd sat down and then ignored me throughout the first course, as though he'd really chosen this seat at random or had taken it reluctantly, then suddenly he'd come up with this unlikely chat-up line about digital digits. I had become used to this sort of thing from upper-class Englishmen. At least he had used the second person, rather than 'one'.
/>   'And if one used one's toes,' he said, 'one could go up to over a million.' (Oh, so we were using 'one', were we?)

  'Impractical, though,' I said.

  'Yes, you'd have to take your socks or stockings off.' (Back to 'you', then.)

  'I was thinking,' I said, 'of the difficulty of articulating your toes.'

  'Oh. Yes. How do you mean?'

  'Well, you can use your fingers to count because you can alter their state, bend each one to show whether it's a zero or a one, but very few people can do anything similar with their toes. They just sort of sit there, don't they?'

  He thought about this. 'I can put my little toes over the ones next to them.'

  'Really? On both sides?'

  'Yes. Good, eh?'

  'Then assuming you can put each of your big toes over the one next to them, you could count to, what, just over sixteen thousand.'

  'I suppose so.' He contemplated his entrée for a moment. 'I can wiggle my ears, you know.'

  'Never!'

  'Yes. Watch.'

  'Good heavens!'

  We amused each other with a selection of childish antics like this for a while, then got on to puzzles.

  'I've got one,' I said. 'What are the next two letters in this sequence? S, T, N, D, R, D?'

  He sat back. I had to repeat the letters for him. He looked thoughtful. 'S, D,' he said.

  'No.'

  'Yes, it is. It's "standardised" with all the vowels taken out.'

  'No, it isn't.'

  'Why not?' he asked indignantly. 'That's a perfectly good answer.'

  'The correct one's much better.'

  He made a noise which sounded suspiciously close to a 'harrumph', and sat back with his arms crossed. 'Well, so you tell me, young lady.'

  'Want a clue?'

  'Oh, if you insist.'

  'First clue. I'll write it down.' I took my napkin and lipstick and wrote: S T N D R D _ _.

  He bent over the napkin, then looked up at me sceptically. 'That's a clue?'

  'The gaps, the spacing. That's the clue.'

  He looked unconvinced. He carefully extracted a pair of half-moon glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. He peered at the napkin over the top of them.

  'Want another clue?'

  'Wait, wait,' he said, holding up one hand. 'All right,' he said eventually.

  'Second clue: it's a very simple sequence.'

  'Really? Hmm.'

  'The simplest. That's your third clue. Actually it's your fourth clue, too, and I've already given you the answer.'

  'Uh-huh.'

  He gave in at last. 'Well, I think the answer is S, D, and you're just being a tease,' he told me, folding the glasses and putting them away.

  'The answer is T, H.'

  He looked at the napkin. I wrote the last two letters into the space. 'No,' he said. 'I still don't see.'

  'Watch.' I wrote a large 1 in front of the letters ST. I didn't need to add the 2, the 3 or the 4.

  'Ah,' he said, nodding. 'Very clever. Haven't heard of that one before.'

  'You wouldn't have. I made it up myself.'

  'Really?' He looked at me. 'You are a clever little thing, aren't you?'

  I used my wintry smile.

  I woke up in darkness, breathless. I was gasping for air, drowning in what felt like a semi-vacuum beneath a huge and terrible weight. Darkness. Not just ordinary darkness but total darkness; profound and utter and somehow intensifying the breathlessness. Where was I? Berlin? No, that had been a dream, or something remembered. Blysecrag? Chilly enough for one of the turret rooms. I looked for my watch. The bed felt small and cold and odd. Nebraska? The air outside the bed, as well as feeling absurdly cold, didn't smell right. The bedclothes were far too heavy. My breath hurt my throat. There was a very strange smell in the air. Where the hell was I?

  I extended my left hand and found cold, stone-solid wall. I reached up and touched wood. I saw a small glowing circle nearby on my right and leaned across to it. It felt like I was wearing all my clothes. My fingers closed around the watch. It felt very cold. According to the Breitling it was four fifteen. I tried to remember whether I'd reset it for the right time zone. Clattering across an uneven wooden surface, my fingers encountered the familiar lumpy shape of the netsuke monkey figure, and then the ribbed casing of my little flashlight. I clicked it on.

  My breath smoked in front of me. I was in some sort of bed alcove. The ceiling of the room was painted bilious yellow and livid green. A row of demonic faces glared down at me, painted red, purple, black and orange. Their brows were arched, their ears were pointed, their eyes were huge and glaring, their moustaches were curled like waxed black hooks and their fang-like teeth were bared behind snarling carmine lips under cheeks as round and green as avocados.

  I stared at them. The little Aspherilux threw a tight, even spot of light. The spot was shaking. I must still be dreaming. I really needed to get back to sleep properly and wake up again.

  Then I remembered. Thulahn. I was in Thulahn, in the capital city of Thuhn, in the Palace of a Thousand Rooms, which had exactly sixty-one rooms. The bizarre painted wooden heads were there to ward off demons while the honoured guest slept. There was no light because (a) it was night, (b) there was no moon, (c) the room's window was covered by both curtains and shutters, and (d) the palace electricity generator shut down at midnight when the Prince was in residence; at other times, like now, it was turned off at sunset. I was cold because I was in a place where central heating meant having a full stomach. I was breathless because I'd come from hot and humid sea level yesterday morning to nine thousand feet by teatime. By the side of the bed there was a small oxygen cylinder and mask, just in case. No TV, of course.

  I remembered the airstrip, being welcomed by a polite little quilted Thulahnese guy of indeterminate age called Langton something or other, walking with him at the head of a procession of adults and chattering children and being shown around the ramshackle town, entering the palace complex through brightly painted wooden gates and having a tour of its impressive state rooms before sitting down to dinner at a long table with what looked like a bunch of monks dressed in primary colours, none of whom spoke English. I'd sampled various consistencies and hues of beige food, drunk water and fermented milk beer, then suddenly it was dark and apparently it was time for bed. I'd felt wide awake — bewildered, dizzy, not connected to the world, but wide awake — until I'd seen the little cot-bed, and then I'd suddenly conked out.

  I clicked the torch off. My feet felt down to the bottom of the bed and touched the cork-stoppered china hot-water bottle.. It was still warm. I hooked it with one foot and brought it up towards my bum as I curled up again and closed my eyes.

  Why had I been dreaming of Berlin and Hazleton?

  Because I'd been talking to Hazleton the day before, I supposed. Because that dinner was the first time we'd exchanged more than a few words. Obvious, really. Except that it wasn't. Some bit of my brain didn't like this explanation and kept insisting there was more to it. I put it down to lack of oxygen. Hazleton had felt my knee beneath the table later, and insisted he would see me back to my room that evening. I'd run away.

  Why couldn't I dream of Stephen?

  Stephen, married to Emma. Emma who went Oh, oh, oh, in total silence. Emma who was having an affair with Frank Erickson, a corporate lawyer for Hergiere Corp, who lived in Alexandria, Va, with his wife Rochelle and three children, Blake, Tia and Robyn. He and Emma had met in various hotels within the DC Beltway, usually around lunchtime, and had managed two weekends together, one in New Orleans when he was attending a convention and she had claimed to be visiting an old schoolfriend, and one at the Fearington House, an elegant country inn tucked away in the woods near Pittsboro, North Carolina.

  I had the zip code and the telephone number for the inn; I even knew what they'd had to eat for dinner on the Friday and Saturday night and which wines they'd chosen to accompany their meals; I could have called the place up and asked them to reserve the
same suite and put a bottle of the same champagne on ice. There were no videos of their tryst there, but I had a scanned copy of the bill. The DVD Poudenhaut had given me contained photographs of that bill, various restaurant cheques — all matched to still photos or other short pieces of video of the adulterous couple in those restaurants — receipts for flowers to be delivered to Mrs Buzetski's office in the graphic-design company she worked for, a receipt for a five-hundred dollar négligée in Mr Erickson's name, which I suspected his wife had never worn, and a whole variety of other bits and pieces of film and documentation that chronicled their affair in excruciating detail.

  The film of them fornicating in the DC hotel room (the Hamptons Hotel, Bethesda, room 204, to be precise) was just the cherry on the cake. Somebody had gone to a huge amount of trouble over a considerable period of time to gather that evidence, and the more I thought about it, the less I believed Hazleton that the disc had just fallen into his hands.

  How much of this sort of stuff went on? Was it just Hazleton, or were the rest at it as well? Did they have anything similar on me? Unlike Stephen, I'd never taken any vows, never made any promises, legal or otherwise, but what about the people I'd slept with? I tried to review the list of sexual partners I'd had over the years, looking for any that could be blackmailed or otherwise compromised.

  As far as I could remember there shouldn't be a problem: I'd always tried to avoid married men just as a matter of course, and on the few occasions when I'd ended up in bed with one it had been because the bastard had lied (well, once or twice I might have suspected, but never mind). Come to think of it, Stephen ought to be grateful and flattered I was prepared to make an exception for him.

  Maybe this had all been done for me, I thought. Maybe Hazleton really didn't make a habit of this sort of thing, but had set up this particular surveillance operation because he knew how I felt about Stephen, knew how Stephen felt about adultery and had seen a way, perhaps, to give my beloved to me and so leave me for ever in his debt.