by James Craig
‘Of course they miss you.’
‘I’m away a lot.’
‘They know that it’s just the job.’
Opening his eyes, Daniel took another mouthful of the wine. ‘I was thinking about that.’
Swinging her feet back on to the floor, Mel sat up. ‘About what?’
He took a deep breath. ‘About the job. I was thinking it’s time to pack it in – do something else. If I don’t do it now, it will be too late. Every time I come back after a couple of weeks away, I can see changes in the kids. If I leave it too much longer, they’ll be grown up and I’ll have blown it. I really have to find something that doesn’t mean being away from home.’
She was watching him carefully now. ‘Like what?’
‘I was thinking maybe a teacher?’
‘A teacher?’ Mel stifled a giggle.
He frowned. ‘Why not?’
‘Sorry, love. But you left school at sixteen. How many exams did you get?’
They both knew the answer to that one: none.
‘I can get retraining as part of the exit process. I’ve got enough time under my belt that they’ll give me a decent lump sum and pay for me to go to college. And I’ll still have my pension.’ The words tumbling out of his mouth made it sound like he’d given it some serious thought. The reality was that the idea had only just popped into his head while sitting in the park, earlier in the day.
‘It’s a bit early to be thinking about your pension.’ Mel reached down and recovered her own wine glass. ‘That’s a long way off yet.’
‘I know. But you’ve got to think all these things through. The point is, we’ll keep the pension if I leave. Financially, we won’t lose out.’
‘You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?’ She began turning the idea over in her head.
‘They’re desperate to get rid of people.’
‘Not someone like you, surely?’
‘They’re happy to wave bye-bye to anyone, if they can get the costs down.’
‘Okay, so if you did do it . . .’ Her voice edged higher and he could tell that the idea was beginning to excite her. ‘What would you teach?’
‘Er . . .’ His gaze fell on the fat tome sitting underneath the coffee table. Max Hastings’ history of World War Two – All Hell Let Loose – had been a Christmas present from his mother. He had been meaning to start it for the past two and a half years. ‘Maybe history.’
‘History? Like Margaret Thatcher and stuff?’
‘I think it started a bit before that,’ he grinned.
‘Mm.’ Mel looked dubious. ‘I was never any good at that at school. It was dead boring.’
‘I could make a decent history teacher – bring it to life. Make it exciting for the kids.’
Mel appeared less than convinced.
‘Don’t you think?’
‘Well . . .’
In the hallway, the phone started to ring.
‘Who the hell is calling at this time of night?’ Mel grumbled.
‘Your mother?’
‘Hardly.’ She gave him a gentle push. ‘Go and answer it quick, before it wakes up the kids.’
Colonel Trevor Naylor didn’t waste any words. ‘Carson’s escaped.’
‘What?’ Hunter coughed. He didn’t want to sound under the influence while talking to his CO. ‘What happened?’
‘He was sprung from the MCTC just after 4.15 this afternoon.’
‘Fuck.’
‘My sentiments exactly. They left three bodies in their wake – two young soldiers and a priest. The place has been locked down but it’s a proverbial case of shutting the stable door—’
‘Yes.’ Hunter stuck his free hand into the back pocket of his jeans. The anonymous letter was still there.
Lay off Andy Carson. We know where you live.
The message seemed rather more significant now.
‘The media are going to go crazy over all this,’ complained Naylor.
That wouldn’t be my main concern right now. ‘Yes.’
‘A driver should be outside your front door in the next twenty minutes. You need to get up there right now.’
Hunter lowered his voice, in case Mel had started taking an interest in the conversation. ‘What about the Leatherneck?’
‘Smith will have to take care of that on his own.’
‘But—’
‘Look, Dan . . .’
Hunter sighed. Whenever Naylor called him ‘Dan’ it meant that he was being ordered to jump into a swimming pool filled with shit.
‘This is a potential disaster of career-altering proportions,’ Naylor went on.
‘Yeah, I can see that – but not for us, surely?’
Naylor let out a brittle laugh and Hunter wondered if he had been drinking himself. ‘If we don’t get Carson back – and quick – there will be more than enough to go round on this one.’
‘True enough.’ Suddenly, a trip to Afghanistan was looking very appealing indeed. ‘But why me?’ Hunter reeled off a couple of names of possible alternative investigators.
‘They’re busy,’ was the curt response.
‘I thought—’
‘The car will be there in twenty minutes,’ Naylor repeated. ‘No one knows Carson better than you. Give me a call when you get up there. Find the bastard. And find him quick.’
Hunter listened to the dial tone for a moment before putting the handset back on the cradle. Turning, he saw Mel standing in the doorway. She had the two-thirds-empty wine bottle in one hand, her glass in the other.
‘I take it that wasn’t your mum?’
‘No.’
‘Work?’
He nodded.
‘This teaching idea is beginning to make a lot of sense.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ he grinned, relieved that she was being so cool about it.
She flicked her eyes towards the bedroom. ‘When I was in the fifth form, I had a fantasy about bedding one of the teachers.’
Hunter’s heart sank. ‘There’s a car coming for me in twenty minutes.’
Gesturing for him to follow, Mel started down the corridor, slightly unsteady on her feet. ‘We’d better not hang around then.’
SIX
Six years at university, an MBA from the Technical University in Padua and then another twelve years working like a slave in this grim city where all it did was rain. And for what? Balthazar Quant stared morosely at the number he’d written down on the pad in front of him and felt a very real stab of physical pain in his intestines. His estimated net worth, down to the nearest thousand dollars. Underlining it did not make it any bigger. Even taking into account a number of relatively optimistic assumptions, the fucking number was a complete joke.
Balthazar had always been a man with a plan. Arriving in London, that plan had been to squirrel away twenty million dollars and retire to somewhere far more pleasant – Tuscany, perhaps, or maybe Switzerland. Five years ago, he had massaged the figure down to ten million. Now, forcing himself to confront the figure scrawled on the page, he was forced to admit that he was nowhere close. Worse, the numbers were going backwards.
Tapping his pencil on the pad, he stared at the name embossed along the side. The gold capitals stood out against a black background, proclaiming the name of the firm’s latest set of legal advisers. They were getting through lawyers at an alarming rate. The latest advisers were one of the so-called ‘Magic Circle’, home to some of the best legal minds in London. Balthazar let out a hollow laugh; their fees certainly were amazing enough. With eight outstanding suits in three different jurisdictions, legal costs were one of the many reasons that MCS, Macroom Castlebar Salle, was haemorrhaging cash. Almost £150,000 in billings in the last month. And what they did get for their money?
A pencil.
A lousy fucking pencil.
‘Well?’ Gerry Durkan stood at the window on the thirty-first floor, watching a jet that had just taken off from nearby City airport rising towards him. Most of the competition had
based themselves in the West End, but Gerry preferred an office in the adult Legoland of the East.
Apart from anything else, the sense of irony always made him smile. The woman he had once tried to kill was now in the ground and he was the closest thing she had left to a disciple. Being here, in her spiritual home, gave Gerry a buzz that he’d just never get in Mayfair. The Docklands was Margaret Thatcher’s Gotham City. Even the building he was standing in bore her name. It was one of a series of seven huge tower blocks that some megalomaniac property developer was building in anticipation of London’s latest growth spurt.
And, almost as important as appealing to his sense of humour, the rents were much cheaper than in the West End.
‘Well . . .’ Quant stabbed his notepad with the pencil and the lead promptly snapped. With a sigh, he let it bounce off the pad and roll across the boardroom table.
Watching the plane pass in front of him, so close that he could almost reach out and touch it, Durkan started listening to Elvis Costello in his head. The vista in front of him disappeared as he focused on a video in his head of Elvis singing ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’, articulating each word with such venom that you could see the spittle flying from his mouth.
Oh, the passion! That was what being young was all about. Losing that passion was the first stage of the dying process.
A small tremor of never quite forgotten hatred rippled deliciously through his body while Durkan waited patiently for Balthazar to come up with a half-decent response to his query. That was the problem with MBAs – so-called Masters of Business Adminstration – they could never give you a simple answer to a simple question. Everything had to be over-engineered to the nth degree. It was a wonder they managed to make it out of bed in the morning.
Fortunately, patience was something that Gerry had mastered over the years. These days, he liked to think of himself as something of a Zen Master. There was hardly a relaxation, meditation or well-being retreat within fifty miles of London that he had not tried out in the last decade or so. Of course, the twelve years spent in Long Kesh, five of them in solitary, were probably a contributing factor to his never-ending search for peace and tranquillity. So too was the ageing process. Pushing sixty, it was a long time since he had been able to tap into the reserves of energy and hate that had driven him as a young man.
Whatever the reasons, Gerry Durkan was now one mellow fucker. He had trained his brain to stay calm in the face of any kind of frustration, upset or provocation. Which, right now, from Balthazar’s point of view, was just as well. The boy wouldn’t be much use on the slopes of Gstaad without his feckin’ kneecaps.
‘The numbers are only provisional . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I understand that.’
‘But redemptions last month were slightly up on the month before, at £28.7 million.’
‘Net or gross?’
‘Gross. But there’s not much difference. Inflows were negligible, just under £300,000.’
‘Three hundred grand?’ Gerry watched the reflection of his grimacing face in the bulletproof, earthquakeproof window. ‘That’s less than nothing.’
Head bowed, Balthazar did not move to correct the factual inaccuracy.
‘What the feck are the sales team doing?’
Even a Zen Master has his limits.
‘Some of them are on the road. And you know how it’s been when people saw what the bonuses were like, a load of them walked.’
‘No one got a bonus,’ Gerry muttered, ‘not even me.’
Not that you needed one, given you pocketed £12 million from special dividends and consultancy fees. Balthazar kept that thought to himself. Picking up a sheet of A4 paper from the desk, he stared at the row of numbers that the Chief Financial Officer had reluctantly given him the night before. ‘What we expect to see going forward—’
‘Bottom line,’ Durkan growled, finally turning to face his associate. ‘Just gimme the bottom line.’
‘The bottom line is that, on current projections, Macroom Castlebar Salle faces a funding shortfall of £183.2 million by the beginning of next year.’
Point two? thought Durkan. How the feck do you calculate the point two?
‘That is based on the expectation of continued redemptions and also a recognition that there are a number of obligations falling due, notably the next tranche of the £105 million we are contracted to provide to the Hydra SPV.’
Which I am on the hook for personally, Gerry thought glumly. With the benefit of hindsight, the Special Purpose Vehicle had been a mistake. Getting into bed with a bunch of Indian spivs who were involved in everything from trading gold and diamonds to developing infrastructure projects in Africa and the Middle East had been somewhat risky; which was a Zen way of saying that the SPV had been a disasstrous clusterfuck from day one. It was the sucking chest wound that would bleed him dry if he didn’t manage to come up with a way to close it down quickly.
Gerry knew that this was a mess of his own making. He had gotten way too greedy. And with the £££ signs flashing in his eyes, he had forgotten the number one rule of business: always gamble with someone else’s money.
‘We’re in a hole,’ Balthazar observed.
‘I can see that.’
‘We’re not the only hedge fund to be feeling the pain at the moment. Investor redemptions caused Boson Briggs to close most of its funds last week.’
‘I saw that.’ Head bowed, Durkan paced the carpet. ‘But we are not going to go belly up. I won’t allow it. I can’t.’ That was true enough. Closing up shop and retreating to his mansion in Epping to count his money and lick his wounds was one thing, but Gerry knew that if he closed up now, he would be penniless, bankrupt. An image of himself closing out his days, a broken old fella sitting in a freezing bedsit above the Sultan’s Fish Bar on Carrickfergus High Road flashed through his brain.
No, no, no!
‘It will not happen.’
Balthazar continued to look gloomy. ‘I spoke to Bianca earlier.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Gerry’s face brightened at the mention of MCS’s Chief Marketing Officer. ‘Where is she?’
Balthazar mentioned the name of a city that Durkan had never heard of.
‘Eh? Where the hell’s that?’
‘Indonesia.’
‘Indonesia?’ Gerry frowned, genuinely confused. ‘What’s she doing in Indonesia?’
‘What do you think? Looking for investors for you.’
Okay, Gerry thought, Indonesia. Fine. The global economy and all that. He wasn’t sure he could find the place on a map, but what the hell. Presumably they had money there, or Bianca wouldn’t have gotten on the plane. That woman could sniff out money a thousand miles away. ‘And?’
‘Early days.’
‘Early days. Meanwhile, we’re losing almost thirty million a month.’
‘Maybe . . . you could go and talk to Nat.’
Nathanial Ridley, scion of the Ridley Cranes empire, had inherited his father’s portfolio when the old man had unexpectedly keeled over at the blackjack table in the Caspian Casino on Chelfont Square. MCS had been looking after £200 million of Daddy’s investments at the time.
‘You go and talk to him,’ Gerry snorted. ‘The boy’s an idiot.’ He thought back to the old days, when he could have gone round with a baseball bat. That would have done the job. These days, he had to play by different rules. ‘How much has he cashed in already?’
‘Almost half. He’s taking it out as quickly as he can.’
‘Well,’ Gerry sighed, ‘you go and talk to him if you want, but I think it’s a waste of time.’
‘Maybe Joe could have a word?’
Gerry raised an eyebrow. Joseph Isaacs, his security consultant, was not the kind of guy you put in front of investors . . . not unless they owed you money. ‘Why?’ A measure of hope crept into his voice. ‘Has he got something on Nat that we could use?’ Over the years, Joe had proved a dab hand at ferreting out embarrassing information on clients that could be deployed in support of
his fundraising efforts. Gerry liked to see him as the company’s Black Ops division.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Balthazar said lamely.
‘Shame,’ Gerry muttered. ‘You almost got my hopes up there.’
‘We need to do something.’ It was the whine of a man who had never once in his life got his hands dirty.
‘You reckon? God knows what I’d do without an MBA as my right-hand man.’ Gerry tutted in mock dismay. ‘I would doubtless be losing even more money than I am already.’
Balthazar looked at the number on the pad showing his tiny net worth and stifled a sob. ‘There’s got to be some kind of Plan B.’
There was a polite knock at the door. Gerry turned to see Delia Sansom, his Executive Assistant, poke her head inside the room. Even from five yards away, it was clear that she looked pale and exhausted. Gerry shook his head. Despite being easily the wrong side of forty, the woman sure liked to party. Hanging on the door for dear life, it looked as if she might retch on the carpet.
Gulping some air, Delia waited for her nausea to pass.
The Zen Master focused on his own breathing.
‘I’ve got a call for you, Mr Durkan,’ she said eventually. ‘They didn’t give a name.’
‘That’s fine.’
Balthazar raised an eyebrow. When did Gerry Durkan ever take a call without knowing who it was on the other end of the line?
‘They said that you were expecting it, but there’s nothing in the day book.’
‘That’s fine,’ Gerry repeated. ‘I’ll take it.’ He gestured towards the star-shaped telephone sitting in the middle of the table. It looked like a bit of kit that had been pinched from the Starship Enterprise. ‘You can put it through to me in here.’
‘Of course.’ The secretary made a better show of hiding her surprise than Balthazar had done. ‘Will do.’
‘And get me some coffee, please. Black.’
‘The Ethiopian or the Costa Rican?’
He couldn’t have told the difference between the two if his life had depended on it. Still, Gerry weighed the question carefully before plumping for the Ethiopian. ‘As strong as you like.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Delia tried to smile through her hangover, not quite able to manage it, before retreating behind the door.
