Sweet Talking Money Read online

  ‘Experienced GP Dr Martin Rogers commented, “That’s the trouble with these places. If they charge their kind of – money, they don’t feel entitled to kick you out for whingeing. As for their inability to spot a hangover when they saw one,” Rogers said, “that’s General Practice 1.01. It should be the first skill a doctor picks up.”’

  Bryn lifted his eyes from the paper, to find Cameron watching him. She’d found one of Meg’s cucumbers and was biting into it, releasing the crisp scents of Latvian forests, black bread, pine cones, oak leaves. ‘There’s more,’ she said, flipping the pages.

  In the opinion section, the paper declared: ‘Thank God for the good old-fashioned British doctor. Those who moan about the Health Service should just try forking out for meaningless advice and idiotic errors. What these yuppie whingers need isn’t sympathy, it’s a boot up the backside. We say: if it’s good enough for granny, it’s good enough for us.’

  Bryn began to fold the paper angrily, but Cameron put out a hand to stop him. Even in his anger, Bryn noted that, of all things, Cameron had got a manicure from somewhere, and, for no reason at all, the fact enraged him. What was she doing painting her nails, when the clinic – the whole enterprise – was in crisis? She flipped the pages again, past the tits, horoscopes, lies and bitching. She stopped at the financial pages.

  ‘Kessler clinic in danger of bankruptcy. Leaked cash flows reveal imminent collapse.’ There was a short article – the Herald’s readers didn’t cope too well with anything longer – which ran through the story: over-rapid expansion, overburdened cash flows, collapse. The cash flow statements were accurate to the penny. Rubbishy as the article might be, there was nothing wrong with its source material.

  Bryn rose to his feet, taking the paper with him. A new addition to the barge was a Swedish-built wood-burning stove. Bryn opened the door of the stove, shoved the newspaper inside and lit a match. With a woof of flame, the malevolent half-truths disappeared up the chimney. Black ash fell back and lay glowing red at the edges. Bryn slammed the door shut.

  ‘You really told Hancock to go for counselling?’ he asked, anger burning in his voice.

  ‘I didn’t know he was a journalist,’ retorted Cameron. ‘Or that he was on Corinth’s payroll. If you knew better, then you forgot to tell me.’

  ‘But counselling? And how come you saw him at all?’

  ‘New doctor. Either Rauschenberg or I sit with all new doctors when they start, to get them used to our treatment methods. Rauschenberg was on vacation, so it was me.’

  Bryn nodded and Cameron continued, frowning as she recalled the occasion.

  ‘This guy Hancock turns up. Looks like a wreck, smells like a wreck. Puts down on the form that he’s a light social drinker, no drugs. Like hell. The guy was an addict. I was worried enough, just by the look of him, that we ran a full chemistry panel on his blood. His liver was this far from collapse.’ Through her finger and thumb, Bryn could see a sliver of light, no more. ‘No specific problem at present, but virtually anything could become the matter. The hangover was obvious, but it wasn’t his major health problem. We recommended counselling because unless the guy deals with his addictions, he’s going to drop dead. Don’t know with what. Just know that he will.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Bryn sighed. He put his hand to the espresso pot. It was cold now, but not empty. He poured the dregs out into a cup and swallowed. On the wall opposite, one of Bryn’s deal mementoes was the framed front page of an Austrian newspaper: Claussen Verkauft, sang the headline – Claussen sold. The deal had been struck at thirty-one billion dollars, and Bryn had earned twenty-five million dollars in fees for his bank. What the hell was he doing here? His million-pound house in Chelsea sold, his deferred bonuses forfeited, all in exchange for a two-roomed houseboat and a wildly underfunded research project. He was crazy.

  ‘The cash flows?’ asked Cameron, gently. ‘Real or made up?’

  Bryn shook his head and sighed deeply. ‘Real, I’m afraid. No idea how they got them.’

  ‘And your millionaires? Is there any chance now …? I suppose –’

  ‘You suppose right,’ said Bryn. ‘The hangover story may be bullshit, but the story about our finances could kill us. Even the slightest smell of trouble will make any sane investor run a mile. Why invest in a business which you think is desperate?’

  ‘Maybe the story will die,’ said Cameron. ‘Maybe it’ll all blow over.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe.’

  The silence stretched out. A waterfly settled on Cameron’s bare arm, and she knocked it away with a hand, continuing to rub long after the fly had gone. Once again, the room was filled with an unspoken question. Eventually, Cameron broke the silence, asked the question.

  ‘Is this just coincidence?’ she asked. ‘Or is there a mole? First the banks, now this. What’s going on?’

  Bryn shook his head. ‘It looks awful,’ he admitted. ‘I send a letter to Berger Scholes. Within two days, Corinth has stamped on it. Now, I’m just two or three days away from sending out my first batch of begging letters, and this happens.’

  ‘That’s never just coincidence,’ whispered Cameron solemnly.

  ‘No, it doesn’t look that way. But it’s not so simple. Who knew I was writing to millionaires? You. Me. Meg. That’s all. Neither of us are moles, and Meg’s not a Corinth stooge, never in a million years.’

  ‘Kati, maybe I said something to Kati … but –’

  ‘Kati? Come on. She’d sooner betray her own mother.’ He shook his head and helped himself to a cucumber. ‘But I have to say I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’

  4

  Mungo, meanwhile, had fallen into an untypically gloomy mood.

  He arrived when he woke up, in the clothes he’d woken up in. He stirred the layer of garbage which lay a foot or two thick on his desk, and shovelled a clearing for his keyboard. Then he worked. He kept the company’s computer systems up and running. He did little programming errands for Kati and Cameron. But most of all he hit his head against a brick wall. The wall was in Connecticut, and the bricks were cyber-bricks, but they hurt just the same.

  Of three or four hundred phone numbers, Mungo had managed to exclude about two hundred and fifty, leaving him with ninety-three numbers, any of which could be the way into the American phone system. Trouble was ninety-three numbers was a hell of a lot. If you were certain of the number, you could use a computer program to automate the job of trying different passwords. Ring, connect, password, password, password, fail, disconnect, ring again, connect again, password, password, password. Even that was dodgy, as even a measly ten-digit password would keep you guessing for ever. But Mungo’s problem was worse than that, since ninety-two of his numbers – or at least ninety of them – were bound to have nothing to do with the phone system anyway. He gnashed his teeth with frustration. His mood grew worse.

  Once Kati tried to break in to his isolation. She walked up the stairs to the rooftop corner room which was Pod Mungo, treading carefully but not avoiding the distinctive snap-crackle-and-slurp of Mungo’s floor décor.

  ‘Here. I thought you might need these,’ she said, offering him a Mars Bar and a Coke.

  ‘Brilliant. Wicked. Ta.’

  He took the Mars and crumbled it over a carton of toffee popcorn. He shoved the concoction into Pod Mungo’s very own microwave and set the timer, with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘I ought to get my own TV show, really. Mungo’s Microwave Magic. All the things you can cook in two minutes, using nothing but the contents of a perfec’ly ordinary vending machine.’

  He licked his fingers, then moved back to his keyboard, spreading chocolatey grease all over it. One of Mungo’s self-donated perks was a regular supply of new keyboards. That way, when a board gummed up with the junk food shoved into its gaps, he simply threw it away and unwrapped a new one from his stock.

  ‘Co-host Anthea Turner, pref’rably. That way viewers could sit comfortably at home learning the secret arts of microwave cooker
y, wondering if Anthea knows she’s only got one button done up on her cardie and that one’s looking dodgy, an’ all the time asking themselves whether the cardie’s going to blow before Mungo can complete his two-minute Waggon Wheel Spectacular. All the makings of fine, on-screen entertainment.’

  ‘You need a break.’

  The pinger pinged.

  ‘Have a break,’ said Mungo. ‘Have a chocolate-caramel-toffee-popcorn-surprise.’

  Kati shook her head.

  ‘Mistake,’ he said, gingerly picking bits of popcorn out of the boiling chocolate.

  ‘’S exquisite. See how it goes all foamy on top.’

  With his elbow on the enter key, Mungo instructed the computer to dial another number, one he’d tried half a dozen times before. The modems chatted to each other and connected with a click. Mungo listened intently to the sound of the foreign modem on his handset. He’d once had a major breakthrough in his earlier cracker career by realising that a telco modem sounded different to a normal one. That trick didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere on this occasion.

  ‘Oh widdle,’ he said, as a popcorn blob fell steaming on to his mousemat. He picked the blob up with his mouth, hit the enter key again, and the computer dialled the next number on its list.

  ‘Are you OK, Mungo? This last week or two, you’ve seemed upset.’

  ‘’S nothing.’

  ‘It’s your family situation, isn’t it? Your sisters? JoJo and …’

  ‘JoJo and Dar.’ Mungo crunched some more popcorn, his mouth bravely tolerating the near-sun temperatures achievable by even the humblest kitchen microwave. ‘It’s dicey at the moment, well dicey. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘May I?’ said Kati, reaching out to a photo stuck to one of Mungo’s PCs. He nodded permission, and she unglued it and scrutinised it closely. The picture showed an adolescent Mungo with two young girls beside him, both thin and freckled, one fair-haired, the other, older one, with hair of flaming red. A grey-haired parental-looking couple stood behind. In the background was a nice suburban semi, with an orderly and well-trimmed garden. Mungo looked much the same as now: ageless, big-eyed, serious. His two sisters, though well-dressed and properly fed, both had the eyes of street-children – knowing, hard, hungry.

  ‘They look gorgeous,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘What? JoJo and Dar? Hardly.’ Mungo inspected the photo dispassionately himself before gluing it back on to the PC with a blob of molten toffee-chocolate. ‘That was three foster folk ago. Quite nice, only they couldn’t manage Dar’s tantrums. Two hundred and four days, they lasted.’

  ‘Oh, Mungo. I’m so sorry.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Is that what’s upsetting you now? More trouble with foster parents?’

  ‘Yeah, look, Kati, I ‘preciate you being bothered and that, but there’s always trouble with the foster mob. Law of the universe. Daleks will be daleks. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Viciously, he stabbed at his keyboard, breaking one connection and dialling another. Kati watched for a while, asking a couple of technical questions as Mungo worked. He muttered answers, at least some of which were intelligible. As Kati began to understand what he was up to, she gave out a low whistle of impressed surprise. ‘You’re trying to hack the entire US phone system?’

  As if in answer, a couple of lines of random characters skittered across Mungo’s screen and stopped, the cursor flashing patiently as it waited.

  Mungo gripped the side of his chair. ‘Do that again,’ he said. ‘The whistle. Exactly the same. Exactly.’ He held the handset up so the receiver would catch her whistle more clearly.

  Kati repeated her whistle as near exactly as she could. The cursor dived into motion again. Another stream of jumbled characters appeared, then a question mark. ‘Login,’ typed Mungo. ‘Enter’. The cursor clicked down a line, another question mark appeared. ‘Show users,’ ordered Mungo, and this time the screen filled not with gibberish, not with Mungo’s own failed password attempts, not with the constant infuriating question marks, but with a list of user names and the delightful message, ‘Welcome to Bell Atlantic’.

  ‘All hail, Canadian Kate, Time Lord and cyber-queen.’

  ‘You’ve done it?’

  ‘All hail, La-Rousse of the Net-Busters.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Your whistle. Hangover from the pre-digital days when you sometimes needed sound instead of data to give you access to stuff. Peace be to your planet, earthling.’

  Kati said something in response, but Mungo wasn’t listening. He was still a long way from Corinth, but he was in the right continent, with his fingers now on the pulse of power. His hands whirled across the keyboard. Somewhere in Connecticut, a massive computer obeyed its new master.

  5

  And as Mungo worked on cyber-burglary upstairs, the security men moved in downstairs to prevent burglaries of the more conventional sort. Cameras were installed everywhere. Their lenses swept the green sofas of the reception area, the grand timbered entrance, the crowded wet-benches of the bloodwork laboratory, the humming computers and spectroscopy equipment of the upper laboratory. They were everywhere.

  Meantime, a one-person-only entrance booth was fitted at the way in to the research area, and only the physical palm-print of authorised staff would give access. Meantime, locks were reinforced with double-locks. Shredders were thrown out in favour of shredder-masher-compactor-destroyers. Staff were drilled on security dos and don’ts.

  The boathouse was a boathouse no more. It had become a fortress.

  EIGHTEEN

  1

  ‘Nah. Not in yet, mate. Try again in ’bout an hour.’

  Electric lamps struck white fire into the night, the only cheerful thing on the rainswept street. Beneath the lamps, a thin plastic sheet protected rows of newspapers from the elements.

  ‘What are these, then?’

  ‘This is still the evening papers,’ said the man. ‘Tomorrow morning’s papers come in an hour.’

  ‘Know anywhere I can get coffee?’

  The bloke gestured up the street.

  ‘McDonald’s. It’s where I go.’

  Bryn shook his head. Cameron had strong views on healthy eating, and he’d get her into McDonald’s only when the Pope got divorced and Bill Clinton took a vow of chastity. ‘Anywhere else?’

  ‘Like baked potatoes? There’s a place just down the lane behind.’

  The place in question was a squalid little hole, flanked by a couple of urinating drunks and a mound of refuse in black plastic bags. The interior, however, was better: an Iranian proprietor talking to a couple of friends while a policeman sipped a cup of steaming coffee, watching the drunks complete their handiwork.

  ‘Hello, my friends. What you want?’ asked the Iranian, breaking off his conversation.

  ‘Just coffee. Two coffees, please,’ said Bryn, ordering for himself and Meg. ‘Cameron, is there anything you want?’

  Cameron surveyed the fizzy drinks, the elderly potatoes, the plastic containers of butter, cheese, beans and coleslaw. ‘Herbal tea. That’s what you like, isn’t it, babe?’ said Meg. Then, smiling a giant smile at the proprietor as though she could flirt some herbal tea into existence, she asked, ‘Do you have any herbal teas?’

  ‘No. I got regular tea – or the lady, she like green tea? I make you real Persian green tea.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Cameron. ‘Green tea, that’d be great. I had an Iranian roommate once at Harvard. Drank it all the time.’

  The green tea came not in a styrofoam beaker like the coffees, but in a china teacup bearing a portrait of Diana, Queen of Hearts. The tea was sweetened with honey and fragrant with hints of cardamom and nutmeg.

  ‘You like?’

  Cameron sipped like a connoisseur. ‘Perfect. Just what I needed. Thanks.’

  ‘Brilliant, fab, ta very much,’ said Meg, as though obliged to translate.

  Bryn paid for the coffees, but the proprietor wouldn’t accept payment
for the tea. ‘Persian tea, I no sell, only give,’ he explained, before resuming his low conversation with his two friends. The policeman finished his coffee and went reluctantly back out into the rain, his radio chattering on his shoulder like some black technological parrot.

  ‘How long?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘Fifty minutes,’ said Bryn.

  The conversation fell into a quiet mutter. Whatever they talked about, the fate of their research work, the fate of their business, loomed above them, dark and menacing. Corinth was racing them to the mystery of the human peptide codes. The clinic had the talent, but Corinth had the money. Would tomorrow’s papers run with the Herald’s story, or would they drop it and give the clinic a chance of recovery? Well, they were about to find out.

  ‘How’s your dad?’ asked Meg.

  Bryn shook his head. ‘Not well. The doctors are talking a load of rubbish about late-onset neuro-psychiatric disturbance and handing out fifty-seven varieties of antidepressants. If you knew my dad, that’s a bit like giving slimming pills to an anorexic. The closest he gets to depression is watching Wales get beaten at rugby.’

  ‘Your dad’s sick?’ asked Cameron, who hadn’t known.