Sweet Talking Money Read online

  ‘Hey, I forgot,’ he says. ‘You don’t drink coffee.’

  ‘I do today.’

  ‘Can you boil an egg?’

  ‘Sure, absolutely, no problem,’ says Cameron. ‘If you tell me how.’

  Bryn sets her in charge of four eggs, a saucepan of water, a half-dozen slices of wholemeal bread and a toaster, and lets her loose. He showers and dresses, and returns to the kitchen, just as toast is bursting joyously from the toaster, the espresso maker is fizzing its head off in satisfaction, and Cameron is (at some risk to her fingers) draining water from the boiled eggs. Bryn sets the table and watches as Cameron begins to wolf her food.

  ‘Do I pay you enough?’ asks Bryn.

  ‘I think I might have forgotten to eat yesterday.’

  ‘I think maybe you skipped a biology class somewhere. I believe there’s a connection between eating and staying alive.’

  Cameron shakes her head vigorously, mumbling through her egg. ‘That’s a myth. Perpetrated by the farming community. Shame on you.’

  They eat some more. Cameron devours both her eggs and is well into the toast. Bryn scrambles a couple more eggs and brings more toast, and they both gobble until full.

  ‘That was real good,’ says Cameron. ‘Maybe I should learn how to cook.’

  Sunlight is entering the barge more or less horizontally now: literally entering through the windows on one side and leaving through the equivalent windows on the other. Light streams across the breakfast table, casting long shadows amidst the litter of toast crusts and eggshells. Steam from the coffee pot is airbrushed in gently waving silhouette on the wall. It’s time to talk business and they both know it.

  ‘Well?’ asks Bryn.

  ‘Well.’ Cameron shrugs. ‘The material we collected is pretty helpful. I’ve been through it all now.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘You know, respiratory disease really isn’t my area. No matter what Kati tells you.’

  ‘I know. It’s a very, very long shot. We both know that.’

  ‘I’m missing some important data. To be honest, it’s absolutely vital that Mungo can get into Altmeyer’s system. I’m dead in the water otherwise.’

  ‘Let’s hope he can.’

  Outside, a river-barge is being hauled upstream by a tugboat. A heavy bow-wave begins to slap at Bryn’s barge and the shadows on the table lift and fall amongst the eggshells. Silence prolongs itself. There’s a question floating between them, and they both know what it is.

  ‘If you get everything you could hope for…?’ prompts Bryn at last.

  ‘If I got everything … I’d have to say, I doubt if I can do it in time. I may not be able to do it at all.’

  Bryn nods. It’s crushing news, but not unexpected. It would be almost too much to hope that they could save the clinic at this late hour.

  ‘We’re doing our best,’ he says. ‘That’s all we can do.’

  She nods, thinking about her research, her work of a lifetime. In twenty-nine days, most likely, it will all belong to Max Altmeyer and his friends at Corinth. Tears jab at her fiercely beneath her eyelids. She tries to look on the bright side. ‘Even if they get everything,’ she says. ‘Corinth, I mean. The clinic, the research, the peptides, the patents, the Schoolroom. Even if they get all that, at least I can still publish, still tell the world what we’ve been doing here.’

  In sudden horror, Bryn stares at her, mouth open, eyes wide.

  ‘Right? That’s true, isn’t it? I’m only repeating what you told me months back.’

  Bryn tries moving his mouth. His tongue is sandpaper, moving in a bed of ash. He can’t speak. He can hardly even gurgle.

  Cameron’s voice grows more forceful. ‘Listen, Bryn. We agreed that I would always be able to publish, and that’s what I’m damn well going to do. I’m a scientist, for heaven’s sake, and if there’s one thing we aim to do, it’s to get our work published.’

  Bryn still can’t speak, but he can shake his head.

  ‘What are you saying?’ says Cameron. ‘Speak to me. If I can’t even publish, then we’ll have saved nothing from this catastrophe. Nothing.’

  He drinks some coffee and uses the bitter fluid to get his tongue working again, though his voice clacks like a broken bone.

  ‘Cameron …’ His mouth produces one word before drying up again. This is hopeless. He swallows more coffee, forces more words to follow. ‘That contract you signed, early on … you assigned intellectual property rights to the company … It’s going to be a problem.’

  ‘Problem? Why? You own the company. I asked you about publishing my work. You told me no problem. We agreed that I could publish whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.’

  Bryn tried again. ‘We’re in default on our loan agreement. Technically, that is – I know it’s a bullshit sort of default – but technically is what matters. It’s only sort of my company now. Really, it belongs to the creditors – to Altmeyer – until he gets his money or takes his shares.’

  ‘And if he isn’t getting his money?’

  ‘He gets his shares. Correct.’ Bryn exhales heavily. Not all the coffee in the world could make up for what he had to say now. ‘And once he gets his shares, the company is his. Cameron, if we lose now, everything belongs to Corinth. Everything.’

  Silence.

  Another tugboat hauls a barge full of rubbish up the Thames. The waves rock as before, and, as before, the steam from the coffee wavers in silhouette, but this time, no one notices or cares. Cameron faces the loss of everything, and across the table is the man who’s lost it.

  ‘That contract,’ she says, after a long while. ‘About my intellectual property. You told me it was for insurance purposes. Is that true? It was about insurance?’

  Bryn has broken Cameron’s heart, so it’s only fair that he breaks his own. ‘No,’ he tells her, ‘the insurance company never gave a damn. It was me. I wanted to bind you to the clinic. It was pure selfishness … I lied to you, Cameron, I lied.’

  3

  Friendships survive difficult things. That’s how you know they’re friendships.

  Your best friend snogs your boyfriend? What the hell! The guy was a waster, best gone. Your best friend nicks your credit card and flies himself first class to Bangkok? Who cares? Lighten up. He sent a postcard, didn’t he?

  But some things, friendships will struggle to survive. Cameron cared about her work with a passion. From early in her life, she had realised that she had been born with a gift, entrusted with it – a gift that was of enormous value not just to her, but to the entire human race. For many long years, Cameron had more or less cancelled any trace of a personal life to devote herself to work. This last long year with Bryn, she had thrown herself into fighting Corinth and defending her precious Immune Reprogramming with all her heart and soul and brain.

  And Bryn had sold it.

  In effect, he’d sold it to her worst enemy for casual gain. By the standards she set herself, his crime was atrocious – perhaps even unforgivable.

  4

  She rose to go. There was nothing else to do.

  Bryn stumbled to his feet. He was desperately in love with her, but now knew for certain he could never have her. His earlier, forgotten selfishness had unwittingly blown up the most precious thins; in Cameron and his heart along with it.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said hoarsely. He blundered into his cabin and came out a moment later, holding some papers. ‘It just needs a couple of signatures.’

  ‘Another contract? You think I want –’

  ‘It’s a share transfer memorandum. I want to transfer half my shares in the business to you.’

  ‘Transfer, as in sell?’

  ‘No, no. Transfer, as in give. I should have done it a long time ago really, but I hope it’s better late than never.’

  ‘Now that we’re on the point of being finally destroyed, you mean?’

  There was no answer to that. Cameron signed the papers where indicated, and Bryn took one copy
, leaving her with the other. She only barely managed to say, ‘Thanks’. The word was strangulated. Her voice was harsh and strained. She left the barge.

  Away in the boathouses, an unearthly shriek troubled the air. ‘Uncha gossa, uncha gossa, uncha gossa.’ It sounded like a pronouncement of doom. From an upstairs window of the boathouse, a podgy parrot launched herself into the air and flapped awkwardly downstream. She didn’t come back to the boathouse that day, or the next, or the next, or the next. Mungo finally pronounced her disappeared or dead. They folded away her perch, and wondered how to break the news to Meg.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1

  A decent video recorder hits the shops, priced around four hundred pounds. The same item, second hand and stolen, retails in the right sort of dodgy shops for about thirty to forty quid. The price to the thief is maybe ten quid, fifteen tops.

  It’s one thing to steal. It’s another to benefit.

  2

  The first three fingerstrokes were as clear as could be. In super-slow motion, the short, rather too hairy fingers rose and fell.

  ‘F – 3 – a,’ said Kati, deciphering each finger as it rose and fell on the keyboard.

  ‘Mixed case, mixed character set,’ said Mungo. ‘Nasty.’

  The security tape, which Degsy had taken and sent on to them by courier, was sharp as a pin and clear as a bell. Cameron, who was acutely nervous about this, the last critical stage of their burglary, began to relax.

  The fourth character was blurred a little by the man’s left shoulder, but the three watchers agreed that Altmeyer’s head of IT had almost certainly typed an upper-case K. But as he was typing the last three digits, an unseen colleague called to him across the room, and he swivelled in his chair, rotating his shoulder and completely obscuring the keyboard for the last three strokes.

  ‘Damn!’ cried Cameron, deeply upset.

  Kati gave her a hug of comfort. ‘It’s not so bad. We’ve got four characters out of seven.’

  ‘Not so bad?’ said Cameron. ‘Any key on the board, including numbers and punctuation marks makes about forty possible keys. Forty doubled, because you’re talking upper case and lower case for each one. Twice forty is eighty. Eighty keys in any possible order, that’s eighty cubed’ – she paused very briefly – ‘that’s over five hundred thousand combinations! Five hundred and twelve thousand, to be exact.’

  ‘’S forty-seven, actually,’ said Mungo. ‘Standard keyboard. ‘S forty-seven doubled and cubed.’

  Cameron frowned, silently calculating. ‘Eight hundred thousand,’ she said at last. ‘Eight hundred and thirty thousand, five hundred and I don’t know – five hundred and some … Oh my God, we’ll never –’

  ‘’S that all?’ said Mungo. ‘Star.’

  ‘Mungo! That’s like a standard three-digit combination padlock, where to try out each different combination you have to crack a whole new three-digit combination lock.’ Cameron’s voice began to waver as the scale of their failure began to unfold.

  ‘Lovely-jubbly.’

  ‘Come on, Mungo,’ said Kati impatiently, thinking of Cameron’s feelings. ‘Don’t mess around. This is heart-breaking.’

  ‘Don’t go breaking my heart,’ Mungo wailed. He forgot the next line of the song, and repeated what he knew a couple of times more, losing the tune a little more on each iteration. Then he got serious. ‘I’ll get going now and crack it over the weekend.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope. Password-guessing software. Coupla days sniffing the wires, use SMB Packet Capture to nick the encrypted passwords, then use L0phtcrack to crack it. Eight hundred thousand combos … I mean, that shouldn’t be more than an hour or so, max.’

  ‘It’s that simple?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And we can get in whenever we want?’

  Mungo closed his eyes in a silent prayer for patience. ‘Listen man, when I get in, I’ll be the sys-admin, king of the network. I’ll set up a back door – Back Orifice 2000, prob’ly – and stroll in whenever I want. ‘S no prob-er-lemo. Might even get some sleep.’

  And what Mungo promised, Mungo delivered. By Monday morning, he was as well off as Altmeyer’s sys-admin himself, king of the system, opening his kingdom to the hungrily thieving fingers of Cameron and Kati.

  3

  Cameron could no longer ask for more information. She had everything she wanted. But it was still tough. She pored over the information till her eyes blurred with fatigue. Her Post-it note habit rose to new heights, and she became withdrawn, difficult and moody. Bryn guarded her like a mother bear. He allowed no one to disturb her or her Post-its. One time, Bryn found Rauschenberg clearing notes from the patients’ consulting rooms. Bryn bawled him out. ‘Leave those bloody notes, leave them!’ Rauschenberg must have muttered something in reply. Bryn boomed back again, ‘So what? She’s a genius. For all I know Einstein doodled on the wallpaper or used marker pens in the toilet. I don’t care. Just leave her be.’ His big voice smashed around the clinic. It ascended right up into Pod Mungo where Mungo chuckled and cracked open another box of Twiglets in his jubilation. It burst its way into the lab, where Cameron smiled and felt angry, laughed and looked upset.

  But those were the highlights. Mostly, it was just hard, grinding, difficult work. One morning, Kati wandered into the boathouse lab to find her partner snoring over a pile of papers, her labcoat rolled into a pillow, sunlight streaming in through the window. She woke her gently.

  ‘You should get some proper sleep,’ she admonished. ‘It’s no good killing yourself.’

  ‘It’s only work.’

  Kati settled next to her partner, squatting in the papery nest. ‘How’s it going? Do you want to talk about it?’

  Cameron straightened with a couple of audible clicks from her maltreated spine. She stretched.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she repeated. ‘Realistically, it’s not going far enough or fast enough. I mean, we’ll always be able to put something together, but whether it’ll be good enough to persuade Altmeyer, I just don’t know.’ Cameron pulled on her labcoat, began to button it, then pulled it off in annoyance and threw it away from her. ‘I just don’t know.’

  Kati opened her mouth to say something, then stopped.

  Cameron raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kati. ‘I was just thinking maybe …’ She stopped. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Allen? You mean, ask Allen?’

  Kati nodded.

  ‘Bryn’ll go ballistic.’

  ‘Well,’ said Kati, dubious about any deception, ‘I guess he doesn’t have to know.’

  Cameron shook her head. ‘You’re right. I agree. It’s not like I’m doing so great without him. I’ll ask him tonight.’

  4

  That day Cameron left early, meeting Meg off the train from Cambridge and dragging her across London to Allen’s flat. ‘Sorry to bother you, Meg, but it’s kind of important.’

  ‘Big romantic do, gorgeous? Call in the pros. Just this once I’ll let you off, even though I had a big date tonight.’

  ‘Degsy?’

  Meg nodded.

  ‘What, again?’

  Meg nodded.

  ‘Every night so far?’

  Meg nodded. ‘Or day. Or evening. Or whatever.’ Anytime neither of them was at work would be more accurate, and though Bryn had been anxious that Meg shouldn’t draw attention to herself by resigning too quickly, he hadn’t quite been prepared for the depth of her commitment to staying in the Cambridgeshire fens.

  ‘You guys are pretty serious, huh?’

  Meg went coy. ‘I don’t know. I’ve only known him eleven days.’

  Cameron explored her friend’s face. ‘Uh-uh, Meg. I give you about a month before you two move in together.’

  Meg blushed. ‘I do like him.’

  Cameron laughed, pleased to have roles reversed for a change. ‘You can’t cook by any chance, can you?’

  ‘I can boil an egg,’ said Meg. ‘At least, I bet I coul
d, but I’ve never actually tried it. I’m a demon with the microwave, though.’

  ‘I was kind of hoping for something a bit more stylish.’

  ‘We’ll get some stylish food and bung it in the microwave.’

  And they did. Cameron took a taxi to the restaurant in Covent Garden which had been the scene of her and Allen’s first date and came away with a tray of goodies, comprising, as far as she could remember, all of Allen’s favourite foods. Meg meanwhile cleared the flat, removing all Cameron’s science papers to her paper-bombed spare room and removing the pink and yellow prayer flags of Cameron’s Post-it notes. That done, she selected music, arranged lighting and laid the table. By the time Cameron got back, the flat sparkled, a rose stood in a tiny crystal vase beneath a pair of candlesticks (‘which looked better minus the Post-its, babe’) and Mozart bubbled gently from Allen’s hi-fi.

  ‘Time to dress and impress.’

  There was a brief debate, during which Cameron argued in favour of something long and black and backless, while Meg’s hotly preferred number was equally black and backless but only half the length. (‘Go for the jugular.’) But Cameron had her way, and by the time she was dressed and ready, Meg was won over.

  ‘It’s sickening, Cammie. I’ve spent my entire life since I was eight going on diets, slapping on moisturiser, war-paint, ten different types of cleanser, bunging Charles-Worthington-this, John-Frieda-that on my hair, plucking, tweaking, shaving, tanning, bleaching, dyeing, you name it. You’ve done bugger all, and it’s still the princess and the piglet, you and me.’

  Cameron, whose height was emphasised by the fall of the long dress, did indeed look as lovely as a princess. Smiling, she steered Meg into one of Allen’s swanky suede sofas and sat down next to her.

  ‘You look great. You think Degsy would want you any different?’

  ‘I wasn’t really complaining. I get results. I’m just pissed off that you’re ten times more gorgeous. You’d think all that bloody plucking would get you somewhere.’