Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  The last thing on earth that Bryn needed slunk away, out of the boathouse, past the wharves, through the residential streets leading up towards the Fulham Palace Road. On a granite kerbstone, a river of snarling traffic before her, a dirty pavement behind, Cameron Wilde MD, PhD sat down and cried like a baby.

  It was the second time in so many days that she’d cried. As far as she was concerned, that was twice too often. She wasn’t the crying sort. On returning to the boathouse later that day, she tugged Meg straight into her tower office, her mind made up. There, with London spreading like a map at her feet, she took the decision that would change her emotional life for ever.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what you’re paid for.’

  ‘Screw Bryn.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Screw him.’

  ‘I want to go for it.’

  ‘Go for it?’

  ‘Make-over. Hair, clothes, whatever. The whole shebang.’

  ‘Cammie, really?’

  ‘What’s that phrase you’re always quoting?’

  ‘Sex appeal – please give generously?’

  ‘Not that,’ said Cameron crossly. ‘About flirtation.’

  ‘No flirtation without preparation. No reproduction without seduction.’

  ‘Right. So let’s prepare and seduce.’

  Meg grinned, more and more broadly as she saw the valley of opportunity widen in front of her.

  ‘Make-over, then manhunt,’ she said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘When a pretty girl feels lonely – make-over, then manhunt. Top tip from Auntie Meg.’

  ‘How do you go manhunting?’

  Meg shrugged. ‘How does a lady-ape go man-ape hunting?’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Cameron. ‘Their bums swell up to five times their normal size and go purple. Then man-apes beat each other up till there’s only one left.’

  Meg grinned. ‘Same difference. We’ll go clubbing Saturday night. But before we go, I’m taking you to a beauty salon, get your arse painted purple. Deal?’

  ‘Jeez, Meg. I appreciate it, you know, but I’m not sure, I think –’

  Meg kissed her partner on the cheek. ‘I don’t care too much what you think, gorgeous. You and me. Saturday night. I could use a good shag, and frankly, Cammie, I think you could too.’

  4

  Mungo’s PCs have done their job. Mungo now has a list of literally hundreds of phone numbers in Connecticut which are answered by computer. He hasn’t dialled every number in the state, but, thank goodness, he doesn’t need to. The American phone companies, God bless ’em, always locate the keys to their vast networks, the big computer switches, up in the 9800s or 9900s. If they didn’t, Mungo would have the devil’s own job locating them, but for some reason, they always do.

  The next step is harder. Only one of Mungo’s phone numbers will lead him to the switch he wants, but which? And when he finds it, how will he fool the computer into believing that he’s an authorised user? There are no preset answers for such questions, only painstaking work, moments of brilliance and a strong dash of luck.

  He begins the next stage, knowing this is a task he can’t delegate. He dials the first number. Somewhere out in Connecticut a modem chats briefly with his and connects. His screen displays a single character: ‘?’. He’s being asked for an instruction.

  Mungo knows his way around the British telecoms system, and he figures that a lot of what works in Britain should work just the same in the United States. After all, the basic hardware components of each system are pretty much the same. He tries his UK tricks. Nothing. Just a persistent question mark. He figures this number, whatever it is, probably isn’t the one he’s after.

  He moves on to the next number. It’s a lot of work, but unlike most of Mungo’s previous adventures in cyberspace, this time it matters. High up in the boathouse roof, Pod Mungo is all but dark. Two of the three PCs are powered down, and the only light in the room comes from Mungo’s one solitary screen. This is how cracking is meant to be. Late at night. Dark. Full of the excitement of the unknown.

  On screen, a single character flashes. It’s white on black, the old-fashioned colours of MS-DOS. The character is a question mark. It’s Mungo’s move.

  FIFTEEN

  1

  Friday evening. A wine bar in the City.

  Huge champagne bottles line the walls: bottles as big as barrels, big enough for a child to hide in, relics of the high-living 1980s, when bankers competed to see who could piss away their income in the most offensively show-off fashion. Well, guys: you were all winners, the whole stripey-shirted lot of you. Rudy Saddler sat among the trophies, sipping at a glass of water.

  Bryn Hughes had brought him here, for a reason presumably. Hard to see what. He hadn’t said anything worth saying. Nothing about his loan application, nothing else, either.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he murmured, rising to go to the loo.

  Bryn watched him go. Jerk. He still disliked Saddler for stealing his job, though he also knew that Saddler hadn’t done anything that he, Bryn, wouldn’t have done in the same situation. Who cares? What law is it says you have to be consistent? Bryn waited till the door to the loos slammed shut, then reached for the other man’s jacket, found his wallet, and withdrew his Berger Scholes security pass. Bryn put the pass into his pocket and Saddler’s wallet back where it was. Bryn finished his beer. Saddler finished his pee.

  They exchanged banalities, made their escapes.

  2

  Saturday afternoon.

  Cameron had been accused of cowardice once, and it wasn’t going to happen again. Grim as the angel of death, with a face of iron, she sat in front of the hairdresser’s mirror, swathed in a black polyester cape. The hairdresser ran her fingers through Cameron’s hair, fluffing it up and letting it fall back.

  ‘How do you want it?’

  ‘Just the way it is,’ growled Cameron, ‘but I’m not allowed, apparently.’

  Meg stepped forward with a conciliatory smile. ‘What she means is …’

  Then the shampoo went on, the scissors came out, and Cameron was in the process of losing a hairstyle she’d had, unaltered, since the age of eight. As they left the salon an hour or so later, Meg pinched her partner’s bottom.

  ‘What are we, babe?’ she whispered.

  Cameron grinned, secretly thrilled with her sleek new hairstyle. ‘Purple,’ she said. ‘Purple and proud.’

  3

  Midnight on Saturday and the time had come. Wearing a suit, Bryn walked straight into the main reception.

  ‘Evening,’ said Bryn.

  ‘Morning more like,’ said the Berger Scholes security guard, shoving a night visitors’ book at Bryn.

  Bryn signed himself in: ‘Rudy Saddler’. He headed towards the turnstiles.

  ‘It’s after hours, mate. I need to see your pass.’

  Bryn flashed his pass at the guard, thumb over the photo, not over-polite. He was supposed to be a Managing Director, after all.

  ‘OK, mate. Just a rule.’

  Bryn swiped his card through the turnstile and waited for a tiny click to tell him that the barrier had been released. The click came and Bryn pushed. The guard watched, relaxed. First timers always pushed too soon and had to reswipe their card. If Bryn had fumbled the barrier, the guard would have stopped him and rechecked his pass. But no fumble. The guard relapsed into his three-pound-fifty-an-hour coma, as Bryn made his way to the fourth floor, which stood silent, dark and deserted. Excellent.

  The layout was open-plan, with a fringe of glass-walled offices around the edge of the large room. Goldfish get more privacy. Not missing his banking days, Bryn walked into the office belonging to the European Head of Credit and booted up the computer. He allowed himself a desk lamp to work by, but otherwise preferred to keep the floor in darkness. The computer yawned, stretched, and groped for its slippers. ‘User ID?’ it demanded, once awake. ‘Password?’

  User ID was easy: blisto
ff, standing for Bernie Listoff, whose office this was. Password was tougher, but Meg had told Bryn that Bernie was famous for his forgetfulness. It was common knowledge, so she said, that his password was always scribbled on a note by his PC. What she hadn’t mentioned was that there were about twelve notes stuck there, plus more that had fallen off and were lying beside the monitor. Damn Meg’s common knowledge. Bryn began to search through the notes.

  ‘Veba. Euro 400 mm evergreen. Phone Kurt.’

  ‘JP Morgan. Co-agent role. Ericsson. 1 billion. 5 yr. Upfront fee OK?’

  ‘Call Keown at HSBC. Joint pitch to BAA.’

  ‘Get revised spreads from Volkswagen. Covenants are a bloody mess. Müller.’

  Bryn leafed through the sheaf of scribbles. None of them said anything like ‘Password: carnation’. Hell. Bryn thought of calling Meg for help but remembered she was out tonight, with Cameron of all people. He tried briefly to imagine the two of them together, failed, and looked around for inspiration.

  Listoff’s desk diary. Worth a try. Berger Scholes obliged all employees to change their passwords every month. Perhaps Listoff kept them in his diary. Lists of business meetings. A corporate entertainment at a football match. A weekend in Paris with his wife. No password. Hell.

  Bryn tossed the diary down, sending a heavy glass paper-weight flying. He picked it up. A miniature cannon sat like an idiot in the bubbly glass. Football colours and mottos encircled the cannon. Arsenal Football Club. Stupid sport. Stupid toy.

  Bryn was about to put it away, when a thought struck him. Arsenal. Back to the diary. Ha! The corporate entertainment was at Highbury stadium. Back to Listoff’s scribbled notes. Call Keown at HSBC. Ha, again! ‘Stupid bloody sport,’ said Bryn, and turned back to the computer.

  ‘Password?’ it asked.

  He typed one word: ‘Keown’.

  The computer didn’t scream hosanna or mutter a sarcastic ‘at last’. It didn’t comment on Listoff’s football obsession or compare Martin Keown with other Arsenal defenders, past and present. It just finished putting on its slippers, splashed some water on its face, ran a comb through its hair and was done. Ready for action.

  4

  Seated at the keyboard with the bank’s systems open to his view, Bryn typed in ‘Fulham Clinic’ under ‘Client name’. The system blinked, then brought up just three notes.

  The first, at the start of the week, had been entered by the friend of Bryn’s to whom he’d addressed his loan application. The note read, ‘Company is a start-up health-care venture, owned by ex-Berger Scholes MD, Bryn Hughes. Proposed loan is very small, but Hughes has suggested there may be opportunity to buy equity. Suggest follow-up, with view to equity participation. Relationship status: under review.’

  Ha! Nice guy. Bryn had always liked him.

  The second note was from Rudy Saddler, dated two days later. It read: ‘Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES engage with Bryn Hughes or Fulham Clinic. Bank is currently seeking to participate in a major financing with Corinth Laboratories of the US. Corinth has made it exceptionally plain that it regards Clinic as fundamentally unethical, and will not do business with any bank that supports it. WE WILL LOSE ROLE ON CURRENT AND ALL FUTURE FINANCINGS IF WE PROCEED.’

  The third note, written by the writer of the first, read simply: ‘Application refused. Relationship status: closed.’

  So that was it. Every bank that received a loan application from Bryn, also received a call from some smirking sod at Corinth. The message would be plain: their business or ours, you can’t have both. And the banks chose. They chose the big business, the huge loans, the giant fees. Once again, Bryn cursed Saddler for doing something that, given the same circumstances, he’d have done too.

  But what disturbed Bryn more was the timing. Within two days of getting his loan application, Berger Scholes had been warned off by Corinth. Coincidence? Maybe. But if it wasn’t, then Corinth was learning about Bryn’s applications within hours of them being sent. A mole inside the clinic? A mole who’d known about Bryn’s loan applications? It seemed almost impossible, given the precautions Bryn had taken, yet the coincidence was glaring …

  Deep in thought, Bryn reached out to turn off the PC. His hand had reached as far as the power switch, when an idea struck. He moved his hand again, back to the keyboard, trembling with excitement.

  5

  Put a pig inside a frock coat, it still looks like a pig. Put a bouncer inside a dinner jacket and the bent nose and bristling hair speak louder than any amount of fancy shirt-front. But the bouncers didn’t need to use much of their scarce mental energies to decide about the next two in line. One of the girls was tall, slim and dressed to kill, even if she did come over a bit gawky. The other was shorter, bubbly, a natural party animal.

  ‘On you go, girls. Enjoy your evening.’

  ‘We will,’ said Meg, as she and Cameron walked on in.

  6

  Bryn typed new instructions into the PC, and jumped back to the systems entry menu. On the far right, tucked discreetly away, there was a tab marked ‘HNWI’. Just that. Four letters, spelling gold. Excitement flared once again. This was better than a loan, better than a bank. He clicked the tab.

  A new dialogue box came up, asking for user ID and password. Bryn tried ‘blistoff’ and ‘keown’ again, but was rejected. ‘First attempt of three,’ commented the computer. Hell.

  HNWI stands for High Net Worth Individuals. In the language of Berger Scholes, an HNWI had personal assets of fifty million dollars or more. Mostly more, mostly much more.

  Bryn skimmed back through Listoff’s diary. In the preceding month, there was a note about a charity do for the Seaman’s Defence Fund. Yeah, right. For his second attempt, Bryn entered ‘blistoff’ and ‘seaman’, the Arsenal goalkeeper. Another cold pulse of excitement washed through his body, down to his fingertips. One of Berger Scholes’ HNWIs could recapitalise the clinic without even noticing the cost. He clicked ‘Enter’. No joy. ‘Second attempt of three,’ said the computer.

  Hell and damnation.

  He closed the diary, drumming his fingers on the desk. There were other places you could get information about rich people, but nowhere was as good as Berger Scholes. The bank had invested tens of millions of dollars in the system, and spent millions of dollars every year keeping it up to date. It didn’t just contain financial information, it contained everything: family, hobbies, friends, charities, politics, health, education, clubs and associations, everything. The database was what MI6 would have had in its files, if the gay Cambridge commies who ran it had ever had the brains, the money and the organisation.

  One more try.

  Bryn typed ‘blistoff’ and for password, he entered ‘password’. What the hell? Worth a go. The screen blinked for a while, then changed. ‘Password refused,’ it stated. ‘Access denied. Your security code has been frozen, please contact your IT manager for instructions on how to proceed.’

  Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  The trouble with the ‘if at first you don’t succeed, then batter it three quarters to death and try, try, try again’ philosophy, is it doesn’t work nearly as well on computers as it does on people. Bryn was just about to try it anyway, just for the hell of it, when he remembered Mungo. He phoned Mungo’s pager with a super-urgent message, and – thank God – got a call back within fifteen minutes.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Mungo’s dazed voice emerged weakly from a background racket, which could have been music or could have been a new type of warfare based around machine guns and pneumatic drills, with some electronic gizmos wailing away in the distance.

  ‘Mungo, I need a hand. Is there any chance I could pull you away from your party?’

  The drills drilled and the machine guns fired, and the gizmos screamed. Then, dimly, Mungo’s voice again: ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mungo, it’s me, Bryn. Can we talk?’

  Another long pause punctuated by some kind of crescendo in the music, and what sounded like somebody dying close at hand and painf
ully. ‘Yeah? … I’m not getting you, man.’

  ‘MUNGO! CALL ME, BRYN, NOW. PLEASE! SOMEWHERE QUIET.’

  Bryn yelled not his very, very loudest – he wasn’t at a rugby match, after all – but quite loud enough to alert a flood of security guards if they felt like being alerted. The line went dead. Five minutes passed. The security guards didn’t appear – perhaps lots of MDs spent the small hours shouting their heads off in the bank. Then Bryn’s mobile rang. At last: Mungo calling from a quiet line.

  ‘Mungo? It’s Bryn. I need you here as soon as possible.’ Bryn explained what he wanted.

  ‘Yeah, alright.’ Mungo’s yeah, alright sounded more like yer-igh, as though he were experimenting with a new kind of language based on two vowel sounds and no consonants. ‘No probs. Need to go home first, though.’

  Mungo rang off vaguely, then rang back for instructions on where to come, then rang off again. Bryn waited.

  And waited.

  And waited. It was coming up to four o’clock, and Bryn was beginning to wonder how much longer he dared to occupy Bernie Listoff’s office, in the uncertain hope that Mungo would arrive, and not even knowing whether he could help. At one point the lights came on, and a team of maintenance workers began to rip up flooring and dismantle some internal walls. Anyplace else, it would be a strange time to do it, but not at Berger Scholes, where maintenance work was always scheduled for the weekend to avoid disruption. Eventually, Bryn’s mobile rang again. It was Mungo, just five minutes away.

  ‘Good man,’ said Bryn. ‘I’ll be down to meet you.’

  Mungo was resplendent in his clubbing gear – sweat-smeared orange T-shirt, gold chain with a peace emblem, huge black trousers and a headband made of something which emitted a pale red fluorescent light. His eyes were vast, bulgy and happy, he carried an unopened two-litre bottle of water in his hand, and he smelled like the sort of thing sniffer dogs would pull you out of the queue for at Heathrow.