Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  But then again, Huizinga was a subtle man, Janssen a ruthless one, and Altmeyer, whatever side he was on, would be willing to do virtually anything for cash …

  The lights burned late as Bryn pondered.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  1

  Movements in the dark.

  Somewhere in the night outside a powerful enemy is manoeuvring. Bryn commands a frigate, knowing that the seas around him swarm with hostile battleships. Decks are cleared for action, the guns run out, men on standby, messroom emptied to make space for the hospital it’s about to become. High up in the crow’s-nest there’s a boy with a telescope, eyes aching as he searches the black horizon, waiting for first light.

  He won’t wait long. Out at sea, dawn comes quickly. It won’t be long before he knows just how bad it really is.

  2

  Mungo was a true child of the Information Age, but even an old dog like Bryn had a trick or two still to play.

  Once upon a time, when Bryn was an underpaid and overworked analyst at Berger Scholes, Companies House used to store its data on microfilm. If you wanted to examine it, they sent you a packet of transparencies about half the size of a postcard, and you wiggled them about under a fiche-reader – basically a cross between a giant magnifying glass and an overhead projector – until you found what you wanted. To print them off, you had to manoeuvre your transparency round, page by page, under the glass, hitting a clunky print-key each time you had the sheet you wanted. The pages came off the printer hot and crispy, covering your fingers in black toner ink and smelling of the old days.

  All that’s gone now, not that it matters. These days it’s all PCs and modems and bland little cubicles with too much air conditioning, and government-paid staff who’ve been sent on courses about how to build relationships with the customer. Bugger that. Bryn set down his illegally smuggled cup of coffee (a large latte, dark roast, Kenyan bean) by the keyboard. He wasn’t here to reminisce. He was here to dig.

  Step one – start from the bottom.

  Sitting at a PC, Bryn entered the name of the property company which had produced his leases for the satellite clinics: Scots Metropolitan Commercial Property Ltd. A handful of names came up, including the right one. He selected it and brought the required accounts to screen. With practised fingers, he cut through the blurb and located the list of directors. He printed off. No inky fingers, no smell, no satisfying clunk from the print-key. Just a prim little beep to tell him his print job was done.

  Next item. Major shareholders. Who owned Scots Metropolitan? A note recorded the answer: Scots Metropolitan Investments, a Jersey-registered company.

  Damn. Bryn swore softly. People don’t just go to Jersey to dodge taxes and guzzle cream. They go there for secrecy, too. Jersey-registered companies don’t need to file accounts, they don’t need to list their directors, they don’t need to give you the time of day.

  That’s the downside. The upside is that, even in Jersey, a company has to reveal who owns it. Bryn called the Jersey Financial Services Commission, who gave him the answer he was expecting. The sole owner of Scots Metropolitan Investments was De Kreuw Holdings SA, a Luxembourg company.

  Damn and blast. The trail had run as cold as an Eskimo outhouse. ‘SA’ stands for Société Anonyme, which literally means an anonymous company, and in Luxembourg, where the stones are more talkative than the bankers, they take that meaning very literally indeed. Bryn swigged his coffee gratefully, knowing his day was about to get a whole lot longer. He settled the plastic lid back on his cup and rolled up his sleeves. A passing bureaucrat saw Bryn’s illegal coffee and tutted. Bryn ignored her.

  Step two – begin again from the top.

  From his briefcase, Bryn pulled out a list of Corinth’s subsidiaries, drawn from its compulsory annual filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A quick scan of the list revealed no overlap with any of the names Bryn had identified so far. No problem. Bryn didn’t need to win easy, he just needed to win.

  He began to dig.

  He used the Dun & Bradstreet credit database. He used Companies House. He used online phone directories for companies registered in the Cayman Islands and the Netherlands Antilles. He used a contact of his in the Paris office of Berger Scholes, who knew his way around the Luxembourg system better than most after a life spent helping the rich to dodge taxes.

  Down and down through the layers of corporate hierarchy, Bryn probed. Despite the theory, searches of this kind are never simple. Like a Russian doll re-engineered by Kafka, a global company today has companies which own companies which own companies which own companies. Muddled in there at random are dormant companies, shell companies, holding companies, companies which change their names, companies which change their location, companies which bury their paper trail underneath a mountain of dead ends, false leads and red herrings. For six hours, Bryn sifted through dirt, panning for gold.

  Then he found it.

  Scots Metropolitan – Bryn’s property company – had a director rejoicing in the name of Dougal P. Moretti. Theoretically, Moretti had nothing at all to do with pharmaceuticals, and everything to do with property.

  But here he was again: D. P. Moretti, listed as an officer of one of Corinth’s countless European subsidiaries. It could be a coincidence, but Bryn doubted it. In any event, he proposed to find out.

  He called Moretti on the Corinth number and was put straight through. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Moretti. I apologise for disturbing you, but I had an urgent enquiry regarding the Scots Metropolitan lease portfolio.’

  ‘Scots Metropolitan? Yes. Certainly. I’m afraid I don’t have any of my papers with me at this office. But if I can help –’

  ‘I’m sure you can. Perhaps you could stick your leases up your bum?’

  There was a terse pause. Then, nastily, ‘Who is speaking, please?’

  ‘My name? My name is Jonah Jackass, of Hogspew, Dog-breath and Wind …’

  He hung up.

  The night before he had been uncertain. No longer. Max Altmeyer – their kind, generous ever-so-helpful new shareholder – had come up with a handful of leases, all of which were ultimately controlled by Corinth.

  The man who owned two fifths of the clinic and was the clinic’s largest creditor wasn’t a friend, and wasn’t a supporter. In fact, he was in league with the clinic’s deadliest enemy.

  3

  ‘Uh,’s good,’ mumbled Cameron, through a mouthful of poppadom and lime pickle. She shuffled hot metal dishes between the burners, swapping dishes with Bryn. Kati watched them like they were aliens. What did she know? She ate naan bread with a knife and fork. She had a salad, for God’s sake. ‘Are we celebrating something?’ asked Cameron after a while.

  ‘No. Definitely not. Far from it.’ A mouthful of badly advised vindaloo caused Bryn’s eyes to prick and water, and he quickly took some yoghurt, pretending he was unconcerned.

  ‘Corinth,’ he said. ‘They’re moving in for the kill.’

  Kati and Cameron stopped chewing, stopped breathing.

  ‘Altmeyer is on their side. He’s been working for them all this time.’

  The two women wore masks for faces: anxiety writ large on Kati’s, determination on Cameron’s. ‘Excuse me?’ said Cameron.

  Bryn took a nervous swallow of Kingfisher lager. ‘The leases,’ he said. ‘Altmeyer secured them for us. I was grateful, thought he was doing us a favour … Turns out I was wrong.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ Cameron prompted him.

  ‘Turns out the leases come from Corinth.’

  ‘Woah! You took out leases from Corinth?’

  ‘Altmeyer is about to ask us to repay his loan.’ Bryn continued. ‘I don’t know how he’s going to do it, I just know he will.’

  Silence followed this statement, which Cameron was the first to break. ‘So?’ she whispered. ‘He wants his money back. We give it to him and tell him to get screwed.’ She waved her bread in the air. demonstrating the simplicity of it all. A couple of sultanas pinged out o
f the dough and landed near Kati. She tidied them silently away with her napkin. The silence settled back again, breathless, expectant.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ said Bryn. ‘We’ve spent most of the loan money taking out these bloody leases. I thought we could always sell up or sublet if we needed the money, but –’ He sighed heavily. ‘Corinth won’t let us. They won’t let us renegotiate. They won’t let us sell.’

  Cameron took this in. ‘OK. So let me get this straight. You get us an investor. He comes from Corinth. You get us a loan. It comes from Corinth. You get us some new properties. They come from Corinth.’

  Like troops patrolling a remote and contested border, Cameron’s words signalled a flare-up, an incident which could either dissolve into nothing, or escalate into violence. The oily green fluid at the bottom of the sag aloo dish began to boil and smoke, a sign of trouble.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Bryn, shifting the dish with an asbestos finger.

  ‘There wasn’t enough property in England, so you had to go to Corinth?’

  ‘Oh, there weren’t enough males in England, so you had to get your boyfriend from Corinth?’

  ‘Don’t go there. Don’t you even dare go there.’

  Bryn breathed out, trying to keep calm. Spread out along the border, his troops were wired, tense, ready. ‘The leases didn’t look like they came from Corinth. They did a good job at hiding things.’

  ‘And if he asks for his money back,’ asked Kati, trying to defuse the situation, ‘and we can’t pay, then what?’

  ‘He takes shares instead of money. He takes control of the clinic. He sells it to Corinth. I’m sure they’ve even pre-agreed a price.’

  Cameron listened, mouth open. Anything she said in this mood would be barbed and dangerous. She moved her lips. Words hesitated on the tip of her tongue. A blazing row was only a couple of syllables away. She licked her lips. She closed her mouth. The moment passed. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘That is big news.’

  ‘How come he can just ask for his money back?’ said Kati. ‘Doesn’t he need some kind of reason?’

  ‘That’s the weird thing,’ said Bryn. ‘Of course he needs a reason, like if we were running into default, getting into financial trouble or whatever. But we’re a million miles from that. It’s as though the leases give him explosive, but he doesn’t have a detonator …’

  He trailed off, beating his brains to find the answer. ‘He must have something planned, otherwise why build a bomb? Why go to all the effort? But I don’t know what it could be. I’ve thought of everything, and I still can’t fathom it.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ said Cameron, ‘coming from the man who buys his property from Brent Huizinga.’ She emptied a chicken bhuna and the last of the biryani on to her plate, leaving the empty dishes on the flame to sputter and smoke.

  ‘And why have they waited?’ said Kati. ‘You guys signed the contract months ago, back in August. Why have they waited so long before striking?’

  Bryn shook his head. ‘They’re smart. The more time goes by, the more money we spend, so we become ever more unable to repay them their money. It’s like we’ve had our head in a noose and haven’t even noticed that the rope’s been tightening.’

  ‘But now,’ said Cameron, ‘after Janssen and Mungo and everything, they’ll guess that we know –’

  ‘Exactly, they’ll guess that we know and they’ll put their plan into action, whatever it is. Of course, if it really comes to it, we can always find money from elsewhere, but …’

  ‘Elsewhere?’ said Cameron. ‘You mean the research side?’

  Bryn nodded unhappily.

  ‘How bad is it? How much money would we have to find?’

  ‘Ten million. We’d have to close our new office space, lay off, say, thirty staff, and cancel all future hires, and then we’d also need to sell all our new equipment, the big fractionation machines and everything.’

  Cameron shook her head, sadly, but emphatically. ‘No point. We might as well just give up right now. Even as things stand, we need to add resources rather than cut them. Any less, and we’d lose the rest of the patents to Corinth. We’d lose all the really serious AIDS peptides. And hepatitis. And the whole flu group. Even as it is …’

  She dug savagely into Bryn’s vindaloo and took a mouthful of fiercely spiced chicken. It was the first time she’d ventured that far up the heat-scale, and the experience temporarily seared her. ‘Jesus! That’s not food, that’s a neurotoxin.’ The heat gathered and bit. Her eyes swam, her face reddened, her nose poured. ‘Jesus. Jesus! You eat that for fun?’

  ‘You get used to it.’

  ‘You’d get used to hydrochloric acid. It’s legal?’

  Bryn handed her the raita, and the yoghurt disappeared in a flash. Bryn beckoned for more.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It looks horrendous whichever way round you look at it.’

  ‘Vindaloo?’

  ‘The Altmeyer situation.’

  ‘Send him a curry.’

  ‘Seriously. Things look black. I’m not sure I have a solution.’

  Cameron’s mouth calmed down and she focused on what Bryn was saying. A pint of ice-cold water disappeared down her chilli-devastated gullet.

  ‘You’re going to give up?’ she asked. ‘Without a fight?’

  Bryn laughed. Cameron had asked tough questions in her time, but this was a cinch. Bryn was a battle tank, rescued from Dunkirk, sent out to North Africa, brought back to storm the Normandy beaches and left to pummel its way eastwards to Berlin. Over the years, he’d been battered, bruised, dented, patched, broken, fixed. He wasn’t new, he wasn’t fresh, he wasn’t young. But his scars had brought experience, and by God, he’d go on fighting, for as long as he had punch left in him.

  He picked up the remaining vindaloo, displayed it like a conjuror to Cameron, and swallowed the lot. No yoghurt, no water, no beer. He breathed out: fire and smoke. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered, ‘we’ll fight. I promise you we’ll fight.’

  4

  Instead of heading straight home, they wandered out into the night and strolled the chilly streets, anxious about the future, wondering about the past. While they were in the restaurant it had been raining hard, and, though the skies had cleared, the world was still wet and fresh and darkly gleaming. Their stroll took them to Bishop’s Park, a small urban park downstream from the boathouse. Cameron found a gate that hadn’t been properly locked and they wandered the silent paths, beneath the leafless trees, listening to the rumble of traffic from Putney Bridge and the surreptitious glide of the Thames.

  Leaning over the embankment and flicking bits of twig down into the water, Bryn said, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking into an alternative. It’s a long shot … Well, OK, it’s born of desperation, but you never know.’

  Cameron’s previous flash of anger had disappeared. She had a temper on her, but she never held grudges. Cecily had never had much of a visible temper, but grudges grew on her like spikes on a cactus, hardening and sharpening in the sterile desert heat.

  ‘I’m sorry for yelling earlier,’ she said. ‘In the restaurant. I guess I was upset, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’d have yelled too.’

  ‘What’s your plan?’

  Bryn hesitated. More wood followed the earlier twigs into the Thames as he thought. ‘Let me ask you this,’ he said. ‘How are you on respiratory disease? Are you up to speed with latest developments?’

  Cameron shook her head. ‘Nope. Not at all.’

  Kati interrupted. ‘Uh-uh. She knows plenty,’ she said. ‘I’ve never found a part of medicine where Cameron wasn’t frighteningly well informed. And besides …’ She looked at Cameron, who looked back at her.

  ‘Besides what?’ demanded Bryn.

  ‘My boyfriend, Allen,’ admitted Cameron. ‘Before he got into chemo, respiratory disease was his research field – and it’s still the thing he loves the most. Remember? I did try to tell you once? Anyway, I guess I could ask
him for help. But I don’t know. He’s a pretty straight guy. I’m not sure he’d be OK about anything – uh, anything …’

  ‘… Anything wildly illegal and improper?’ said Bryn.

  ‘Right.’

  There was a pause, during which each one of them also thought of the fact that Allen had applied to Corinth for a job. He’d withdrawn his application and now had nothing to do with the company. And yet, none of the three of them standing there under the leafless trees could quite forget the connection. Feeling defensive, Cameron was first to break the silence. ‘So?’ she said. ‘What’s the big idea?’

  And by the midnight river, amongst the wet and sighing trees, Bryn told them.

  5

  Somewhere in Cambridgeshire, a biotechnology business.

  An ugly Victorian pile houses the admin side, while behind, a purpose-built block of glass and steel rises like a fang from the flat countryside. Winter sunlight flashes blue from tinted glass, while the lawns surrounding it are cropped and bare. The perimeter wall has been brightened up with loops of razor wire, searchlights, notices about dogs. Almost hidden in the rhododendron bushes, there are some long low sheds, cheap affairs with thin metal walls and roofs which must rattle like the devil in the rain. A heap of dung steams gently outside.

  Inside the red-brick manor, a secretary is being interviewed. Her CV is impeccable, her computer skills up to the minute. Because it’s an interview, the applicant struggles to remain serious, but you can tell she’ll be a laugh to work with: one of the girls. The interview is a formality. The new girl is a Londoner, moving out to live nearer her boyfriend. Her last job was PA to a chief executive of a big London investment house, who gave her an outstanding reference. ‘He offered me five K to stay on, but I told him my mind was made up,’ she says. ‘Love before money?’ asks the interviewer. ‘You’re crazy.’ Everybody laughs.