Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  Meg smiles, shakes hands, leaves. She drives a short way beyond the main gates, stops, and makes a call. Bryn’s out, but she leaves him a voice mail.

  ‘It’s me, babe. They haven’t actually said so yet, but they’re going to give me the job, I’m certain. That reference you gave me was awesome. One of the guys said he’d never seen anything like it. Only trouble was, I nearly forgot what company I was meant to have worked for.’

  Meg chatters on, happy and excited, pleased to be involved in Bryn’s scheme for the clinic’s survival. Despite what happened to Mungo, Meg still lacks a fully developed sense of danger. Over her shoulder, as she completes her call, you can see the red-brick wall that guards the complex. Waxy black rhododendron leaves carve the air like knife-blades, while the looping razor wire flashes silver in the sunlight. There’s a sign too: ‘MA Research Associates – Biotechnology for the 21st century’. The name and slogan are meaningless, the kind of corporate drivel which someone somewhere should have patented, made a killing from. And beneath the slogan is a byline: ‘MARA Ltd – a Max Altmeyer company’.

  Meg puts her phone on the seat beside her and winds the window down, ready for the journey back into town. Her mind is elsewhere and she doesn’t notice it, but through the window comes a smell. It’s a strong smell, a smell of animals.

  6

  Up in the flickering gloom of Pod Mungo, its proprietor rocked back on his chair, crunching toffee popcorn and shaking crumbs from his keyboard. In Meg’s absence, Tallulah had decided that Mungo was her best bet for food and company, and her presence stimulated Mungo to new heights of microwave inventiveness. Tallulah was now, frankly, obese. If she flew at all, her breath was laboured and heavy. Right now, she was down amongst the nest of wires on the floor, lethargically eating the last of the popcorn.

  Behind Mungo, Bryn brooded anxiously: knowing he was a distraction, but unable to stay away. Of the three grey windows on to cyberspace, only one was live. Mungo hit a key and the screen beeped again. ‘MARA Login Procedure – Access Denied’.

  ‘Oh, widdle. ‘S gone Egyptian.’

  ‘Egyptian?’

  ‘Yeah. As in crocodile.’ Bryn shook his head blankly and Mungo spoke again, stretching out his words as though speaking to a halfwit. ‘Egyptian crocodile. It’s in de-nial.’

  Bryn’s nerves weren’t soothed. He was living in a thick fog of anxiety. ‘Anything we can do to speed this up? Anything at all?’

  Mungo shook his head, grey and sinister in the cyber-twilight.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  1

  A crow’s-nest at the masthead is a scary place to be. Even a modest ocean swell, amplified through sixty feet of wooden mast, will sweep you through huge circles in space, over the ship, out above the sea, then racing back over black and silent decks to the sea on the other side. A giant’s pendulum, balanced between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  Meantime, there’s a job to do. Over in the east, has the blackness thinned? It’s hard to tell. Up here, your eyes play tricks.

  Eyes aching, you scan the horizon. Will the sea be empty or crowded with the enemy? Do you have a chance of escape, or no chance at all? There’s not enough light to be sure, and you mustn’t speak too soon.

  Once again you lift the telescope. Out in the black and silent west, stains encroach upon the darkness, dark patches where night thickens and clots. You’ll wait a minute, another minute, but already you know the answer. You haven’t escaped. The miracle hasn’t happened. Out there, lying to windward, is the enemy fleet, massive, ready, and, like you, waiting for dawn.

  2

  A letter arrives, bland, official and dull.

  Bryn – coffee addict that he is – opens his mail with a steaming cafétière by his right elbow (mild roast, Mysore bean, perked up with a dash of dark Jamaican). He rips open the envelope with a blunt thumb, unfolding the letter with his left hand as he reaches for coffee with the right. The right hand never makes it. The left hand brings the letter close, and as he reads the colour drains from his face.

  At long last, he’s found it – the missing detonator. In thirty days, barring a miracle, the clinic will be dead.

  3

  White-faced, Cameron looked at the letter. ‘You’re sure?’ she said. ‘This seems like no big deal. They can investigate all they want. All they’re going to find is a first-rate medical practice.’

  ‘Of course they will. That’s not the point.’

  ‘So the point is?’

  ‘The General Medical Council is the body which authorises all doctors in the United Kingdom. They could strike you off the register. They could close the clinic down.’

  ‘On what grounds? These supposed complaints come from Corinth. You know that. They have no substance whatever.’

  Bryn nodded. He did know it. ‘True, but you’re still missing the point,’ he said. ‘I haven’t explained myself very well. This is the point. Right here, this is the point.’

  He directed her attention to the second document he had with him, the loan agreement signed with Altmeyer. Ringed in black was the clause that had concerned them out on the yacht, beneath the blazing heat of the mid-day sun.

  ‘Suspension of business,’ it said. ‘Lender is permitted to call the Loan due for Repayment or Conversion if the operations of the Business are suspended or under investigation for possible suspension by any governmental or regulatory authority who is empowered so to act.’

  ‘Damn, I remember this.’ Cameron reread it, frowning, puzzling through the complicated English. ‘So, according to this, Altmeyer’s allowed to ask for his money back, if … goddamn, if the General Medical Congress, or whatever you guys call it, comes poking around.’

  ‘Exactly. The GMC won’t close us down, but the point is they can. They’re empowered to do so. That’s all Altmeyer needs. He’s got his explosive. He’s got his detonator. This is his bomb. Theoretically those GMC investigations are confidential, but I’ll bet anything you like that we get a fax from Altmeyer within the next half-hour demanding that we repay his loan.’

  ‘So then we’ll either have to find ten million pounds, in – how long?’

  ‘Thirty days.’

  ‘Or watch ourselves being sold to Corinth.’

  Bryn nodded.

  ‘And ten million pounds – there’s no chance, I suppose …?’

  Bryn shook his head. ‘No chance. We could fire everyone on the payroll. Sell all our equipment. Sell the buildings. Sell the barge. Then,’ he shrugged, ‘then of course we could pay it, but what would be the point? We’d hardly beat Corinth, if it was just you, me and a cardboard box.’ He paused, aware suddenly of a burning anger towards Corinth, a smouldering, intense fury that the company should play with people’s lives for the sake of corporate profit and Huizinga’s pay packet. ‘And, sod it, Cameron, sod it. We’ve got to beat the buggers, we’ve just got to!’

  Cameron barely heard him. Though this moment had been looming for a while, the shock was still staggering when it came. She looked like someone forced to watch a son or daughter be killed in a car accident. Her face, like Bryn’s, was taut and white. The only sign of motion in the room was her hand, drumming tak-tak-tak on the table, faster than a humming bird’s wing. Outside, through the glass pane in her office door, Bryn could see Rick the Beard and the others moving about, careful with their lab equipment, noting results, collating data, inching closer to the ever more pointless goal. Cameron’s hand stopped its drumming.

  ‘Mungo?’ she asked. ‘I don’t suppose he’s …’

  ‘He’s got nowhere. I’ve just checked.’

  Cameron’s hand drummed briefly again. Then she stopped, grey eyes the colour of smoke. ‘If Mungo can’t make it through cyberspace, I guess we’ll just have to do it in real space,’ she said.

  Bryn’s head jolted up in surprise.

  ‘Real space?’ he asked. ‘You mean –’

  ‘Burglary,’ said Cameron.
‘A good old-fashioned, honest-to-God break-in.’

  A slow smile spread across Bryn’s face. By God, he loved this woman. She didn’t want to be in a fix, but since she was, she’d enjoy – she’d actually enjoy – the effort to smash a way out of it. But his reflections were interrupted by the chatter of a fax machine outside. Grimly, Bryn went out and returned with a single sheet of paper.

  ‘Altmeyer?’ said Cameron.

  Bryn nodded.

  ‘Thirty days from now, huh?’

  He nodded again. ‘Thirty days.’

  She smiled. ‘I’ve always wanted to burgle someone.’

  ‘Me too,’ added Bryn. Then, recalling General Patton’s philosophy of battle, he quoted, ‘Have a plan.’

  ‘Execute it violently,’ she responded.

  ‘And do it today.’

  Simultaneously, they looked at their watches. There was no time to be lost.

  4

  Five thirty, the same afternoon. Both buildings empty fast, but the Manor, the red-brick gothic monstrosity, empties faster. As the minute hand clicks from almost-down to straight-down, people drop their pens mid-sentence, grab for coats and scarves, form knots at the doorway leading out. Max Altmeyer has a knack for making money, but getting his employees to love him is a skill he’s never mastered. A regular employee now, Meg heads out with the rush.

  ‘Hey, Megsy! You coming down the pub?’

  She makes friends fast, does Meg, and one of them is calling her now.

  ‘Yeah, maybe, later. I’ve got a couple of things to do first,’ she says.

  A brick pavement connects the two buildings: the Victorian admin block and the sleek, sinister science block. She wanders down towards the science offices, sheeted in their impenetrable glass. She doesn’t have a plan, but like Bryn she has instincts. The front entrance is a no-no. Too public, too on-display. She saunters round the back, to the loading bay. Just one person there: a stringy bloke, Meg’s age roughly, wearing the uniform of a security guard. Right now, he’s guarding nothing. He’s having a fag.

  ‘Alright, gorgeous?’

  They recognise each other vaguely, having seen each other in the canteen at lunchtimes occasionally. The guard, supposedly alert for intruders, switches his mental alarm signals off. Meg is no intruder. She sizes him up, approaches.

  ‘Got a fag?’

  He produces one silently, lights it. She closes her lips around the filter in a pout. (Her second best feature, lips.) She inhales – not too deeply, she’s not too used to smoking tobacco – and breathes out a tube of smoke. After exhaling, she doesn’t quite close her lips. The stringy youth smirks at her. He inhales, gathers concentration, blows a smoke ring. The ring isn’t brilliant, but OK. Meg blows a jet of smoke into his ring, like trying to thread a needle. It doesn’t work, the smoke just billows out into a mess, but it’s not a competition. The youth nods at her.

  ‘Working up at the Manor, then?’

  Lots of conversational gambits are open to Meg at this point. For instance, even quite an unimaginative person might think of saying, ‘Yes’, but decision has come to Meg. She drops her cigarette on the ground, tweaks his cigarette from his mouth and drops it too. Putting both hands behind his head, she kisses him, her tongue drilling deep into his mouth. He tastes of smoke and salted peanuts, but behind those tastes there’s something softer, like milk maybe. His head gets the idea pretty quickly, and she doesn’t need her hands there any longer. She drops them to his waist and pulls him against her. There is no ambiguity in the movement of her hips. They lock together in silence for a short time, punctuated by little snorts of air when it has become essential to breathe. They kiss like oilmen drilling, Casanova given an hour to live.

  She pulls away.

  He makes to come forward again, but she steps back, shaking her head, her mouth still open, breathing in rapid pants. He too is open-mouthed, breathing hard.

  ‘It’s private here,’ he says. ‘No one’ll come here now, just me.’

  Meg looks round at the oil-stained floor and the litter of discarded packaging. She shakes her head, but her face is tilting slightly down, she’s looking at him from under her eyebrows, and hunger is written all over her mouth.

  The stringy youth is in a dream, a situation he’s only ever seen in films. He doesn’t know how come he arrived here, but doesn’t want to screw things up. He checks his watch.

  ‘I’m on patrol here tonight. Give me till half six to lock up, then I’ll be back.’

  Meg nods.

  He looks doubtful. Nothing like this has ever, ever happened to him. Meg sees his doubt, grabs his belt at the buckle and yanks him over. They kiss again. Her hands are at waist level, but not round the back this time, round the front. He leaves, shaking.

  5

  Six thirty. Footsteps come running down a concrete corridor. The stringy youth bursts through a steel door. Empty. The loading bay is empty. He sees nothing. Disappointment breaks over him like a cold Atlantic wave. Of course the bay would be empty, what the hell did he expect? Still breathing hard from his run, his desire, his disappointment, he walks along the grimy loading ramp, looking out at the deserted lawns.

  Wrong way, he’s looking the wrong way. He falls into an ambush. One hand grabs him over his mouth, another hand reaches for his groin. Meg pulls him towards her, and in a moment they are joined to one another again, locked in place like a pair of suction pumps. They kiss as though kissing were oxygen, but in the end their lungs demand the real thing and they pull away as before, panting heavily.

  ‘Gotcha,’ says Meg.

  The stringy youth is pleased to have been got.

  ‘All clear. No one left.’ He jangles some keys. ‘And no one can get in, either.’

  ‘Lead on then, tiger.’

  He leads on. As promised, the building is deserted. There are laboratories, briefly glimpsed though glass doors: labcoats, test-tubes, racks of chemicals locked and labelled, big white German-made machines promising insight into the most tightly held secrets of life. Meg is impressed, but doesn’t say so.

  Her companion says, ‘There’s a common room along here. It’s got sofas and everything.’

  Before he’s finished speaking, they’ve arrived. It takes them a handful of microseconds to rip cushions off the sofas and scatter them over the floor, but any hope of constructing anything resembling a bed is soon shot to pieces as they grapple again, somehow managing to pull their clothes off as they clinch.

  It’s quickly over, Meg’s choice as much as her lover’s haste. She’s surprised herself. She’d expected not to let it go any further than some more heavy duty snogs, but perhaps the act of miming passion made her feel it. Whatever the reason, when her newest conquest goes hunting his packet of cigarettes, Meg is feeling happy and excited, and not only because she’s inside the building Bryn told her to check out.

  ‘Fag?’ he asks, handing her a lighted fag.

  ‘Ta.’

  He lights one for himself, using his other hand to thump his chest.

  ‘Degsy,’ he says.

  ‘I’m Meg.’

  6

  He looked her up and down, in a kindly way, not possessively. He stroked away a strand of chestnut hair which had become sweat-glued to her damp cheek. With his clothes on he looked stringy. Clothes off and he looked a bit hunkier than that. Sinewy, thought Meg, strong; like a distance runner, even though she’d always had more of a thing for swimmers. Apart from his fairly rapid execution – and Meg knew she was partly responsible for that – Degsy had been a considerate lover, if considerate is the right word for someone literally quivering with desire.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Meg.’

  ‘Nice to meet you too, Degsy,’ she said, running her hand across his chest, up on to his arms and shoulders, then back down again and round.

  ‘You always introduce yourself like that?’

  Meg smiled, but her mind was elsewhere, in two places at once. The first spot was in her hand, which lay on his belly, rising and fall
ing with his breaths exactly in sync with her own. She stroked it, round and round, meditatively. The second place was with Bryn. He’d asked her to snoop around a bit, find out what she could about the security arrangements. On balance, Meg felt, she had ‘exceeded expectations’, as the Berger Scholes performance appraisals used to put it – especially since the most significant element of the security arrangements was currently up on one arm, nibbling her bosom.

  ‘Degsy?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  She nudged him away from her breast, but kept him close, so his side stayed pressed up against her. ‘D’you like your job?’

  ‘Like my job? What d’you mean?’

  ‘I’m saying do you like your job? Are you committed and all that?’

  Degsy’s attention moved away from Meg’s nipple to her face. ‘Look, nobody in the entire universe – least no one with a brain in the entire universe – would get a kick out of watching a wall of TV screens all night, and wandering round with a torch, going, “Is anybody there?” I do it because I get paid, alright?’

  His attention wandered back to pleasanter things. Meg let him do as he wanted, cradling his head in her arm. She pondered. The low-risk strategy was to get Degsy to show her around, remember as much as she could, report it on to Bryn; but her pulse was racing, one-twenty beats to the minute, and Bryn himself had never been one for the cautious approach.

  ‘Degsy?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

  He pulled his lips away with a small smacking sound. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘I’ve got some friends who want to burgle the building.’

  He sat upright, pulling himself away from her. There wasn’t a single point now where their two bodies touched. ‘That’s why you jumped all over me? Jesus. Only in my bloody dreams …’ He reached for his underpants and began to pull them on. Meg grabbed at them before he’d pulled them higher than his knees, and twisted them so he couldn’t move them higher.