MBA

by Douglas Board

  Ben asks me about tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow is my second governors’ meeting. It’s in the evening, but to do what I’ve decided to do about Gyro I will have to go early, in the afternoon.’

  ‘What you have decided to do is?’

  ‘I checked with Sling – the bank have written off the loan as Gyro said, to pay him off for saving them. So, on the plus side, Hampton has no immediate nightmare scenario.’

  ‘But you want the rules tightened up so it can never happen again.’

  ‘I do. But the more I’ve thought about it, that doesn’t work. First of all, I’m the newbie youngster on the board. I couldn’t get the board seriously to tighten up the rules unless I came clean about how Gyro evaded them. So that would push us straight into the him-or-me scenario, who’s telling the truth and what’s my evidence.’

  Ben muses, ‘That’s what Frank would have wanted you to do.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. But I reckon I lose that fight.’

  Ben protests, ‘Even if someone leans on Sling to shut up, don’t forget I was a witness. There’ll be records on the systems of that bank in the Netherlands Antilles, you can’t wipe computers that easily. A court could subpoena them.’

  I wave my hands. ‘A legal nightmare. I don’t want my life ruined.’

  ‘Our life.’

  ‘I’m waiting to see what you decide, remember? Anyway, there are still two problems. So what if the rules are tightened up? What does that really achieve? Gyro knew what he was doing wasn’t allowed. Rules can be got round if someone wants to badly enough. And Gyro isn’t all bad. He isn’t even mostly bad.

  ‘Both of us admire what he’s done for the school, far more than any other dean by a long shot. Gyro’s better placed than anyone to spend the next year turning our new-found fame around the world into the income and high-paying students that Hampton badly needs.’

  ‘That’s a dilemma.’

  ‘Which I’ve solved.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon I’ll tell him his secret is safe with me provided he does four things. One, spend the next twelve months getting our income up – converting our fame into cash. Two, propose me as a member of the audit committee and support a tightening up of the rules over the next six months – it’s not sufficient but it’s necessary. And three, give in his notice in twelve months’ time so we can look for a new dean. At the end of the day, he sailed too close to the wind. Changing the rules isn’t enough.’

  Ben’s eyebrows rise and rise. ‘Wow. That’s a heavy-duty play. I don’t know what you’ve been learning, but it’s some potent stuff. So, do you think Gyro will say yes?’

  ‘If he doesn’t, I’ll blow the whistle.’

  Ben is quiet. ‘Well, he’ll need something to keep him occupied over the next year. Did you see he and Dianne have separated?’

  ‘Yes, but how much time did they spend together anyway?’

  Ben puts his hand on my arm. ‘You’ve only listed three things.’

  ‘Number four: a memorial for Frank – and a promise never, ever, ever to slag him off.’

  THURSDAY 21 JUNE (NIGHT)

  BEWARE THE CANDIRU. This minute, almost-transparent Amazonian catfish, about 2.5cm (1 in) long, is reported to be able to swim up the urethra of a person urinating in the water – where it gets stuck by the dorsal spine. The chance of this happening is remote, but don’t take the risk. Cover your genitals and don’t urinate in the water

  JOHN WISEMAN 7

  As soon as the light had flooded from the tower, Greg’s neurones and hormones had gone to DEFCON 1. He had known something would happen, and it was happening – but what was it? The moment to burst from the chrysalis of waiting and nonentity to claim his destiny by surprise and storm had arrived; every tissue of his body knew that. Well, unfortunately, not the pulmonary and oesophageal tissues: he fought to suppress a coughing fit that arrived from nowhere. Superheroes didn’t cough, that was one of their lesser-known superpowers. Besides, the Prime Minister was on television. But the fit defeated him.

  ‘Why did Britain invade Iraq?’

  Et tu, Brute? was Greg’s final thought as Lens punched the Prime Minister in the jaw and then turned on the cameraman. He had not seen Lens coming. But from that moment, Greg was pure action.

  The two armed police officers jumped Lens, who went down on the grass. In his ear-piece Greg heard them call the back-up team for assistance.

  Lens screamed until a punch broke his nose. ‘The evening news … in 10 minutes …’

  ‘Porcupine Titty!’ shouted Greg, like the devil bellowing for his lawyer.

  The words came from a list computer-generated after extensive research. They had been calculated to offer the optimal combination of audibility, memorability, unlikelihood of arising for any accidental reason as well as generating immediate attention from male and female workforces. Greg had never expected to use them and the police officers had never expected to hear them, but they worked. Decompression: the emergency identification by an undercover officer of himself to the uniformed branch.

  Greg’s body weight propelled the Prime Minister towards the helicopter. The pilot started the rotor. Greg shoved his precious cargo in and followed, slamming the door shut. The pilot looked blank, so when he repeated the phrase Greg threw in ‘Undercover police!’ for good measure.

  As they climbed, the scene below turned into an explosive incident in Toytown. The back-up car arrived and all the figures pumping adrenaline and guns receded into miniatures. Greg followed the pilot’s gesture and put on the headset hanging above his seat, happy to discard his once-adored ear-piece. The latter had gone mental and was stopping Greg from thinking. Lens? So the conspiracy extended inside Downing Street? In which case the helicopter might not be safe.

  The involuntary passenger stared out of the opposite window like a sack of potatoes, all eyes and no comprehension. And no seatbelt either. Reaching over to buckle the Prime Minister in flitted into Greg’s mind and out again: it was too much trouble. Instead Greg glared suspiciously down at the lake, looking for new hidden enemies. But the lake was toying with him: the secret of the pain which it would inflict on his groin in a few hours’ time remained hidden.

  At 400 feet, the Prime Minister and Greg began to regain their breathing. They were climbing away from the sun, so towards the east. The pilot spoke on a channel Greg could not hear, two or three words at first and then rapid-fire. From the movement of the pilot’s lips, something had just changed. Abruptly they banked, reversed direction and dived hard towards the lake. Cabin roof 3; passengers’ skulls 0. The Prime Minister put his hand up to dab a rivulet of blood. The tower made their skin and bones glow as they passed over.

  Greg’s headphones purred into life as the pilot addressed him. ‘Two unidentified incoming from the west, ultra-low altitude.’

  Greg thought, fuck me. And then: so why have we turned towards them? ‘Incoming?’ he blurted.

  ‘Jets. Or missiles,’ the pilot explained.

  We who are about to die might as well act the part. ‘Life jackets!’ barked the pilot. ‘Grab him! Get ready to jump!’

  The violent dive left Greg feeling sick. Being a superhero was over-rated. Surely he had done enough, unmasking at least part of the conspiracy and taking the Prime Minister to safety, or what had seemed like safety at the time. But with one hand he groped for a life jacket, while with the other he hung on for dear life. The plunging cabin stopped about ten feet above a stormy lake. Spray soaked him as, at the pilot’s press of a lever, the door was jettisoned and tumbled away in a gale. The pilot tilted the cabin toward the wet void and held up five fingers. ‘Impact in five,’ he said, and began counting down.

  Embracing fate in both arms, in one case in the form of the Prime Minister and in the other case in the form of a life jacket, Greg jumped into the lake.

  ---

&n
bsp; The Slough train was due in eight minutes.

  ‘Nice evening,’ said the old man with the Union Jack but Connie ignored him, pacing the length of the platform and back. All men were the same and she was not in the mood to forgive any of them – whether the tattooed youngsters in the pub, this barnacle on the railway bench, the fat cat, the slick misogynist, the weird scientist or, no better than any of them, the apprentice shitbag.

  The human race had been betrayed by its priapic half, and several of them had betrayed her personally. On another day she might have felt more kindly towards the pensioner but her bladder wasn’t having any of it. Whoever fixed the wanking hand to the lift had called it right.

  She told herself again and again that all Ben needed to have done was own up to his role at Bakhtin on the Sunday afternoon of her birthday. What could have been easier? She would have shouted for a bit but forgiven him (she liked to think). Probably they would still have slept together, but without a lie growing like a weed in between all the words they said to each other.

  Without that lie, Frank would not have decided during Wednesday’s dinner to get Connie back to his house this afternoon. Without going back she wouldn’t have been confronted by his need of her car battery. Without giving up her car battery, she would have had no reason to feel the soft curds of fear welling up inside her which she was covering over with a hard blow-torch of anger.

  Still, from what she remembered from Ben’s timetable, the tower was open by now and the Prime Minister’s announcement made. In a few minutes she would be on her way to Slough and could begin to calm down. Of all towns, Slough was the epitome of tedious normality, although the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman had wanted to obliterate it from the sky. Connie has fixed the horizon with eyes like red lasers, as if in a minute two smudges of smouldering ash four inches apart might appear on the celestial dome.

  Which, a minute later, they did. Connie pinched herself. The approaching roar, horrendously loud, caught her by surprise. Standing a few feet from the man on the park bench, the vibrations in her bones turned her blood to ice. Two cigar tubes about six metres long with stubby wings flew overhead. She ducked. Waving his Union Jack, the old man has spoken to her but she heard nothing. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Tomahawks,’ he repeated matter-of-factly, waving his flag as if at a military exhibition. ‘Cruise missiles. Turbofan engines. 1,500-mile range. Nuclear capable.’

  Connie’s thought was run! Run, either from the firestorm of a tactical nuclear explosion or from police hunting for Frank’s accomplice! But either would be useless. Even if all of the checkpoint police were killed in the blast, she would die, too. And if for some reason she did not, Alderley station, like all public places in modern England, had closed-circuit surveillance. She could not have chosen a more visible dress if she tried.

  She forgave Ben. He only betrayed her. She had murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people. Frank must have needed the batteries to operate some sort of homing device for the missiles.

  Connie remembered the mobile networks going down on 7/7 and the calls made from hell on 9/11, but reached for her phone anyway. She would leave a message for one of her brothers. She crouched behind the stone hut on the platform that housed engineering equipment; she knew it would not shelter her from the blast, but did it anyway. Out of sight she heard the whine of the missiles’ engines going up as they approached their target, the change in sound destroying any possibility, however remote, that the instruments of death were en route to somewhere far away.

  It was 7.28 but the indicator has changed to predict the train’s arrival at 7.32. Connie knew this was a train that would never arrive, and fainted as her phone began to ring. The number that was calling was not one she had stored in the phone’s memory.

  ---

  Ben’s all-access lapel pin got him through the police checkpoint but at the price of a near-heart attack. He crested Pynbal’s Ridge as two cruise missiles, hugging the ground with their terrain-following radar, blasted out of nowhere singeing the Lexus with exhaust. He stopped in total confusion. Five minutes ago he thought he had worked out what Frank had done, but now …

  The missiles headed down the lake where Ben saw two people swimming. One of them waved, and suddenly the missiles arced up, parting company to make the arms of a ‘V’. Two maelstroms appeared in the water. Trails of orange-and-gold smoke shot upwards, creating the logo of Virtual Savings & Trust several thousand feet high.

  ‘Casey,’ Ben said, understanding it all. Casey could not get the Red Arrows so … sadly Junior had died before seeing the surprise. Ben jumped back in the Lexus and dialled Connie’s number. She answered on the fifth attempt, badly dazed. ‘Connie, where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Alderley station. There’s a train here. I don’t know if it’s mine.’

  ‘Stay there. I’ll be less than five minutes.’

  ‘Ben.’ Her tone was like a glass of tap water, neither cold nor warm, not happy or angry, yet potentially offering the conditions for life. ‘I think it’s my train.’

  ‘Stay there. I can’t explain. It’s terrible, and it’s amazing. He finally did it, Connie. Frank finally did it. You need to come and see.’

  ‘Is Frank dead?’

  ‘I think so.’ Pause. ‘No, Connie, I’m sure he’s dead. I can’t lie. But don’t go. He wanted you to see what he’s done, you know that. Afterwards, I’ll drive you home.’

  Over the phone Connie could tell a bend was being rounded in alarmingly stunt-man style.

  ‘Slow down, Ben! All right. But on one condition.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Take me to the ladies’ at the Kings Arms first.’

  ---

  For four hours they had been parked at the lookout on Crassock hill, where they had walked on Sunday night. Ben had driven there after securing Connie’s urgent relief at the Kings Arms and then sausage and chips twice, bought from the take-away next door with both of them in evening dress.

  At first like moths they had simply looked, and had been excited by the looking. The valley was bathed in the light of an impostor moon, and they were bathed with it. This moon was fixed several floors high on a titanium column while ants scurried beneath it and inside it. The scene transfixed them, all the more because the intensity of the light was palpably fading.

  The radial night-shadows cast by themselves, by the trees, by the college buildings and by the occasional car moving up Pynbal’s Ridge were becoming less defined than they had been two or three hours ago. As the light declined, its reflection in the lake mingled with the flashing blue necklace caused by the glow of innumerable police cars. They would stay until the light had gone, in memory of Frank.

  By 8.40pm some of the police cars had moved halfway up their side of the valley and towards Frank’s house. Ben recounted two or three times what he had seen, sifting fragments to try to expand what he had deduced. But it was Connie who recalled Frank’s words best, piecing together things which he had said to the two of them over dinner, things intended to be understood afterwards. Frank, the crusader for truth, had lit for a few hours an enchanted light in whose beam it was impossible to lie. He had almost succeeded in getting to the bottom of the Iraq War. Almost, but not quite.

  At about 9.30 Ben took Connie to stand at the lip of the lookout. ‘I don’t know how much more time we’ve got,’ he said simply. ‘I brought you here for a reason.’

  She was curious. ‘What reason?’

  ‘To be in the light, the two of us. And then I say, I want to marry you. Will you marry me?’

  ‘Why do you want to marry me?’

  ‘Because I love you.’ Ben seized Connie’s hand. ‘You see it, don’t you Connie? This is Frank’s present to us. When I say I love you, I can’t lie. In all of history it may never happen again that a man asks a woman to marry him when he cannot lie.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’
/>   ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I’m ten years older than you. Do you worry about that?’

  ‘Yes. But women live longer than men anyway. Though if we want to have kids we shouldn’t waste time.’

  ‘Having kids is one thing, being a dad is another. Do you want to be a dad?’

  Ben looked up at the moon and then at its impostor. He was as curious as Connie to see what he said. ‘I want it very much. I want to be a good dad.’ Then he added, as if it was part of the same thought, ‘I want a good job, but it doesn’t have to be a top job.’

  Connie was quiet for centuries. Then she said, ‘Am I beautiful?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Just to you?’

  ‘To many people.’ Ben smiled and pointed at the tower. ‘Frank is keeping me honest. I thought about saying “everyone”, but I couldn’t.’ A pause, again. ‘So will you marry me?’

  ‘You realise that I can’t lie either? Silly me, of course you do. The answer is no.’ She kept hold of his hand. ‘Or not yet. I feel something for you, something very strong. I have done ever since you were sprawled across the dean’s desk.’ Both of them laughed. ‘But it’s too soon to know if it’s love, and it’s definitely too soon for you to know what you want. You only started growing up earlier this evening.’

  Around them were silver birch trees. All of the words they had spoken hung pegged out on invisible clotheslines between the branches, and they walked round inspecting them, gleaming and wet in their honesty. Not even a preposition slipped away forgotten.

  ‘You might be right,’ Ben said finally. And then, ‘I suppose we will find out if I stick around.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘If this had been a fairy-tale, you would have said yes and I would have produced a ring.’ He put his hand in his pocket and turned it inside out, producing nothing. They collapsed laughing and sat on the grass holding each other tightly.