Perhaps, just perhaps, they should not have named the bomb Beryl. He’d never cared for the name. Major Palewski groaned with annoyance.
‘Give it time, my dear Gaston,’ oozed the smartly dressed man at his side. Nothing ever seemed to rattle him. A fellow of infinite patience. In some ways so terribly French, in others so terribly not.
Around the Major, people checked watches, squinted through binoculars, lit cigarettes and tutted. It felt pretty much like a Parisian café, only they were all stood roasting on a plain in the Saharan desert.
‘Not really sure I need to be here,’ muttered the Major. ‘Rubberstamping exercise.’
‘Oh, I think you do.’ The man was enthusing again. His smile was indelible. ‘Nuclear power is almost the greatest force this world has ever known.’
‘Almost?’ Gaston raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, who knows?’ His companion frowned, but his smile did not go away. ‘It’s certainly the greatest achievement of humanity. Before you build all those power stations, I think you really do need to see a nuclear explosion for yourself.’
Well yes, Gaston had always liked fireworks. Even during the war, he had enjoyed watching barrage lighting up the night sky. But this was different. He felt a moment’s unease at the presence of the genial man at his side. There were rumours about him, about his family—who were they really? Had they been collabos during the war? But there were rumours about everyone’s family, and this was the new France, after all. Perhaps it needed people like this. Especially if the Palewski Plan was to succeed. The Major wanted France to be at the forefront of nuclear energy, and this man had convinced him to build even more power stations than the country currently needed. ‘We have to think of the future, Gaston,’ he’d assured him.
Well, why not, thought Gaston. Something to be remembered by.
He glared at the mountain again, and it exploded at last. Just not in the way it was expected to. Instead of shooting up into the air, a vast jet of flame shot horizontally across the plain, blazing towards them. The light seared their eyes. Even the Major flinched and screamed, backing futilely away from the fireball.
As quickly as it had appeared, the flame vanished, replaced by a choking black cloud that washed over them.
When eventually Gaston straightened up, he realised his companion had remained standing throughout, and was now dabbing black smuts off his white linen suit. He was smiling broadly.
‘An impressive demonstration, I’m sure you’ll agree,’ he laughed.
‘But . . .’ Gaston could not find his voice. He coughed, clearing ash from his lungs. ‘That was not supposed to happen! Was that safe?’
‘Oh, perfectly.’ His companion folded away his handkerchief into his top pocket. ‘Perfectly.’
Gaston would not be the only person there to die of leukaemia, killed by a bomb called Beryl.
* * *
Heidi found most of Daddy’s clients stiflingly boring. But not this one. Already her visitor had taught her that she had been wrong about something. No one had ever done that before.
Heidi had grown up thinking that money was dull and that people with a lot of it were even duller. Their clothes were dull, their conversation was dull, even their vices were dull. And her father put up with all of it. Because he ran one of the most exclusive banks in Switzerland and it was his job to somehow find these tedious people interesting.
It had been all right when she was young, but now she was coming of age, she’d realised to her horror that he was planning on marrying her off to one of them. Her mistake, she realised, was never rebelling when she had had the opportunity. There had been a point, somewhere, when she had still had a chance. Perhaps when her expensive finishing school, well, finished and before the emptiness of the rest of her life began. She could have hopped on a tiresomely punctual Swiss train and gone somewhere, anywhere other than Switzerland. She wouldn’t have starved. Daddy, whatever his faults, would have made sure of that.
But instead she had come home and waited by his side, working in the family business. Most Swiss banks are, in their own quiet way, family concerns. Clients liked that sense of continuity. Heidi and her father would go to the airport to meet people off planes that were never late, and arrive in a restaurant in perfect time for their reservation. The plates would be cold, the conversation empty, and each evening would stretch on until she wondered if she should stab herself with a butter knife or just marry one of them to get it all over with. When her father had first insisted he accompany her, she wondered if he was grooming her to take over the bank. Now she realised that she was simply an asset he was looking at realising. That was certainly how her father’s clients regarded her.
She had an office. As it was mainly for show, she had made the most of it, ripping out the wooden panelling and filling it with sharp steel furniture and fragile glass tables. There was even a desk toy, on which, pulling back one little steel ball would send another eleven flying off and ticking back. Little planets, knocking into each other. Back and forth until even they gave up and fell still, waiting for something else to happen.
Heidi could tell the client was impressed by her taste. He took in the room, rather than her. She liked that. When he looked at her it was almost as though he was assessing her as another gorgeously perfect piece of furniture, approving both the cut of her trouser suit, and the cut of her hair.
This client was definitely different. For one thing he was fun. And for another, he was a fraud. Her father hadn’t noticed, but then her father was a great one for appearances and hunches. Heidi wasn’t. She enjoyed thorough research. She had a whole folder lying in front of her on the glass table. This man had come to the bank with the details of a vault which hadn’t been opened for a very long time. It wasn’t unheard of for a vault to be passed down through a family without being visited for several generations, but it was certainly unusual. All the paperwork for this vault was perfectly in order. That was the problem, as far as she was concerned.
In such cases, the paperwork was never in order. There was always some small thing awry, some tiny detail that the bank would need to help smooth over. But not in this case. It was all in complete Swiss order—even down to the original documents just happening to provide information that matched the slightly revised requirements brought in after all that fuss caused by those nice Germans salting so much of other people’s money away. Unless this handsome man sat across from her, smiling that charming smile, was somehow on speaking terms with his long-dead relatives, that was impossible. Which clearly meant that he was a fraud.
A fraud who was sitting back, insolently at home in her chrome and leather chair, his legs crossed, an exquisitely cobbled shoe tapping the air gently, waiting for her verdict.
She had him. She could send him to prison for life. He was a fraud come to steal money from her father’s bank. Now that, thought Heidi, would be interesting. She couldn’t help smiling, couldn’t hold in a little laugh at the thought.
The fraud looked at her, and he smiled too, laughing along with her. No, more than that—he winked. He knew. He knew that she’d seen through him. And he didn’t care.
Heidi let him lean forward across the desk, face reflected in its surface as he lit her cigarette for her. With a toss of her long blonde hair, she leaned forward too, regarding this charming man thoughtfully. There was already an intimacy between them. A shared joke. One thing her father had taught her was that it was always fatal to get caught up in emotion. Her family prided itself on its tact, grace, and caution.
Heidi had long been planning on rebelling. Here was a man come to rob her father’s bank. And she was going to let him. Because it would be fun.
‘So,’ she said to him coolly, ‘how much money would you like to steal?’
The man didn’t even blink. ‘All of it,’ he said.
* * *
Now what? Harrison Mandel thought. Having found
himself suddenly, embarrassingly rich, he had no idea what to do next.
As was increasingly the case in the world, his problems had been caused by a computer. Harrison had invented one. Or rather, Harrison had come across some letters belonging to Ada Lovelace. A lot of people knew that Byron’s daughter had invented the first programming language. Many people discounted her actual language, preferring to patronisingly applaud her efforts. While her contemporaries had been trying to dance in corsets or write novels about dancing in corsets, Ada had invented computer programming, whilst wearing a corset. The problem with her audacious attempts at programming was that they just fell a little bit flat when fed into an actual computer.
That was, until Harrison Mandel had found her correspondence with an Italian polymath. Harrison realised that the letters described a rather different kind of computer to any that had ever been built. Perhaps, Harrison figured, the letters were an elaborate game between tutor and student, an attempt to invent two sides of a coin by post.
Whatever, Harrison had been so diverted by this discovery that he sat down and built the computer they described. It was surprisingly easy. The jottings by Lovelace and her Italian were simpler to follow than the instructions that came with his wardrobe. They might almost have been written deliberately with that intention.
He fed in Lovelace’s code, figuring that at most it probably wouldn’t even compile and that would be that. But it had worked, and worked brilliantly. The problem lay in what to do next.
The Americans had ordered ten thousand. The Russians had ordered twenty. There’s just the one, he’d protested, adamant that this was a discovery that belonged to the world. When he’d refused, things had suddenly started going a little awry in his life. As though he was wandering through a Laurel and Hardy film. Pianos really did fall out of windows near him. Cars mysteriously failed to stop at crossings.
Nervous, Harrison decided the best, and certainly the safest thing would be to sell it after all, but to a private bidder. Let them deal with the Russians and the Americans. The offer he received was so ludicrous, he’d said yes.
When his sudden, embarrassing riches were merely impending, his only problem was how to quantify them. He’d idly flicked through a newspaper, and noticed the headlines about the recent sale of a hitherto unknown Van Gogh, the kind of art treasure that only obscenely wealthy people sold to each other to convince themselves that they were cultured people. He looked at the painting reproduced splotchily in newsprint and thought, I’ll be worth exactly that.
It was a funny feeling. On the one hand his life’s worth equated exactly to one of the treasures of the world. On the other hand he was worth exactly as much as a sheet of pasteboard daubed with cheap colours by a lunatic between one hangover and the next.
He kept staring at the picture. He could not work out how he felt about it. Harrison had never really been moved by art. He’d paid money to go to museums and look at things. But all the time he’d been preoccupied by everything else. The perfume of the woman next to him, the way his left foot always ached more than his right, the distant smell of the café, the hilarious faces of people pretending to be transported by aesthetic rapture. The pictures themselves did nothing for Harrison other than fill up the walls. What were they for? Come to think of it, what was he for?
Now that he was suddenly and embarrassingly rich and wondering what to do with his life, Harrison Mandel found himself pondering art and pondering what he was missing out on. An idea struck him. Surely there was only one place in the world to find out about art?
* * *
Nikolai couldn’t possibly eat any more. No matter how hard both his host and the waiter pressed him, he waved away, with a good-hearted show of reluctance, both a final sorbet and another round of the cheeseboard.
His host topped up his wine personally, smiling with delight at his appreciation of the vintage. The sommelier rushed over to suggest a no doubt delightful dessert wine, but Nikolai, to much good-hearted laughter by all, waved the fellow away.
Everyone agreed he had acquitted himself excellently. Praise was heaped on his judicious choices from the menu, and a few regretful chuckles were had about roads not taken. Ah well, all agreed, there’d be plenty of time. Maxim’s wasn’t going anywhere.
His host took care of the frankly extraordinary bill and then went off to fetch their car. Slowly, Nikolai heaved his considerable bulk off the banquette, nodded to the waiters like old friends, and then waddled slowly over to the window to savour once more that magnificent view.
His host returned, and they shook on the deal, before Hermann, that exquisitely dressed chauffeur, handed him into the car. Of course it would be a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, of course it would be.
He settled his head back against the reassuring leather upholstery and marvelled again as Haussmann’s floodlit boulevards whipped by.
Yes, thought Professor Kerensky, I’m going to enjoy working in Paris.
* * *
If it hadn’t been for Swansea, none of it would have happened.
Some agents in the Department could push back their chairs after one drink too many, ruefully recalling their nemeses, and they would talk of Geneva, Monte Carlo, Tangier and Berlin. Names you could conjure with. Locales that spelt allure, style, romance and tragedy. In the world of the Department, it was all right to fail if you did so somewhere with subtitles.
But Duggan? His downfall was Swansea. Ironically, he had never even been to Swansea. But that’s where the Department’s expenses desk sat. Probably on its own in a car park. As much as Duggan ever imagined anything, he imagined it rained a lot in Swansea.
Duggan had had a hot lead, a trail that pointed to a shipping container in Ghent. He knew he had to get there quickly before the evidence vanished for ever. This was the kind of urgency that required a helicopter, a private jet, or even a hovercraft. But that desk in Swansea had its limits, and those limits were a cheap hotel and an early ferry.
If only, Duggan thought later, they could have allowed him another two pounds. He could have got a hotel that wasn’t so abysmally cheap. Then he could at least have had a proper night’s sleep. Every cheap hotel, along with a thin pillow and a chipped tooth glass, includes someone called Barry, who pops in at 3 a.m. to shout out his own name and slam some doors. If only Barry could have done that at 5 a.m., then Duggan wouldn’t have missed the early sailing. As it was, Duggan slept through his alarm and was left to prowl the harbour miserably for hours, becoming briefly convinced he was being tailed in Woolworths, before passing some time in a café where they served you your tea with a greasy thumbprint on the mug.
Duggan had always been a man of limited emotions, but later, on the evening ferry crossing, he found himself toying with some new ones. His constant companions Anger and Annoyance were shuffling over to make room for Apprehension. He kept checking his watch, brushing aside the sleeve of his crumpled raincoat and staring at the dial. Time was doing two things simultaneously—it was crawling by very slowly but it was also racing past. The ferry lurched through the waves to Ghent with all the hurry of a Sunday rail replacement bus service. Meanwhile, on the distant docks a shipping container could be emptied at any moment.
Inside the container was the smoking gun, the hot potato, the reward for the last eighteen months of gruelling work. Work that had taken him nowhere near Geneva, Monte Carlo, Tangier or Berlin. He’d fought his way into, and out of, an auction house in Aberdeen, and traded blows with toughs in a dull town in Norway. He’d made a lot of trouble, but Duggan knew that trouble was how you got noticed. If you were walking into a spider’s web, he’d told his chief, you’d best do it as an angry wasp.
His chief had nodded seriously at that and told him that his heart was in the right place but his foot was best off in his mouth.
Finally, Ghent loomed on the horizon like a hangover. The sun was setting over the harbour’s unpromising skyline. The air was turnin
g cold and some rain had popped over from Swansea. Duggan shivered, pulled up his raincoat and made his way to the docks. He hurried through the maze of iron boxes, guided by the tip-off he’d torn out of that terrified oculist. Was that really only yesterday? He glanced again at his watch, rubbing at an egg stain on his sleeve. It was fine. He would be just in time. It was always about time, this job.
There were a couple of guards on duty at the dock. Of course there were. He made swift work of them. Maybe they were in the gang’s pockets, maybe they weren’t, but, at the end of a miserable day, Duggan didn’t care. He didn’t have time to find out and hitting them made him feel better.
He didn’t linger over the padlock either. He carried tools with him that were as useful for ironmongery as they were for interviewing suspects. As he unlatched the door, Duggan’s mind tried out another new emotion. Trepidation. No, he didn’t like it.
If luck was on his side and hard work was to be rewarded, then inside this container would be everything he’d need. Its contents had been gradually moved here from all over Europe. People had died getting each object here. This shipping container was one of the most audacious clearing houses in history, and, if Duggan was right, even with that missed ferry, he’d got here just in time. With luck, he’d even have caught them red-handed.
The door swung open. The container was empty. Apart, that was, from an empty champagne bottle sat on the floor. Resting against it was a note, also, no doubt, completely lacking in fingerprints. The note read: ‘Sorry to have missed you.’
* * *
At the lazy end of time there was a box. People have variously described this box as small and blue or vast and white, depending on how they looked at it. An estate agent once described it as deceptively spacious before bursting into tears. A mechanic in the spacedock of Centrum IV once had a look at the engines and was still scratching his head and sucking air through his jaws several years later. A scientist had called it impossible. A philosopher had called it annoying. Genghis Khan had thrown an army at it with little success. His grandson had won it at backgammon. It had flown through black holes, it had crashed into bus stops, but right now, it was idling.
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