In the Company of Ghosts

by Stephen A Hunt

  ‘If I find ninjas hiding in one of the urns, you can all draw straws to see who’s going to take a bullet for Werks. Until then, you can do what all good guard dogs do…stay quiet and watch for burglars. If you’re needed to bark, I’ll whistle.’

  The agent appeared as though he was about to remonstrate with Doyle, but Agatha tapped his lapel with her office passport as they reached the entrance to what looked like the library. ‘My apologies, gentlemen. A cultural misunderstanding. We do things a little differently in our country.’

  Agatha just made it through the threshold as Doyle started to close the door on the two spooks’ faces. She glanced around. The library contained shelf upon shelf of leather tomes, bookcases fitted into the wall, brown walls mounted with large electric candles and a collection of porcelain in glass cabinets arrayed in front of a sweep of tall windows. Under the high white ceiling everything inside appeared smaller than it should do by rights, a rich noblewoman’s Wendy House. Gazing sadly on the view outside, herbaceous rose borders and his granite-edged pool with ornate waterspouts spraying in its centre was Curtis Werks, a magazine-sized tablet computer resting in his lap as he leaned back in an armchair. His skin appeared more tanned than his brother’s, a healthy ruddy shine to it. Or perhaps that just comes from being alive? I wonder what you’re thinking, Mister Werks? Not just anguish, but worry too. Real worry, If I’m any judge. Other than that he was a mirror of the dead twin Agatha had seen in the mortuary. The mirror man was wearing the smart-casual uniform of venture capitalists around the world – dirt-yellow chinos and a dark black roll-neck shirt. There was nobody else in the room. No secretaries or bodyguards – either his own or the state’s hastily assigned bullet-catchers. A set of piercing blue eyes swivelled around on the two newcomers as the library door shut. Agatha was struck by the sudden impression that such eyes should have belonged to a ghost, so clear she could almost stare through them and out of the window Werks stood framed against as he stood up. But this is the twin who lived.

  ‘You’re the specialist team from the British government?’ Werks asked in a soft-spoken Pennsylvania baritone. ‘Please, do sit down.’

  Doyle nodded brusquely. ‘Gary Doyle. Agatha Witchley. We’ll stay standing. You might want to sit.’

  ‘All the better to intimidate me, is it? Well then,’ said Werks, ‘Perhaps you can start by telling me what evidence you have that my brother was actually murdered rather than dying in an unfortunate accident?’

  ‘You don’t seem too upset over his death?’ observed Doyle, sidestepping his question.

  ‘I don’t need British civil servants to tell me the manner I should grieve,’ snapped Werks, running a hand through his dark mop of hair. ‘Of course I loved Simon. We were as close as any pair of twins in the world. But our work was important to us, it was everything we built together. I don’t know what will be worse… the news reaching the market that Simon died accidentally as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation, or the news hitting Wall Street that he was murdered in a professional execution. And now you people tell me I’m a target for assassination too. Do you have any idea how that is going to play out? Now, you can have the courtesy to tell me why the hell do you think Simon’s death is murder?’

  ‘I know this is a novel experience for you, but in this deal, I ask the questions,’ said Doyle. ‘You answer them.’

  Werks scowled. Agatha trusted it wasn’t because Groucho Marx was coalescing into solidity in front of the sweeping view of the parkland beyond the crystal panes. I can only trust our interviewee doesn’t have the gift. Thankfully, Werks appeared utterly oblivious to the ghost’s presence. ‘I have a copy of the footage from our London building showing the unfortunate way my brother died. And if it was murder, it must surely have been death by telekinesis.’

  ‘Yeah, you have a tape, I have a tape,’ said Doyle. ‘Mine’s way more interesting than yours. The government hasn’t filled your house with more spooks than the Haunted House at Disneyland just because your brother’s choice of fetish web sites put the Home Secretary’s nose out of joint.’

  ‘What, he thinks I’m working for the Home Secretary?’ laughed Groucho. ‘I used to keep a secretary at my house. I had to give her a raise when I found out there were three other companies after her… the gas company, water company, and electricity company.’

  ‘Will this mean trouble for your firm, Mister Werks?’ asked Agatha, interrupting the exchange and ignoring the spectre twirling his cigar.

  ‘We’ll be going down the tubes when the news gets out. There have been rumours floating around the street that ControlWerks is about to be stalked by a consortium of private equity buy-out funds, the big players with more money than God. Simon’s death is just the kind of thing that they’ve been waiting for. Our stock will collapse. They can move in and buy us up at a discount.’

  ‘Now, I thought you owned a controlling stake in your firm,’ said Doyle.

  ‘Together we had a controlling stake,’ said Werks. ‘Simon’s will doesn’t leave his stock to me. It leaves the stock to a variety of charities. I lost our controlling stake in ControlWerks the moment he died. We agreed on that when we set up the company. We never wanted the firm to get in the way of our relationship. Half for him, half for me, straight down the middle.’ There was a round wooden table next to Werks with an intercom sitting on it, and he leaned over to activate a call. ‘I’ll have my coffee now.’ He looked at his two visitors. ‘Given we’re in England, two teas?’

  Doyle nodded. ‘White, no sugar, ta.’

  ‘Just a cup and a jug of hot water, please,’ said Agatha. ‘Piping.’

  Werks passed on the order while Groucho Marx peered in at the billionaire’s touchpad, glanced up at Agatha and shrugged indicating mystification over the small computer. Agatha turned to the side to obscure her hand from the two men’s view and shooed her fingers at Groucho. Not now. Go away. Instead of disappearing, he leaned in closer and put a semi-transparent arm around Werks’ shoulder. ‘What would you do if a bull charged you?’ The ghost shifted his head to indicate he was going to answer his own question. ‘Why I’d pay whatever it charged,’ grinned Groucho, imitating Werks’ drawling Pennsylvania accent.

  ‘So what about your will?’ asked Doyle.

  ‘Unlike Simon, I have a wife and four children – and my will provides comfortably for them. Still, the vast bulk of my estate will eventually pass to charity. The Gates Foundation and a few of the other smarter causes who know how to deliver bang for buck. The organisations that actually address the causes of the world’s problems, rather than just paying their people fat salaries to hose money around on fires. Or worse yet, ignoring the problems keeping them in gravy, and insisting on spending all the money on raising more of it.’

  ‘Well, sorry for your loss and all that,’ said Doyle, ‘but from where this underpaid old plod is standing, getting paid a few billion by a gang of investors to retire early sounds like a nice problem to have.’

  Curtis Werks’ face distorted in disgust at the idea. ‘It was never about the money. Simon and myself were both paper billionaires before we turned twenty-five. If we had wanted to waste our lives drinking Truffle Martinis on a liner-sized yacht at the Cayman Reef Resort, we could have been doing that a decade ago.’

  ‘That’s not a waste in my book, chum, that’s a lifestyle aspiration.’

  ‘ControlWerks is about changing the world, it is about doing something, being the best in any goddamn market we choose, or creating new ones from scratch. The buy-out funds will fire most of our staff and milk our portfolio of patents like a milch cow. The day after any takeover, the only innovative thing coming out of ControlWerks will be the patent infringement claims. If that happens, I might as well put a noose on and jump off my desk.’

  Groucho jabbed a thumb in Werks’ direction. ‘I’d lend him my book about tips on suicide, but I suspect he won’t be bringing it back.’

  Agatha sighed in Groucho’s direction and rubbed her chin. ‘Your firm me
ans that much to you, Mister Werks?’

  ‘It meant that much to both of us,’ said Werks. ‘It’s our legacy to the world.’

  There was a knock at the door, and Rugby man admitted a South American-looking member of staff carrying a silver tray weighed down with a coffee, a plate of biscuits, a pot of tea, and a steel jug steaming with hot water. With the tray’s contents distributed, Agatha dipped into her handbag again and removed what looked like a normal plastic teaspoon and a square tea bag. The teaspoon didn’t change colour when she dipped it into the water. Pure water, then, unadulterated.

  ‘You have a favourite brand?’ Werks asked of Agatha. ‘My kitchen probably has it. You won’t believe how specific our clients and partners in India are when it comes to tea.’

  ‘Sadly, my queer little tastes are rather ossified,’ smiled Agatha.

  ‘India, eh. Are you doing any business in China or Russia?’ asked Doyle, sipping from his cup. ‘Business that might make their foreign services add you to the “not so helpful” list, the kind of party animal who gets served a radioactive Polonium-210 cocktail rather than a Truffle Martini?’

  ‘Our low orbit tourism arm, SpaceWerks, is run out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but there’s nothing about our operations in Russia to upset anybody. That really is a cash cow. And without us, it’s a business with no wealthy Western tourists turning up at the launch pad to pay for all that expensive rocket fuel. We have a wide range of manufacturing deals with China, and we launch a couple of communication satellites each year from their country. But our Chinese operations are run in conjunction with a local equity partner, Lucky Tiger House. Our friends at LTH ensure all the right party officials are fed and watered at sufficient intervals; that indigenous pork barrels are suitably oiled. If ControlWerks gets taken over and used primarily as a patent troll, China’s factories will lose the majority of our business. China and Russia’s secret service might conceivably send agents to protect us, but never to target us. Their local interests have too much to lose.’

  ‘And the billionaire boys had no warning that someone was gunning for them? Either before your brother died or after?’

  Werks shrugged. ‘We’re featured in the Fortune Five Hundred every year, of course we receive death threats. All too regularly. Usually they’re of the order of: “You and your brother slip into my brains at night and steal my software designs: give me every last dollar or I will destroy you.” The people who send then in can barely string a list of demands together without using crayon, let alone slip past my firm’s security detail. Nothing credible or specific in that line has been received, not to my knowledge. I’ll have my head of security e-mail you with copies of everything unpleasant sent to us for the last five years.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ said Doyle. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have any idea where Luke Wilder has happened to relocate? He was the senior guard on your London team.’

  ‘I might recognize him if I saw him, but the name means nothing to me, I’m afraid. My firm’s security staff is sourced through a private military security contractor called PegasusEnForce. They use only top ex-policemen, intelligence officers and military personnel. Guards are rotated through PegasusEnForce’s roster of clients every year or so, to minimise opportunities for internal corruption, being blackmailed, bribed and turned and the like. I’m barely getting to remember my own guards’ names before they’re switched out. I can have our client manager with PegasusEnForce talk to you, if it’s relevant.’

  ‘You never can tell.’

  Agatha lent forward on her umbrella, using its heft as a walking stick. ‘Who are the private equity firms being floated as frontrunners in your takeover, Mister Werks?’

  ‘Greenrock Capital is putting the consortium together. They’ll be able to separate the real names behind the deal from the market rumours, if you can get then to talk to you.’

  ‘Not a bleeding problem. You think Greenrock might want the billionaire boys dead?’ said Doyle.

  ‘The only assassins they usually have on staff are their lawyers,’ said Werks. ‘If the private equity industry has moved beyond that, then the world if going to become a very, very scary place.’

  Doyle lay his empty teacup down on the reading table. ‘My kind of town.’

  ‘Now you get to ask him how like his twin he was,’ Groucho suggested to Agatha, hovering behind the industrialist. ‘Though how their mother ever had twins is beyond me. She never went on a double date in her life.’

  ‘How similar were you to your brother?’ asked Agatha. ‘Is it possible he had a situation developing in his life that you didn’t know anything about?’

  ‘As far as ControlWerks is concerned, Simon was in charge of the business aspects of the company while I handled the technological prospects and research. But he was always involved with and understood about seventy percent of what I was working on, and vice versa. Operationally, I run the energy and media side of the firm while Simon handled space tourism and commercial orbital, but there was enough crossover between us that we could always cover for each other.’

  ‘And as a person?’

  ‘I think at the core we both liked ideas more than people.’

  ‘That’s a very Silicon Valley weakness,’ said Agatha.

  ‘Perhaps it is at that. What else? Simon was more private than I am. Less social. He rarely went to parties, not even the firm’s own functions. A lot harder-nosed when it came to matters of business. We both expected a lot from our staff. There’s never been any room for the mediocre at ControlWerks. It has to be said that Simon was working far longer hours than I have been recently. I’ve been spending quality time with my wife and boys. It was a source of a small amount of tension between us, but we never properly argued over it. I always told Simon he should get married too. Bring someone into his life he could actually leave his legacy to.’

  ‘Having a family does anchor you,’ said Agatha, attempting to keep her voice neutral.

  ‘Anyone your brother fired recently?’ said Doyle. ‘The kind of Mister or Mrs Pissed-off who would know where the London building’s alarms and sensors are located?’

  ‘We always put our largest effort into hiring the best people at the start,’ said Werks. ‘The second greatest effort goes into retaining them. After that we offer our employees the rare chance to make a difference and innovate. For which they are exceptionally well remunerated.’

  Gary Doyle pulled a face, sucking on a lemon as if the inspector had inadvertently tuned into Curtis Werks’ silky voice on a business channel.

  Werks continued, nonplussed, ‘It’s expensive for the firm to lose people, bad for morale too. I insist on having the lowest staff turnover of every industry we operate in. So no, we haven’t fired anyone. There hasn’t been a redundancy in ControlWerks since its formation. A few staff have left over the years to do their own thing, almost all financed by our own seed fund. My ex-PA set up the Courtesans’ Mist lingerie line with our backing. She’s a millionaire now, for God’s sake. I’m struggling to find the motive here.’

  ‘Not a range of underwear that flatters me anymore, sadly,’ said Agatha. ‘Although I have seen them sold in M&S. Your family. They need to be protected immediately. If this murder is a matter of commercial leverage, they will be in grave danger.’

  ‘Already done,’ said Werks. ‘My main residence is outside New Canaan in Connecticut. I’ve paid PegasusEnForce to divert a small private army that was due to arrive in South America to train countries in the most effective way to interdict drug crops. They’re now gainfully employed scaring our neighbours. If it transpires their employment is not so gainful, I am going to be sorely tempted to send your branch of government the full bill.’

  ‘Lucky we’re not in the phonebook,’ said Doyle.

  ‘You can never be too cautious, Mister Werks,’ noted Agatha. She raised her umbrella. ‘One must always anticipate inclement conditions.’

  ‘So, straight out with it then. Who do you think might want your brother ki
lled?’ asked Doyle.

  ‘Realistically, no one,’ said Werks. ‘How the hell do you even begin to get into the mind of someone who wants to kill a man for business, or whatever the hell reason it was? If it was a mugging in some developing nation where Simon was inspecting one of our new solar plants, if his wallet had been lifted or he was shot resisting a kidnap attempt, I could at least understand it. But in our office? In London? In Mayfair? That’s cold insane. I still can’t even believe it was anything other than an accident. If it weren’t for half a regiment of the British Special Forces sneaking in from the woods to borrow tea from my housekeeper, I’d think this whole thing was a goddamn hoax in poor taste. Who do I suspect? Nobody. So realistically, I have to suspect everyone we’ve ever dealt with.’

  Doyle grunted. There was something bear-like in a grunt like that. ‘Well, that’s it, then. Me and Miss Marple here will be off to interview a few private equity fund managers and charity heads and anyone else who stands to benefit from this mess. I’d say don’t leave town, but with your business that’d be a waste of time, wouldn’t it? So just make sure your Lear Jet’s juiced to fly back quickly if we need you.’

  ‘I have Simon’s funeral to arrange and ControlWerks to salvage,’ said Werks, bitterly. ‘I’ll be around your green and pleasant little land for a while. It’s vital for me that the news of Simon’s death isn’t leaked before ControlWerks has a poison pill defence in position and my bankers have thrown every financial defence they can in place. If the news of Simon’s demise slips out before that, everything we’ve built together will be swept away. Both our lives’ work.’

  ‘For me, not so important,’ said Doyle. ‘But I’m sure the Home Secretary gives at least half a hoot about another bump in the unemployment numbers, so if the news leaks, I do have one promise for you, it won’t be from my end.’

  They left Curtis Werks sitting there in his armchair, grim faced and pecking intently at the touchscreen on his lap. Groucho Marx had evaporated into the ether, although Agatha could swear she could still smell the ghost’s cigar smoke. It made her realise how much she needed one too. Dealing with that comedian is quite literally purgatory. The company of ghosts wasn’t her only distraction. Doyle seemed amused as they navigated the corridor, passing the two state security officers standing as still and wordless as the statues of Roman emperors in the alcoves while he rubbed his hands together.