by Iain Banks
Possibly drunk on their success, certainly unable to decide what to do with it, the squabbling merchants let the reins of power slip from their fingers. Three generals — in Britain, on the Danube and in the Eastern Empire — revolted, and limited Emperor Julian's occupation of the Imperial throne to a little more than two months. When he fell, so did many of those who had supported him.
The Business had already existed for several centuries by then. To Rome it had brought furs from Scythia, amber from the Baltic, carpets from Babylon, and — in its most intense, risky and lucrative enterprise — every year secured a host of spices, aromatics, silks, gems, pearls and manifold other treasures from Arabia, India and the Further East. Sensibly keeping away from direct political power, all taking part had prospered; estates were purchased, villas built, fleets constructed, herds increased, slaves and works of art bought. With the Didius Julianus fiasco almost all of that was lost. As I say, it was a lesson we have cleaved to for the best part of two millennia (at least until now, arguably, with the 'Pashific shing').
Documents — clay tablets, mostly — still stored in the closest we have to a world headquarters, near Chateau d'Oex in Switzerland, show that most of our original fortune was made in trading, warehousing and lending money. There appear to have been a few scams, too: shipwrecks that never happened, camel trains that were robbed by our own people, warehouses that burned down either with or without their contents, depending whether you looked at one set of accounts or another; enough of that sort of thing generally to make us no better than most but sufficiently few for us not to have been the worst.
Allegedly we still store a few items which the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire asked us to look after; sadly, nothing quite as dramatic as the body of Christ or the Holy Grail, but I've heard on good authority that we have in our possession at least one extra book the scholars don't know about which could well have made it into the Bible, a book of Leonardo cartoons, dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings, various other art treasures and potentially valuable documents and several sets of crown jewels.
Rumours I've heard indicate that our Swiss Bank may be implicated, albeit marginally, in the recent Nazi gold scandal, which, aside from the morality of it all, is both careless and embarrassing, given the occasional co-operative venture we've taken on with the Rothschilds and the generally good relations we've enjoyed with Jewish enterprises over the centuries.
At any rate, one of the reasons that we are able to go quietly about our business as a company without too much intrusion or publicity — adverse or otherwise — is that we have at least a little dirt on almost everybody, whether they are other commercial concerns, sovereign states or major religions. There are other reasons, but we'll come to those later. All in good time (a resource which, given our longevity, we are obviously well used to working with in bulk).
CHAPTER TWO
'Well, thanks for the ride.'
Raymond grinned. 'It was a pleasure having you in the back, Ms Telman.' He squeezed my hand rather harder than a normal handshake would have called for, then tipped his cap and swung his lithe form back into the Lexus. I permitted myself the briefest of lingering glances and a sigh, then followed the two footmen carrying my luggage into the vast symphony in grey stone that was Blysecrag House, while the car crunched over the pale stones of the driveway and set off back through the deer-scattered parklands and forests for the main road.
'Kate! My girl! Good to see you!' Dressed in well-worn tweeds, waving a shepherd's crook with the thoughtless abandon of one brought up all his life under extravagantly high ceilings, attended by a brace of gangling wolfhounds leaving a double trail of whiskery grey hairs and saliva across the parquet, his own white hair seeming to float uncombed around his head as though in only casual contact with his scalp, Freddy Ferrindonald advanced down the length of the entrance hall, laughing, arms held wide.
He was lit from the side by the wintry sunlight pouring through a two-storey-high stained-glass window depicting a Victorian steel works; all gaudy reds, splashing oranges and sparking yellows with great roils of belching smoke issuing from huge machines, and small hunched human figures barely visible beneath the fumes and sparks.
A self-consciously eccentric dashing English toff of the old school, Uncle Freddy was genuinely an adopted uncle of mine, as he was a step-brother of Mrs Telman's, a familial relationship that he had never let stand in the way of sharing with me the odd toothily leering sexual innuendo, or giving my bum the occasional pat. Still, he was a laugh and — maybe because like me he didn't have much in the way of real family — we'd always got on surprisingly well.
'Welcome back!' Freddy hugged me as enthusiastically as his thin frame and eighty-plus years would allow, then held me at arm's length and looked me down and up. 'You're looking as lovely as ever.'
'As are you, Uncle Freddy.'
He seemed to find this hilarious, laughing loud enough to raise an echo from the tiered upper galleries of the hall and exposing a wealth of variously angled and diversely coloured teeth. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked with me towards the distant foothills of the main staircase.
Miss Heggies appeared. Miss Heggies was the housekeeper of Blysecrag. She was small but formidable, with grey bunned hair, a steely stare, lips the colour and fullness of a small elastic band, artificial eyebrows and a voice to etch titanium. She also gave the impression of having a combined Transporter Room and Tardis buried somewhere in the house at her command, as she seemed to possess the gift of materialising at will wherever and whenever she wanted. The only difference was that in Star Trek or Doctor Who there was a cheesy sound effect and a vaguely human-shaped shimmer — or the sudden appearance of a Metropolitan Police box — to give you a few seconds' warning; Miss H had perfected the art of arriving instantly and without a sound.
'Ah, Miss H,' Uncle Freddy called out. 'Where's the lovely Kate billeted?'
Miss Heggies nodded to the expectant-looking footmen with my cases. 'Ms Telman's in the Richmond room,' she told them.
'Miss Heggies,' I said, with a nod and what I hoped looked like a respectful smile. Miss H is the sort of person it pays to keep in with.
'Ms Telman. Welcome back.' Miss Heggies allowed her head to incline downwards by about a degree, while the corners of her mouth twitched. This was her equivalent of a floor-deep curtsy and a broad but bashful grin. I felt truly honoured. We started up the stairs.
I threw open the tall windows and stepped out on to the balcony, hugging myself as I drank in the cold air beneath a clear, cobalt sky. My breath smoked in front of me. Beyond the stone balustrade the view dropped sharply away in a series of sculpted terraces dotted with lawns, flower-beds, pools and waterfalls to the wooded floor of the valley where a few loops of river sparkled through the trees before decanting into the broad lake to my right, at the centre of which a single huge fountain towered. On all sides, the parkland spread away to the hills and crags beyond.
Looking along the cliff edge the house was perched upon, I could see a long structure like the top part of a crane laid along the lawn and jutting out over the drop. Steam drifted over it from behind, its rear obscured by a towered and crenellated wing of the house.
I rubbed my upper arms through my jacket and blouse, realising that I was smiling broadly at the view.
This was Blysecrag. It was begun in the early eighteen hundreds by the local duke, who was determined to create one of the great houses of England. He was responsible for the huge reservoir created in the hills five miles to the north of the house, which — via two valley-spanning aqueducts and a network of canals, cisterns and balancing reservoirs — supplied the water, and the pressure for the various water features in the house and grounds, of which the tall fountain in the lake was but the most immediately obvious.
The duke devoted all his time to the construction of the building but neglected to maintain the fortune that was supposed to pay for it. He duly went bankrupt. The estate was purchased by Hie
ronymus Cowle, an eccentric from a local mill-owning family who had made a second fortune in railways. He judged the already vast and rambling half-built structure to be a decent start, but insufficiently ambitious; many more architects, landscape gardeners, hydrologists, engineers, stone masons and artists would have to be thrown at the project.
By the time Hieronymus had finished, Blysecrag boasted three hundred rooms, eighteen towers, two miles of cellars, five lifts, thirty dumb-waiter shafts, a similar number of laundry-delivery elevators disguised as wardrobes, a water-powered funicular linking the house to its own railway branch line, a six-hundred seat underground theatre with a hydraulically driven revolving stage, numerous fountains and a mile-long reflecting lake. The place was equipped with a variety of systems for communicating with the staff, plus a pressurised petroleum-vapour lighting system powered by an early hydraulic turbine.
Hieronymus died before he could move in. His son, Bardolphe, spent most of the rest of the family fortune indulging passions for gambling and aviation; he converted one of the ballrooms into a casino and adapted the reflecting lake — which was handily aligned with the prevailing westerlies — into a landing lake for his seaplane and, near one end of the lake, up a short incline, had installed the world's first land-based steam-powered catapult on the cliff edge, to launch the aircraft. It was this structure I could see from the balcony of my room, wreathed in steam.. Uncle Freddy had just had it restored to working order.
Not content with being able to land his seaplane during the day, Bardolphe had devised a system of coal-gas pipes set just beneath the surface of the mile-long lake to release bubbles of methane which could be ignited during the hours of darkness to provide a flare-path for night landings. He died in the fall of 1913 trying to make his first such landing; apparently the wind blew out half the plumes of burning gas and ignited several piles of leaves at the side of the lake, causing him to fly towards the trees to one side and collide with the top of an ornamental pagoda. He was buried in a coffin that looked like a roulette table, housed within a seaplane-shaped mausoleum on the hillside looking over the lake and the house.
Blysecrag was used as a convalescent hospital during the Great War, then it and the estate fell into disrepair as the Cowle family struggled to cope with the ruinous costs of upkeep. It was an army training centre during the Second World War, then the Ministry of Defence sold it to us in 1949; we too used it as a training centre. Uncle Freddy bought it from the company in the late fifties and has lived here since the early sixties. The Business started the refurbishments but he completed them; the restoration of the steam catapult and the reflecting lake's underwater lighting system, recently converted to run on North Sea gas, was all his doing.
I returned inside and closed the windows. The servants had hung my suit carrier in one of the two huge wardrobes and left my other bags on the bed. I looked around but there was no TV in here: Uncle Freddy thought he was making a huge concession to modern technology by having a special room to watch television in. Blysecrag had speaking tubes, servant-signal wires, pneumatic delivery tubes, a domestic telegraph system and its own baroquely complicated field-telephone-based intercom network, but only a handful of TVs, and they were mostly in the servants' quarters. I'm a news junkie; normally the first thing I do in a hotel room is switch on the TV and find CNN or Bloomberg. Never mind. I shivered in my clothes, just briefly. Here I was in a huge house stuffed with antiques and swarming with servants, waiting for the vastly rich and powerful to arrive, and it was all entirely familiar to me. I had one of those moments when I reminded myself how fortunate I'd been, and how privileged I had become.
As usual the first thing I unpacked, even before my toiletries bag, was a little netsuke monkey with a dolorous expression and eyes made from tiny chips of red glass. I placed it on the bedside table. I set the monkey — usually along with my watch and a torch — by my bed wherever I am in the world, so that I always have something familiar to look at when I first wake up. The sad-faced little figure was one of the first presents I ever bought myself after I left school. Embedded in its base is a thirty-five-year-old pre-decimal coin; the same twelve-sided thruppenny bit that Mrs Telman handed to me from her gleaming black limousine that wet Saturday afternoon in 1968.
Uncle Freddy wanted to fish. I dressed in some old jeans, a sensible shirt and a thick woolly jumper I found in a drawer; the house provided a life-jacket-equipped waistcoat with too many pockets, and a pair of thigh-length waders. An ancient jeep driven with geriatric abandon by Uncle Freddy himself bounced us down a grassy track to a boathouse by the broad lake with the fountain; the pair of wolfhounds bounded after us, scattering spittle to either side as they ran. In the boathouse we picked up two old cane rods and the rest of the paraphernalia associated with fly fishing.
'Are we likely to catch anything at this time of year?' I asked as we tramped along the shore, loosely accompanied by the dogs.
'Good God, no!' Uncle Freddy said, and laughed.
We waded into shady shallows not far from where the river met the lake down an ornamental weir decorated with chubby stone cherubs.
'Well, the bastards are up to something,' Freddy said, casting far out into the gentle current. I had told him about my visit to Silex Systems and the odd behaviour of Messrs Rix and Henderson concerning the locked door. He glanced at me. ' As long as you're sure you're not imagining all this.'
'I'm sure,' I told him. 'They were both perfectly polite, but I could tell they really didn't want me there. I felt about as welcome as a mole on a bowling green.'
'Ha.'
'I took another look at the plant's figures afterwards,' I said, making a reasonable cast myself. 'They show some odd fluctuations. They're like an oil painting: the further away you stand, the more convincing they look, but get up close and you can see all the brushstrokes, all the little blobby bits stuck on.'
'What the hell can they be up to?' Uncle Freddy said, sounding exasperated. 'Could they have another production line going in there? Could they be building their own chips and selling them independently?'
'I thought about that. Finished chips are worth more than their weight in gold, more than industrial diamonds, but I don't see how they could have hidden the capital plant. The raw-materials purchases would barely show in petty cash, but the machines, the whole line…they can't have hidden that.'
'Silex. They're not wholly owned, are they?'
I shook my head. 'Equal forty-eight per cent with Ligence US. The other four per cent is owned by the employees. Rix and Henderson are our guys, but via Mr Hazleton.'
'Shit,' Uncle Freddy said. Mr Hazleton is a Level One executive; a single level above Uncle Freddy and the highest of the high, one of the all-but-untouchable principal players of our company and a full member of the Board. He would be showing up later on today with some of the other power players. Uncle Freddy — a frustrated Level One man if ever there was one — harboured certain resentments concerning Mr Hazleton. 'Do we have a legal route in there?' he asked.
'Only through Hazleton,' I told him. 'Or another Level One intervening.'
Uncle Freddy snorted derisively.
'Otherwise we'd have to wait until the elections next year,' I said. 'Though we'd have to start campaigning now. And I've no idea who might be plausible replacements.' (I'll have to explain about these elections later.)
'We should just get a chap in there,' Uncle Freddy said.
'I think so. Want me to talk to somebody?'
'Yes. Get a fellow from one of the European offices. Somebody who knows what they're doing. Scottish, I suppose, but not based there, or London.'
'I think there's someone in Brussels who might do. If you'll authorise it I'll see if I can persuade Security to put them on secondment.'
'Right you are. Yes. Think that's the least we should do.' Then Uncle Freddy's line, until that point lying in a lazily straightening S shape across the ruffled waters, jerked suddenly and disappeared under the surface. He looked surprised. 'Well
, I'll be—!' he exclaimed, and braked the suddenly spinning reel.
'Let's hope that's a good omen,' I said.
The Business has understandings with several states and regimes, and over the centuries we'd carved out our own little territories in various places. We have, for example, a small factory in the US military base on Cuba at Guantanamo, which produces the only authentic Cuban cigars it is more-or-less legal to sell in the US (though they're so exclusive and expensive, and their production legality so ticklish, they're never advertised. Rumour has it that it was one of those which President Clinton… well, never mind).
Usefully close to Guantanamo is the small Bahamanian island of Great Inagua, which is not truly independent but has its own semi-autonomous parliament; we have interests there, too. On the US mainland, we own a couple of casinos and a few other business ventures in the Rez (as it's usually called; formally it's the Wolf Bend Native American Reservation) in a desolate corner of Idaho where — again conveniently — the full remit of US law does not apply.
We are the only non-governmental organisation to have a permanent base on Antarctica, in Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land, between Dronning Maud Land and Coates Land. Purchased from Argentina during the Junta, this is the closest we've come so far to having our own statelet and has the handy attribute of being both excruciatingly remote and effectively beyond the reach of international law. The more lurid company rumours have characterised Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land as our Siberia; our very own gulag. However, no one I know has ever heard of anybody being sent there against their will, so I reckon it's just a story to help keep people well behaved.