by Chris Ryan
The trouble is, thought Matt, she doesn't understand how little choice I have. Her world is so different from mine. In my trade, there are no resignations.
Matt smiled as he tried to remember a line from an old Eagles song, something about being able to check out at any time but never being able to leave.
If I had other options, I'd take them. Sure, I could tell Abbott to get stuffed. All my money would disappear, and never be returned. Soon afterwards, I'd lose the house and the bar. Next, they'd arrest me and Gill for murder, and the trial would be about as fair as cup tie between Arsenal and Scunthorpe United. If it ever came to a trial.
Matt took another hit of the beer. No. If I don't want to do it, I'll have to run. Get out of town, change my name, my face, start over again somewhere else. It could be done. I've heard of men doing it and getting away with it. But how much of a life is that? No friends, no family, none of the old familiar surroundings. Just a life of constant shadows and threats. You could do it, if you had to, but that was no life for a man.
Right now, I'm clean out of choices. I'll do the job, and I'll get it over and done with. There's nothing else I can do.
Inside his pocket, his phone was ringing. Gill. She never goes this long without calling, no matter how bad the argument.
'Yes?' he said, snapping open the Nokia.
'Matt?'
Because he'd been expecting Gill, it took a moment to recognise the voice. Soft, with just enough traces of her Northern roots left in it to stop her from sounding too posh. 'Eleanor?'
'I need to speak to you.'
'I'm listening.'
'No, not on the phone.' She hesitated. 'Can you come and see me? Maybe tomorrow?'
Matt turned away to face the wall: he could already see a waiter glancing in his direction, and he wanted this conversation to remain private. 'What is it? Is everything OK?'
There was a shallow, mirthless laugh on the phone. 'You mean apart from my brother turning into a homicidal maniac, then killing himself?' She paused, and Matt caught the sense that she'd had to screw up her courage to make this call. 'There's just something I wanted to ask you, OK?'
'OK, I'll see you tomorrow,' said Matt.
He put down the phone, and picked up his fork. He took a mouthful of his curry, but found it hard to swallow. Suddenly I'm not hungry any more.
FIVE
The tower of glass, steel and chrome rose high into the sky. It was on the A4 heading out to Heathrow. The dazzling noon sun caught the side of the building, sending down shafts of brightly coloured, refracted light. As Matt stepped out of the taxi, he pulled his shades down close over his eyes, wiped a bead of sweat away from his brow, and stepped quickly towards the entrance.
Stay out in this heat for more than a few seconds and you start frying like a slice of bacon.
A blast of fresh air conditioning hit him in the face as he walked through the revolving glass doors. Briefly, he could feel his head spinning as the temperature plunged. He paused, recaptured his focus, then looked across to the receptionist.
'I'm here to see Mr Lacrierre,' he said. 'I have an appointment for twelve.'
The girl looked back up at him. 'And you are?'
'Browning,' he replied. 'Matt Browning.' He was dressed in cream chinos, a blue linen shirt and tasselled loafers. She had probably thought at first that Matt was just a delivery guy. Not a man with an appointment to see the chairman.
'Would you like to take a seat?'
Same as any organisation. When they know you're talking to the top guy, suddenly they treat you with respect.
He sat down on one of the black leather sofas that stretched along the side of the foyer. Straight in front of him, a poster hit him in the eye. A group of smiling African, Chinese and European children were clustered in groups. Some text down below described how the company had been donating vaccines for children in developing countries as part of its social responsibility programme. TOCAH LIFE SCIENCES ran the slogan. BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER FOR A BETTER TOMORROW.
I reckon at this place a man has to eat his way through a plateful of corporate bullshit for breakfast every morning.
'Mr Browning?'
Matt looked up. She was a tall, striking woman, with auburn hair tumbling down the side of her face. Her cheekbones were high, and delicately sculpted, and her clear blue eyes shone out of her lightly-tanned face. How many men fall in love with you every day?
'I'm Natalie,' she said in a slight French accent, her lips pursing together elegantly as she spoke. 'One of the chairman's personal assistants.'
One of? There can't be many more like you.
Matt found it impossible not to follow the slow swaying of her hips as she led him into the lift. As the door closed, he caught the fragrance of her perfume drifting from her neck. On the tenth floor there was an additional layer of security. The lift stopped, and two guards steered you through a metal detector before catching another lift up to the top floors. One of the guards wanted to take the back off Mart's mobile phone, but he told him to hold on to it. He'd pick it up on the way out.
He stood to the back of the lift, admiring the curve of her arm as she pressed the button for the twelfth floor. 'Here,' said Natalie, as the doors slid open.
Lacrierre's suite of offices occupied the entire top floor of the building, looking out over London to the east, and Heathrow airport to the west. Matt could see the planes cruising low through the sky as they prepared to land, but the office had total soundproofing.
'The chairman will see you in about five minutes.'
The speaker this time was blonde, about six foot, wearing a red trouser suit, and with a harsh, metallic edge to her accent. Scandinavian, perhaps, reckoned Matt. Or one of the small Baltic states. Natalie seemed to have faded away, disappearing behind an oak writing table, where she was looking up at a black, flat-panel computer screen.
'Would you like to wait over here?' continued the blonde, pointing towards a tanned leather armchair. 'Can I get you a coffee?'
Matt nodded and sat down, casting his eyes over the collection of newspapers on the coffee table: the FT, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and the New York Times. Then he looked back towards the reception desk. Next to Natalie and the blonde, there was another girl, Chinese, tall and slim, wearing a white dress, and with a single gold and diamond necklace.
Christ. This guy's running a harem up here.
Matt had read through a collection of profiles of Lacrierre that morning. He was forty-seven and had set up Tocah twenty years earlier. It now had sales of twelve billion pounds a year, profits of two million, and the stock market valued the business at nearly thirty billion. Lacrierre still owned a third of the business. He was born in Lyons, an only child, and joined the French Army, then the elite First Paratroopers Marine Infantry Regiment, popularly known as the Marsouins: the unit specialised in beach assaults and was the most common recruiting ground for the French equivalent of the SAS.
But he served only six years, retiring when he was twenty-five to restart his career as a businessman. He made some money dabbling in property, then started Tocah in 1984, just as biotechnology was turning into a big business. He had been married and divorced twice, had two children by the first wife, and one by the second. According to the papers, he was supposed to be dating a French singer, Nadine Riboud.
If I was Nadine, I'd be watching these secretaries.
'He'll see you now.'
The blonde led the way. Matt followed her through the short glass passageway that led towards the main office. The floor was covered in thick, black stone, and the walls were made from a translucent glass that gathered up light from the entire building. A pair of modern pictures hung on the back wall – maybe a Chagall, Matt couldn't be quite sure – flanking a desk constructed out of a solid granite plinth and a thin sheet of burnished aluminium. On top of it, there was a pair of black Bloomberg terminals, showing real-time share and currency prices from the financial markets.
Lacrierre stood up,
walking briskly across to Matt. His handshake was firm: two decades after leaving the services, he still carried himself like a military man. He had thick, curly black hair, greying a touch around the edges, worn so that it was hanging just below the collar of his shirt. The accent was stranded somewhere between Washington and Paris, Matt noticed: mid-Atlantic, but a mix of French and American.
'I'm pleased to see you.'
A Rupert, or a Jean-Pierre, it makes no difference, thought Matt. They're all the same.
'You too,' said Matt.
Lacrierre gestured towards a pair of suede black sofas in the corner of the room. The centre of the office featured a clear square of glass, twelve feet by twelve, cut in the floor and replicated on each floor below. Looking down, you could see all twelve floors of the headquarters building spread out below you.
Good to be able to keep an eye on the ants.
'You are two years out of the regiment, yes?' said Lacrierre, pouring himself a glass of Vittel mineral water from the bottle on the coffee table between the two sofas.
Matt nodded.
'And you served tours in Bosnia, in Ulster and in South-East Asia. You must have seen many things. I should like to hear about them one day.'
Matt poured himself a glass of water. Moving from the heat of the day to the chill of an air-conditioned building had left his throat raw and dry. 'That's off-limits,' he said. 'Regiment rules. We don't talk about our work to outsiders.'
Lacrierre nodded, a smile spreading over his lips. 'I quite understand. Maybe when we get to know each other better.'
'Look, I'll be frank with you,' said Matt, leaning forward. 'I don't want to be here. The Firm are twisting my arm. You've got some kind of pull with them. I don't know what it is, but it must be bloody good, because I'm being hit hard. So here I am. I'll do the job, and I'll do it well. Then I'm out of here, OK.'
'I respect your honesty, Matt,' said Lacrierre. 'I'm a businessman, I have no time for flattery. As you come to know me, you'll learn the truth of that. But I suspect your view will soften as well. Maybe as you come to know me, I'll appear less of a monster.'
'Perhaps,' said Matt tersely. 'We'll see.'
Lacrierre leant forward. 'Come on, let's go and meet Orlena.'
'Who's that?'
Lacrierre stood up grinning. 'She's your new assistant,' he said, dropping a hint of mischief into his tone. 'And let me tell you, you're a luckier man than you probably appreciate.' He pressed a button on the top of the table. 'Send her in.'
As the door slid open, Orlena walked into the room with the kind of swagger Matt had rarely seen in a woman. At first he suspected she was just another of the painted airheads he'd seen staffing the reception desk, but a moment later he could see that was a mistake. She walked in not just as if she owned the place, he noticed, but as if she was about to order you from the premises as well.
'Shall I start?' she said glancing across to Lacrierre.
He looked across at Matt. 'Orlena started out in research. She did a doctorate in biochemistry at Kiev University, and joined Tocah five years ago as a research scientist. In the last year, she has switched to working on corporate security. The people we're up against are smart and sophisticated. It's no good just fighting them with muscle. We need brains as well. You two should make a good team.'
I might not want this job, but at least the view will be good.
At the press of the button, the monitors sprang to life. Matt settled back into his chair. Orlena had high cheekbones, and thick black hair that was cut in a sharp, straight line just below the bottom of her slim neck: she had the classical, sculpted beauty of an Eastern European. Her skin was as white as snow, unmarked by a single blemish. Her lips were thick and red, a jagged line of crimson lipstick smeared across them. And her bright blue eyes lit up the room.
Belarus, realised Matt, looking at the map that had just appeared on the screens. The country was like a small rectangle, suddenly squashed out of shape. Matt knew its reputation from his time back in the regiment: the most criminal, lawless, vicious, chaotic and dangerous of all the former Soviet republics.
The Wild East. A bunch of mafia psychos, retired KGB officers and stray nukes.
'Belarus,' said Orlena, tapping at the monitor with a burgundy-varnished fingernail. 'One of the many republics that broke away from Russia during the break-up of the Soviet Union.'
'We can skip the geography lesson,' said Matt.
Lacrierre glanced first at Matt, then at Orlena. 'He's a soldier, Orlena,' he said, his voice dropping to a low whisper that could not quite hide his irritation. 'From an elite regiment.'
Matt smiled. 'I know where Belarus is, and I also know that anyone who was thinking straight would keep well clear of it.'
Orlena turned back to the monitor, ignoring him and pressing a button on the desk. She was dressed in a thick black skirt that stopped just below her knee, and a crisp, starched white blouse that was buttoned up all the way to her neck. It was the most staid, businesslike outfit you could imagine. But somehow she managed to make it provocative.
A fresh series of images jumped on to the screen: a pile of brightly coloured pills, and a series of maps. 'In the last five years, Belarus has become the centre of the world trade in counterfeit medicines. When it was part of the Soviet Union, it was designated the hub of the pharmaceuticals industry under the old five-year plans. The result? There are lots of factories that can manufacture drugs to a reasonable standard. And there are lots of biochemists with time on their hands and no money.'
Matt admired the slender curve of her thigh as she swivelled to point at a different set of maps.
'A series of Tocah's most profitable heart-disease and cancer drugs have been targeted by the gangs. They know the formulas of our drugs, because we have to file them with the patent office. They can unlock the manufacturing process. They are using factories in Belarus to manufacture fake copies. Then they smuggle them into the West. They sell them to wholesalers, at a fraction of the real price, and they end up in the pharmacies. When you get your prescription filled, you don't know whether you are getting the real medicine or a fake. Tocah loses a sale, and the gangsters make huge profits.'
Lacrierre leant forward on the desk, looking directly at Matt. 'We estimate it's costing us a million a year, maybe a million and half, in lost profits.'
'So,' said Matt, 'what do you want me to do about it? 'I'm not a chemist.'
'But you are a soldier,' said Orlena.
'I believe Mr Luttrell has already told you we want you to take out the factory,' said Lacrierre. 'That's the only way of beating these people. It's no use talking to the politicians or the police in Belarus, they are all in the pay of the gangsters, as you know. The whole country is completely corrupt. So if we are to stop this, we need to stop it at source.'
'We need a small team of men,' says Orlena. 'I have contacts in Kiev who can put together some ex-Red Army men for back-up. But they need leadership, and military expertise. That's your job.'
Getting out of the bloody country alive, thought Matt. That's my job.
Up on the screen, Matt could see a large-scale photograph taken from the sky. It had been taken by a low-flying surveillance aircraft covering the territory at about 20,000 feet, he judged, working from the clarity of the picture. At this range, it showed a series of fields and some derelict buildings. Orlena gradually enlarged the photograph, sharpening its focus.
'This is the main factory,' said Orlena. 'It's about sixty kilometres north of Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The outside looks a mess, but the interior is in good working order. That's where the drugs are coming from. We need to get in, destroy it, then get out again.'