by Robert Young
EIGHT
He will call her but it will not be today. Campbell knows that his head is too full of things that will distract him and muddle his thinking and he wants to be relaxed and sharp when he calls her, unflustered.
He considers that seeing her may provide a distraction of its own, that he may focus his energies elsewhere for a few hours but then he pictures their conversation slipping into a lull and then turning to work to ease the silence. He considers the idea that talking to someone with no real knowledge of him or his life might offer perspective and clarity and he imagines an easy, familiar conversation developing, warm and cosy.
Where's the fun in that?
His decision made, he can move on. There is a stack of reports on his desk and clogging his email inbox that need to be read and analysed but they are thick with charts and numbers and he cannot penetrate their content nor divine any meaning. Not in this frame of mind.
He takes tea breaks and a long lunch, tries to force the day to end but it just slides and trickles past at its own pace and when he hits the gym at six pm he does so with a vigour and aggression that is designed to either chase away the frustration that grates and drags at him, or burn it away.
But nothing will work today for Daniel Campbell and so when he returns home he eats a simple meal, turns music on loud, then turns it off again and stares at the wall, then at the back of his eyelids. There will be no running from this, he will not be allowed to shake it off. He must simply think it through and try to be honest with himself and try to make the right decision.
But what scares Campbell is the thought that he doesn't really know himself anymore. All these things he has done - all these things he does - they have changed him. Or have they simply been designed to give that impression, to everyone as well as himself?
It has been three years now since it happened. He refers to it as ’the incident’ and he has spoken to close friends about the gatecrasher and all that followed; the threats and violence, all the wounds he received, physical and mental, the scars they left. More recently he has found himself talking of it with other people, less close. This has its own risks given what he was caught up in, but there is something pushing him to take risks.
In the months after it happened he was so disoriented, so off the rails, in trying to readjust. He had been through every kind of emotion, faced dangers and risks inside a few weeks that most people would never encounter in their lifetime. Having been sucked under so deep, to return to the surface the way he had was like getting the bends.
It took six weeks before he was sat down and told to consider his future, two more before he was granted a sabbatical and another two before he was on a plane with a passport, a backpack and no plan.
He threw himself into it from the start. He tried as best he could to get off the tourist trails and avoid the crowds, but soon found that sometimes the best place to get lost is in a crowd. There were beach parties and bar crawls, there were friends made and lost inside a night and breathless, frantic one night stands with women whose names he never even learned.
He slept in comfortable hotel rooms, on the floors of coach stations, but never on the planes or trains or buses that always gave him a show out the windows of the new places he was travelling through. So often, he found, that it was the journey he enjoyed most, not the destination.
In Dhaka, Bangladesh he’d had to bribe a security guard at the hotel to let him out into the night to explore the local area after his passport had been held at the airport during a stopover. Sometimes you want to see the world but it doesn't want you to see it and when you do, you understand why. Walking alone in those streets he had understood why people attached the word ’stricken’ to the word ’poverty’.
He did three bungee jumps, white water rafting twice and managed to take crash courses in both skiing and scuba diving barely two weeks apart. The latter had been a bug he caught and not just because he was one of only two men in a group of ten learning to dive. The eight women were in a group, all friends and all under twenty five. He'd enjoyed that week immensely, but still managed to stay focused on the diving enough to get his Open Water qualification and fall in love with the whole new world down there.
He'd come back leaner and fitter and the nine months and twelve countries he'd visited (one by accident, having strayed across a border whilst trekking in a South East Asian jungle) had given him a taste for adrenaline and thrill-seeking that felt as though it had been missing, although it had never been there before.
He felt different in ways that he could not define or explain, felt out of place in his own home, his own skin. He found himself increasingly restless and impatient, unable to switch off. He was uncomfortable sitting still and found that he operated on less sleep, like sleeping was simply wasting the opportunity to do something else.
Not to mention the things that lurked there, in sleep, waiting to surface from the depths every so often and assail him.
For a long while he did not talk of it at all, what happened. He'd fought so hard to get out of the hole he found himself in, to find some peace, but although it was all over, somehow the peace eluded him. Even now, when he put the brave face on for people and talked about it in as blasé a manner as he could muster, when he ran or worked out or travelled, it felt like that place of pre-incident tranquillity he'd been looking to get back to was still out of reach. Or that it simply wasn't there anymore.
That thought helped as he reflected on his professional dilemma. He worried that to jump ship now was just another attempt to run from something, and that he wasn't getting closer to where he wanted to be in life, just further from where he didn't, which is not the same thing at all. But the idea that he was chasing the wrong thing, that he was stalking thirsty through the desert after a mirage, buoyed him up. Maybe this wasn't more running away, simply a change of direction. Perhaps what was needed was a new approach to things, a different destination. A different destination would mean a different journey too, and that was the part he enjoyed most of the time.
NINE
Caspar Hogg likes this room. It is comfortable and well ventilated, which means that when the hours slide into days and he loses all track of time, as so frequently he does, then it doesn't start to stink so quickly as in his last place.
The last place had a sagging sofa with flat exhausted cushions, it had a small bed in the next room and a broken air-con unit that worked on minimum or maximum and nowhere in between.
This place though, this place is what Hogg knows is referred to by people who talk about such things as 'well-appointed'. Quality soft furnishings and efficient, functioning ventilation and climate control that is computer-operated. He likes that. He appreciates the simple, defined parameters of such things. He likes boundaries and rules and objectivity.
The old place had neighbours and a landlord. It had an unreliable electrical supply and terrible broadband. The new place is all hooked up with fibre-optic ultra-fast Wi-Fi. It is networked and never ever blows a fuse when he's running too many machines. There is no such thing here as too many machines, just too few of him and his furious typing and mouse-clicks.
They send him a cleaner twice a week who says nothing to him ever, but wears a tight fitting uniform and a bra which is two-sizes too small so that her breasts seem to divide into four. Which doesn't stop him leering for a moment, of course, but he knows better than to do any more than that.
They'd not take kindly to such ingratitude but that's not why he subdues any urges he feels when he sees her hips swaying through the doorway, or the reflection in one of the screens when she bends down to pick something up off the floor, and there is always something to pick up off the floor.
He does nothing because she would be repulsed and he needs no reminding of that fact. It doesn't make him angry or resentful, doesn't fill him with a vengeful rage. It makes him sad.
This job though, with all these wonderful perks and trimmings, this makes him happy. So he contents himself with a lingerin
g gaze at her round backside and her squashed-in bosom and he banks the image in his head for later.
There is a mini-fridge in the room for his cold Cokes and cold beers. The plates and the food and the microwave stay in the kitchen and when he can find a break from a coding session or a gaming binge he gets himself in there and he cooks some real food, with fresh ingredients.
It isn't that he's lazy or slovenly so much as it is that he devotes no effort to those things he doesn't enjoy and he has a preternatural capacity for focusing on those things that grip and fascinate him. Coding does that. Beating the challenges that they set him, or coming up with the solutions that nobody else thinks exist.
He thinks a lot, has the privacy to do so uninterrupted and without the pollution of other people's rancid ideas. When they request features and functions for their network, he delivers them fast but then spends hours on breaking them so he knows where to make them stronger.
The remit is quite bespoke and with the amount of money and secrecy that surrounds it, the things he's signed, the clear and obvious consequences he faces for breaching their terms or their trust, he concludes that he is working for a major international financial institution, an intelligence organisation, or something quite different from both of those. He supposes that the latter is a more sinister and frightening proposition to consider, but then, the other two are hardly known for their friendly and tolerant approach to the little man, so if it is some criminal enterprise, it makes little difference to him.
He won't mess with them though, whoever they are, because he likes the gig, they treat him well enough and he fears that he may be a dead man if he does.
TEN
The business card is thick and brilliant white on the front, black on the reverse. The name is spelled out in glossy black ink, which appears simply to sit on that plush white surface. Stars are arranged in that same black ink around the name of the company, in the constellation it represents, and then as Campbell drops it to the table he spots something else. Made out in a gloss white that stands out from the lightly textured card only when the light reflects off the smooth lines, are lines that connect the stars and complete a stylised drawing of a scorpion.
Giles Lawson. Scorpio Capital.
He reads it again, reads the Mayfair address and the minimalist email address, [email protected]. He flips it over and notes that same stylish design of black gloss ink making out a scorpion against the matt black background.
He knows a hundred different company names, all the hedge funds and investment houses and research consultancies that have centuries old names, or brand new variations that seem to be the conjunction of more than one word, or some strange sort of cod-Latin inventions. They invoke concepts and images, just as they are designed to, in the mind of the target market. They suggest at dynamism and energy, at wisdom and experience and often are little more than the result of some 'brain-storming' session in a plush office or even plusher wine bar.
The use of names of stars or planets is hardly a new idea but nevertheless, there is something about this that makes Daniel Campbell feel a pinch of excitement, something about the card and its stylish, almost hidden design that makes him think that Giles Lawson and Scorpio Capital are actually pretty cool.
Lawson's phone rings out and goes to voicemail and since it is late in the day on a Friday, Campbell figures he has most of the weekend to fret over the message he left and how it might be greeted. He does not expect a call back, not out of hours. Not until Monday when he's at his desk avoiding eye contact with his boss, feeling guilty about the call he's waiting for despite the fact he's doing precisely what he's been told to do.
Then at 8, as he unpacks some groceries in the kitchen and pops the cap off a chilled beer, the mobile chirrups in his pocket.
'Daniel Campbell.'
'No less. The Krug drinking maniac!'
It is hard to be certain he recognises the voice since he only knows it from a near-shouted conversation in a nightclub, the worse for wear both of them.
'Ha! Not tonight.'
'Moet is it?' laughs Lawson and Campbell's finding himself suddenly nervous and excited and intimidated all at once.
'Lager actually,' is all he can manage.
'Good man. Got the message. Take it you want to talk a bit more. What we said the other night? About that?'
'Yeah, been thinking about doing something different for a while. And you said to call.'
'Indeed I did. Did I offer you a job last time? Can't remember a lot. I know I had a bar tab as big as my hangover next day!'
'Yeah, big night,' Campbell replies and is aware that if chit chat and small talk are important to winning this man over, he's coming up short.
'Always. So what's the gig then chap? Sit rep?'
Sit rep? Campbell paused for a moment wondering if he'd misheard. No, this guy just talked like that. Situation report. Was he ex-military or something? A lot of guys he'd met in the industry were, although Lawson had struck him as fairly young for that.
'Like I say. Looking to make a change. Boss knows I want to and he's cool about it. Just trying to figure out what to change to.'
'OK, sweet. Look I know what you do and I like how you do it. Heard a little bit about you from a few mates in the City. Heard you like telling company CFO's to cut the bullshit.'
'Well that's not strictly-'
'Not the way I hear it. Great work pal. We need someone to do that at our place. Got a mate in a big bank says they're looking for decent compliance guys but unless I've lost all of my instincts, that's not exactly where I see you.'
'Compliance? No, not my thing really.'
'Good lad. So howsabout us then? Howsabout Scorpio?'
'I… uh… I don't know loads about you if I'm honest. Just the basics.'
'We make rich men bankrupt all day long and then we go out and screw their wives at night.'
He says nothing at this, has nothing to say.
'Too much? OK, I am of course just mucking about and talking it up Dan. What we do is simple. Two things; we make a filthy amount of money, and then we go and spend it.'
He laughs nervously. 'I may be a little inexperienced.'
Lawson gives a good throaty laugh. 'Nice. No experience necessary. Learn on the job what you don't already know. Make up the rest.'
'Put it like that, maybe I'm a little over-qualified.'
'What you up to now? At work?'
'Erm no,' he says and though it is after eight, he feels suddenly guilty that he isn't at his desk.
'Oh right, you said you were having a beer. In town?'
'Home actually, just got in.'
'Quiet one? On a Friday? Forget that. Come meet us. Come down to-' the phone goes muffled as Lawson consults his companions as to their whereabouts, '- you know Pandora? Off Berkeley Square?'
He hesitates again.
'Er, I… I was…'
'Dan, you have a job interview at 9. Pandora, Mayfair. Dress right and be on time.'
Minutes later, he stands in the shower under scalding hot water and sinks the cold beer with closed eyes. Technically that went better than he was expecting. Technically.