The Business

CHAPTER SIX

It snowed later on during the night and when I opened the curtains the next morning it was still snowing, turning the countryside softer, brighter and silently beautiful. I watched it snow for a while, then showered and dressed. The cabin's phone rang while I was drying my hair.

'Telman?'

'Jeb. Good morning.'

'You want breakfast?'

'Yes, please.'

'Okay, dishing up in twenty minutes.'

'This is at your place, yes?'

'Yup, the villa.'

'Right. How will I get there?'

'Should be a truck in the garage.'

'Ah.'

There was: a big Chevy Blazer. I climbed in, it fired first time and rolled out into the snow. The garage door swung down automatically behind me. There was sat. nav., CB radio and a phone but I vaguely remembered the way and only took a couple of wrong turnings.

We were still in a Mexican groove, food-wise. I sat in the big, bustling kitchen of the villa with everybody else and tucked into my huevos rancheros while Dwight, sitting next to me, boasted loudly about all the famous people he'd met in Hollywood, enthused about his Broadway play and just generally acted like somebody shooting for most-favoured nephew status.

'You ski, Telman?' Dessous shouted, from the head of the table.

'A little,' I said.

'Heading for the slopes in about an hour if the weather clears like it's meant to. Like you to come.'

'Happy to,' I said, feeling myself slipping into the way of Dessous' clipped syntax.

'Mind if I tag along?' Dwight asked, with a grin.

'Wouldn't want to cut into your Muse time there, nephew.'

'That's all right, I could use a break.'

'Actually, son, I was being polite. There's only room for one more in the choppers, and Telman's just taken that seat.'

'Oh.' Dwight looked crestfallen.

'Still up for it, Telman?'

'Yup.

The weather cleared from the west. Two dozen of us flew from the Big Bend airstrip in a British Aerospace 146 into a vast blue space divided perfectly into blue sky and white earth. We landed at Sheridan, just east of the Big Horn mountains. Two Bell 412s were waiting on the tarmac; we loaded our skis into pods attached to the legs and were lifted to pristine snowfields lying beneath the high peaks. The Bells dropped us in the middle of their own little snow blizzard, their skis suspended just a foot above the surface while we jumped out and unloaded ours. Then they lifted away again and clattered down the valley.

Dessous got me to help him with a recalcitrant binding while everybody else swept off down the heft of icing-sugar white in a blur of multi-coloured shapes.

When we were alone, I said, 'There's nothing wrong with this binding, is there?'

'Nope,' Dessous said. He looked around. Our companions had disappeared into the broad valley beneath. The only moving things we could see were the fast-receding black dots of the helicopters, already too far away to hear. 'You want to sit down?'. We sat down in the snow, our skis planted, curved tips like plastic talons scratching at the blue. Dessous pulled out a leather cigar case. 'Smoke?'

I shook my head. 'Only after a drink. But don't let me stop you.'

'Well, I got a hip flask, too, but that's normally only for medical emergencies.'

'I quite agree.'

He prepared and lit a long cigar with some care, then said, 'How you think you're doing, Telman?'

'I don't know. What's the context?'

'Well, impressing me, I guess.'

'Then I've really no idea. Why don't you tell me?'

'Because I want to know how you think you're doing, dammit.'

'All right. I think you think I'm an opinionated socialist feminist, who's half American, half European, combines what you would regard as the worst aspects of both mentalities, has lucked out with some off-the-wall predictions and doesn't really respect the traditions of the Business the way I ought.'

Dessous laughed, and coughed. 'Too hard on yourself, Telman.'

'Good. I was hoping so.' This made him chuckle a little too. 'So, what is all this about, Jeb?'

'Not me who's going to tell you. Sorry.'

'Then who?'

'Maybe nobody, Telman. Maybe Tommy Cholongai. Know him?'

Another Level One: a Chinese-Malay shipping-line owner. I said, 'We've met.'

'Tommy and I have an agreement. Given there ain't much we ever agree on, this is something of an event in itself. Involves you, Telman. If we both agree, then…'

'What?'

He blew out a cloud of blue-grey smoke. 'Then we might ask you to do something.'

'Which would be…?'

'Can't tell you yet.'

'Why not?'

'Can't tell you that, either.'

I sat and looked at him. He was staring up at the tall summit of the highest mountain. Cloud Peak, he'd said it was called, on the way up. Thirteen thousand feet; tallest of the Big Horn range. Custer's last stand had taken place a hundred klicks due north, in Montana. 'You know,' I said, 'all the secrecy surrounding this thing you can't tell me about might put me off whatever it is in the first place, if I ever do get to find out what the hell it is.'

'Yup. Know that. All the same.' He looked at me and grinned. I hadn't really inspected his teeth before: they were uneven, yellow-white, and so probably his own. ' Actually, Telman, I'd tell you now and get it over with but Tommy wouldn't appreciate that, and an agreement is an agreement.'

'So now I have to go see Mr Cholongai, would that be right?'

''Fraid so.'

I crossed my arms and looked around for a while. I was waiting for the cold to seep through my glossy red ski-suit and make my backside numb. 'Jeb,' I said, 'I'm junior to both you guys, but I am on sabbatical and, anyway, I thought I'd worked my way up in the company sufficiently not to get…passed around like this.'

'Better passed around than passed over.' Dessous chuckled.

' "Better looked over than overlooked," ' I quoted. 'Mae West, I believe,' I added, when he cocked an eye at me.

'Fine-looking woman.'

'Just so.'

We skied down to meet the others, were taken back up to more virgin powder and repeated the process, if not the conversation. Soon it was time for lunch, which we took in a Vietnamese restaurant in Sheridan. Dessous regaled us with his plans to develop the drive-in movie theatre/shooting gallery, which meant having a whole sequence of stacked screens ready to be dropped into place, or even a sort of roller system, like a giant scroll; once you'd shot the blue blazes out of one bit, you'd just haul it up or drop it down until you had a fresh area.

The conversation became even more ridiculous when Dessous talked about another project. He'd been taken with the sort of wheeze megalomaniac dictators were so fond of, involving a stadium full of compliant, well-drilled subjects and lots of big, coloured boards. The idea was to use the big, coloured boards to display what looked like a picture of something when seen from far enough away (the other side of the stadium, usually). I'd seen TV pictures of this sort of thing. As far as I could see the standard image was a portrait of whatever power-mad shit-for-brains was in control at the time.

Dessous thought this would be a fun thing to do, but he wanted to take it a step further and have moving images displayed.

The head technical guys who'd come skiing started to get excited, discussing how this could be done. The consensus seemed to be that you'd need a Third World country to get the requisite numbers of people, and that maybe it would be best just to hire an army division or so. Big cubes of expanded polystyrene with six different colours or hues on them just big enough to twirl round without interfering with a neighbour's would give you some degree of flexibility, though it'd be hard to get any control of saturation unless you could light them from inside, which would make them kinda heavy. The control system would be a bitch: you'd have to treat every goddamn person as a single pixel and they'd never be able to memorise more than a few changes. Some sort of individual signalling apparatus would be required. Serious programming of some sort.

I suggested they might call it a Lumpen Crowd Display, or possibly Large Ego Display; LCD or LED. This they thought a hoot, and only encouraged them. What would be their refreshment rate? Could you use all raster-farians? Hey, what if they all wanted a screen dump?

While the technical guys got on with this, Dessous was chairing another discussion group, which was trying to work out what images you could show on this widest of wide screens. Great sporting moments seemed to feature strongly.

I slipped away, stayed longer in the toilets than I really needed to, then stepped into the street outside where no one from the party could see me and checked my phone's signal strength.

'Hi, Kate. How are you?'

'Oh, sorry, Stephen, I…I didn't mean to call you,' I lied. 'Wrong button.'

'That's okay. You all right?'

'Yeah, yeah. You?'

'Fine.'

'Okay, then, sorry.'

'No problem. Where are you, anyway?'

'Place called Sheridan. Wyoming, I think.'

'You skiing with Dessous?'

'Yup. How'd you know?'

'Ah, just masculine intuition. I've been there myself.'

'Where are you now?'

'Ah, still in DC…And it looks like I've got where I'm supposed to be.' I heard the noise of traffic behind his voice as he said, 'Yeah, okay,' to somebody else, then, 'I've got to go,' to me. 'You take care now, okay?'

'Okay.'

'Don't break anything.'

'Yeah, you too,' I said.

Only my heart, I thought.

The following day I took the same Huey back to Omaha (those big olive-green headphones again — for someone who tried to avoid helicopters I seemed to be spending a lot of time on the damn things), then a United 757 to LAX (stodgy muffin, steward with neat butt, brief snooze) and a Braniff 737 to San Francisco (mercifully quiet but overflowingly obese woman in seat alongside — smelled strongly of French fries). A hired car took me home to Woodside.

The place was warmer than Nebraska but the house felt cold.

I watered my long-suffering cactuses and made a few calls. I met with some old friends in Quadrus, a Menlo Park restaurant popular with some of the PARC guys. I ate too much, drank too much and smoked too much, and babbled happily about nothing of consequence at all.

I invited Pete Wells back to my place. He's a research analyst and an old pal/lover, still a good-time guy and up for the occasional friendly fuck, though he is engaged to some lucky lass in Marin and so not for much longer. We made hazy, stoned, well-tempered love to Glen Gould playing J. S. Bach, listening to the man humming and singing along.

I slept well, apart from a weird dream about Mike Daniels searching my garden for his missing teeth.

The next morning, with Pete already gone and me both a little bleary and not particularly well rested, I repacked my bags — with DKNY, mostly — and took the Buick back to meet its buddies at San Francisco International's Alamo, then it was a JAL 747-400 to Tokyo via Hawaii (twenty minutes late leaving due to two tardy suits; I joined in the Mean Group Stare when they finally stumbled into First trying not to look sheepish and studiously avoiding everybody's eyes. Sushi very good. Played both Garbage albums, separated by Madonna's Ray of Light. Slept well). Cathay Pacific Airbus 400 from Tokyo to Karachi (shown how to play with game console in seat by Japanese kid; very good sleep later — worry that I may be turning into woman in a song I heard once who only slept on planes. Bumpy landing).

I had a feeling that whatever passport I chose for Karachi it would be the wrong one, but I decided on the British one and was pleasantly surprised: whisked through. The place was packed, the air was thick with a medley of smells, the humidity was stifling and the lighting in the arrivals hall was terrible. Over the crowds I spotted a board being held up with a rough approximation of my name on it. I hadn't been able to find a trolley so I held my suit carrier out in front of me and used it to work open a path in the right direction.

'Mrs Telman!' said the young Pakistani man holding the sign up. 'I am Mo Meridalawah. Very pleased to meet you!'

'It's Ms Telman, but thank you. How do you do.'

'Very well, thank you. Let me…' He took my bags off me. 'Follow me, please! This way. Out of the way there, coarse fellow!'

No, really, he did.

Hiltonised overnight, and restless, I got up, kicked the previous day's newspapers out of the way, booted the ThinkPad and spent some time on a few techy-oriented news groups before going back to more disturbed sleep. Mo Meridalawah reappeared mid-morning and drove me back to the airport through some of the most chaotic traffic I had ever seen. It had been just as bad the evening before but I had assumed then it was rush-hour.

There was no such excuse now, and it was even more terrifying in daylight; unbelievable numbers of bicycles, trucks belching black diesel fumes, garish buses, motorised trikes and cars driven seemingly at random in any direction as long as it was either directly across our path or on a collision course. Mo Meridalawah waved his hands about and chattered ceaselessly about his family, cricket and the incompetence of his fellow road users. Karachi airport was almost a relief.

Yet another helicopter: one of those ancient, tall Sikorskys with the engine in the bulbous nose and the flight deck up a ladder. The cabin was actually quite comfortably kitted out, but it all looked worryingly old-fashioned and well worn. Mo Meridalawah waved goodbye from the tarmac with a white handkerchief as though he for one never expected to see me again. We chopped out over the city, across dense green mangrove swamps, along the coast and then across the lines of surf and out over the Arabian Sea.

The Lorenzo Uffizi had been a cruise ship for nearly thirty years; before that it had been one of the last transatlantic liners. Now it was out of date, its powerful but old engines were hopelessly inefficient and the vessel as a whole was just too old to refit again economically. It was only worth scrapping, and it was to complete that process that it had come here from the yard in Genoa where its more valuable and salvageable fittings had been removed.

Sonmiani Bay is where a lot of the world's ships end up. The broad beach slopes smoothly into the sea, so that the vessels can be aimed at the sands, put to full speed ahead and then just run aground. On the vast beach there's plenty of room for whole fleets of obsolete ships, and in the countryside around there are hordes of impoverished people willing to work for a pittance, cutting the ships up with torches, attaching chains and hawsers to sections of hull and then — if they're quick enough — getting out the way in time when the giant winches further up the shore haul the pieces of ship off. More cutting, more dragging by winches, then the bits are craned on to rail flatcars and hauled to a quay side thirty miles away, where the scrap is loaded aboard ships bound for anyone of a dozen steel mills throughout the world.

I had heard of Sonmiani Bay, I had read about it in a magazine twenty years earlier and just a couple of years ago I'd seen some TV footage, but I'd never been there. Now I was going to get to see it first hand, and I'd be arriving by ship. Tommy Cholongai was a Level One exec who could fairly be described as a shipping magnate. The first time I'd used this phrase in front of Luce she'd asked, did that make him anything like a fridge magnate. Normally I'd have said something, but as I recall I'd just asked her if she was still looking for Mr Cannon, and so my lips were tied. Today, I'd been told, Mr Cholongai was going to fulfil a lifelong ambition by being at the controls when the Lorenzo Uffizi hit the beach at full speed.

The Lorenzo Uffizi was still an impressive sight. It was about fifty klicks offshore, lying still in the water a few hundred metres from the comparatively toy-like shape of Mr Cholongai's own motor yacht. We circled the liner, level with its two tall funnels. The ship was creamy white, streaked here and there with rust; the funnels were blue and red and the stern funnel was the source of a thin streamer of grey smoke. Windows glittered with reflected sunlight. Empty lifeboat derricks stood like lamp-posts along the boat deck — there was just one lifeboat left on each side, up near the bridge — and its two drained swimming-pools gaped pale blue beneath the dazzling cloudless sky, Ballardesque.

The Sikorsky landed on the broad curve of a stern tier still marked out for deck games. One of Cholongai's assistants, a small Thai called Pran whom I vaguely knew from a company conference a few years earlier, slid the helicopter's door open for me and mouthed a welcome over the scream of the engine.

'I have wanted to do this for years,' Tommy Cholongai said. 'Captain, with your permission?'

'Certainly, Mr Cholongai.'

Cholongai took hold of the brass handle and, with a big grin on his face, moved the bridge telegraph indicator all the way down to the Full Ahead position. The telegraph made the appropriate ringing, chiming noises. He brought it back to All Stop to the sound of more bells, and then set it back to Full Ahead again and left it there. The rest of us — including the Lorenzo Uffizi's captain and first officer and the local pilot as well as Cholongai's personal staff — looked on. A couple of Cholongai's PAs started clapping enthusiastically, but he smiled modestly and waved them to be silent.

Beneath our feet, the ship began to shudder as the engines spun up to speed. Mr Cholongai stepped to the ship's wheel, followed by the rest of us. The wheel was a good metre across, each handle tipped with brass. When the ship had some way on her, moving steadily across the gentle swell and still slowly gathering speed, Cholongai asked the pilot for the heading and then spun the wheel, watching the compass display in its overhead binnacle. The ship's course curved gradually, her bows turning to face the sands of Sonmiani Bay, still out of sight over the horizon. At nearly thirty knots, our arrival ought to coincide with high tide.

Satisfied that we were pointing in the right direction, with approving nods from our captain and pilot, Mr Cholongai relinquished control of the wheel to a small, smiling Chinese seaman, who didn't look remotely big enough to handle it. 'You take good care now,' Mr Cholongai said to the seaman, patting him on the back and grinning broadly. The little Chinese guy nodded enthusiastically. 'I'll be back in an hour, yes?' More nodding and smiling.

He turned, scanning the faces gathered round him until he saw me. 'Ms Telman?' he said, and indicated the way off the bridge.

We sat on the sun deck just beneath the windows of the bridge, shielded from the ship's self-made wind by tall, sloped panes of glass, all streaked by dried salt and spattered here and there by birdshit. Above us a parasol provided shade, its edges rippling in the breeze. The two of us sat on cheap plastic seats around a white plastic table. A white-coated Malay steward delivered iced coffee.

The air felt thick and hot and the faint breeze curling over the glass barrier didn't seem cooling at all. I'd dressed in a light shot-silk suit, the coolest outfit I had with me, but I could feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder-blades.

'My friend Jeb tells me you are concerned, Ms Telman,' Cholongai said. He sipped his iced coffee. He was a dense-looking man, of average height and bulky but smooth-skinned with spiky grey hair. He'd put on sunglasses when we'd come outside. With so much sunlight and white paintwork around it was very bright even within the parasol's shade, and I was glad I'd remembered my own Ray-Bans.

'I seem to be,' I looked round at the paintwork's glare, 'getting kept in the dark, Mr Cholongai.' I smiled. I tried the iced coffee. Very cold, very strong. I shivered, the sensation of cold and the white blaze of light suddenly taking me back to the snowfields of Wyoming.

He nodded. 'This is true. One cannot tell everybody everything.'

Well, that was suitably gnomic. 'Of course,' I said.

Cholongai was quiet for a moment. He sipped at his coffee. I resisted the urge to fill the silence. 'Your family,' he said eventually. 'Do you still see them very often?'

I blinked behind the shades. 'I suppose I have two families,' I said.

'Truly you are blessed,' Cholongai said, without any obvious irony.

'I'm afraid I don't see either often. I was an only child, my mother was a single parent, she was also an only child, and she died some time ago. I met my father just once. Mrs Telman was like a mother to me…more like an aunt, perhaps. I only met her husband once, on the day of the court hearing when she — they — adopted me.' I was not, of course, telling Cholongai anything he couldn't find out from my personnel file; I didn't doubt that some underling had already briefed him on all this.

'That is very sad.'

'Yes, but I've been very lucky.'

'In your career, do you mean?'

'Well, that as well. But I meant that I was loved.'

'I see. By your mother, you mean?'

'Yes.'

'A mother should love her child.'

'Of course. But I was still lucky. She made me feel loved, and made me feel special, and she protected me. There were many men in her life and some of them were violent sometimes, but none of them ever touched me and she did her best to hide from me what they did to her. So, though we were poor, and things could certainly have been easier, I had a better start in life than some.'

'Then you met Mrs Telman.'

I nodded. 'Then Mrs Telman came along, and that was the single luckiest thing that ever happened to me.'

'I knew Mrs Telman. She was a good woman. It was sad she could have no children of her own.'

'Do you have a family yourself, Mr Cholongai?'

'One wife, five children, two grandchildren, third grandchild on way,' Mr Cholongai said, with a big smile.

'Then you are blessed.'

'Indeed.' He sipped his iced coffee. There was an expression on what I could see of his face that might have meant the coffee was giving him a toothache. 'Might I touch on a personal matter, Ms Telman?'

'I suppose so.

He nodded for a while, then said, 'You have never thought of having children of your own?'

'Of course I've thought of it, Mr Cholongai.'

'And you decided not to.'

'So far. I'm thirty-eight, so I'm not in my prime for child-bearing, but I'm fit and healthy, and I reckon I could still change my mind.' In fact I knew I was fertile; I'd gone to a clinic when I was thirty-five, just out of curiosity, and been again a few months ago, and gotten a clean bill of reproductive health both times. Nothing wrong with my eggs or any part of the system, which made not having children my choice rather than an imposition.

Cholongai nodded. 'Ah-hah. This is awkward, I know, but, may I ask, was it simply that the right man did not come along?'

I tasted my iced coffee, glad to remain inscrutable behind my glasses. 'That depends what you mean.'

'You will have to explain. Please.'

'It depends on how you define the right man. The right man did come along, as far as I was concerned from a purely selfish point of view. But he turned out to be married. So, not the right man after all.'

'I see. I am sorry.'

I shrugged. 'One of those things, Mr Cholongai. I don't cry myself to sleep every night.'

He nodded. 'You are not, perhaps, a very selfish person: you give a lot of money to deserving causes, I think.'

This is the sort of thing you have to live with in the Business; that old financial transparency means there's no feeling quietly superior to somebody about things like this. If they have the slightest interest in your private affairs they'll already know exactly what causes you feel most strongly about, or what system of checks and balances you've put in place to square your conscience with your functional life.

'Actually,' I said, 'I'm very selfish. I only give to charities so that I can sleep easily at night. In my case the proportion of my disposable income I find I need to jettison is about ten percent. A tithe.' More coffee. 'It's the closest I come to religious observance.'

Cholongai smiled. 'It is good to give to charity. As you say, all benefit.'

'Some think otherwise.' I was thinking of a few — mostly US-based — execs I'd met who had nothing but contempt for anybody who gave any money to any cause, with the possible exception of the National Rifle Association.

'Perhaps they have their own…indulgences.'

'Perhaps. Mr Cholongai?'

'Please, call me Tommy.'

'All right, Tommy.'

'If I may call you Kathryn.'

'I'd be honoured. But I'd like to know, Tommy, what all this has to do with anything.'

He shifted in his seat. He took his sunglasses off briefly, rubbing one knuckle into the corner of one eye. 'Can we talk in confidence, Kathryn?'

'I assumed we already were. But, yes. Of course.'

'It has to do with Thulahn.'

'Thulahn?' That threw me.

'Yes. We would like to ask you to change tracks.'

What? Maybe he'd meant change tack, but it worked either way. 'How do you mean?'

'In your career.'

I felt a coldness sweep over me, as though I'd drenched myself in iced coffee. I thought, What have I done? What can they do to me? I collected myself and said, 'I thought my career was going just fine.'

'It is. That is why it is difficult for us to ask this of you.'

My initial panic had subsided, but I was still not at all sure I liked the sound of this. My heart was racing. It suddenly struck me that a light silk blouse and unlined jacket were bad things to wear when your heart was thudding: people could probably see the fabric quivering. Maybe women and fat men suffered more this way; some sort of resonant frequency set-up magnifying the effect in your breasts. Breeze, I thought. There's a breeze. Should cover any signs. Calm down, girl. I cleared my throat. 'What exactly are you asking me to do, Tommy?'

'To become, in a sense, our ambassador to Thulahn.'

'Ambassador?'

'It is more than that.' (More than that? How could it be more than that?) 'At first we would ask you to go there to report. To look at the place and try to work out where it might be heading, to spot trends, in other words — social trends, if you like — in the same sort of way that you seem to be able to spot trends in technology at the moment. Do you see the connection?'

'I think so. But why ?'

'Because we are entering a unique situation in Thulahn. By adopting it as our base we will be exposing ourselves in a way we have not done before. We will be making ourselves vulnerable in a manner we have not been since the fifteenth century.'

This was a Switzerland reference, of course: the late fourteen hundreds was when the place became effectively independent and the Business — always attracted to havens of stability, no matter how relative — had started to put down roots there. Cholongai's chronology ignored a dodgy moment in 1798 when the armies of revolutionary France invaded, but never mind.

'Don't we have people to do that sort of thing?' I asked. Surely either we did or we could employ the best. This was the sort of thing you could just throw money, university professors and battalions of post-grads at. Sociologists loved places like Thulahn.

'Not at the appropriate level, Kathryn. We need someone whom we can trust. That, of course, means someone in the Business whom we know to be profoundly committed to it. There are probably hundreds of people at the right level using that criterion alone. But we also need someone who can see things from a perspective outside the company, someone who will feel sympathetic towards the people of Thulahn. Someone who will be able to empathise with them, and advise us how best to incorporate their needs and wishes with those of the company itself.' Cholongai sat forward, clasping his hands on the surface of the white plastic table. Beneath our feet the deck buzzed and around us the plates and glass of the superstructure vibrated as the ship powered onwards, heading for the shore.

'Thulahn is not Fenua Ua,' Cholongai said. 'There are nearly a million Thulahnese. We cannot evacuate them all, or provide all of them with apartments in Miami. They seem a docile people, and devoted to their royal family, but if we are to make the sort of commitment to their country that we are anticipating making, then we need to be able to predict how they will feel in the future, and move to accommodate those feelings.'

'Such as, what if they decide they would like democracy?'

'That sort of thing.'

'So I'd be spying on them?'

'No, no.' Cholongai laughed lightly. 'No more than you already spy on those companies we consider investing in. What you would do would benefit the people of Thulahn as much as ourselves, perhaps more.'

'And only I can do this?' I tried to sound sceptical. It wasn't difficult.

'We think you would be the best person to do so.'

'What would it involve?'

'It would mean that you would have to relocate to Thulahn. It might be possible also to continue performing your present function for a while, but I would think that before too long it would become impossible to carry out both tasks satisfactorily.'

'You mean I'd have to live in Thulahn?'

Cholongai nodded. 'Indeed.'

Thulahn. Memories of my few days there came tumbling back. Thulahn (or at least Thuhn, the capital, because I hadn't really been anywhere else): mountains. Lots of mountains. And rain. Mountains that — when you could see them through the clouds — made you crane your neck to see their snowy summits, even when you were already a mile or two high. Almost nothing level. That fucking football pitch that doubled as a landing strip. Lots of smoke — the smell of burning dung — tiny bright-eyed children plumped out by thick clothes, small men bent under huge bundles of firewood, old women squatting fanning stoves, shyly hiding their faces, goats and sheep and yaks, a surprisingly modest royal palace, the few dirt roads and the single stretch of tarmac they were so proud of, bizarre tales about the dowager Queen I'd never met, huge monasteries barnacled across cliff faces, waking up in the middle of the night feeling breathless, the creak of prayer windmills, the bitter taste of warm milk beer. Not to mention my fan, the Prince.

I took a deep breath. 'I don't know about that.'

'It would seem to be the only way .'

'What if I say no?'

'Then we would hope that you would continue to do your present job, Kathryn. We would have to find somebody else — perhaps a group of people rather than an individual — to take on Thulahn in the way I have outlined.'

'I like my life, Tommy.' Now I was trying to sound regretful. 'I enjoy feeling part of the buzz in the Valley . I like staying in London and travelling in Europe. I like travelling. I like the view over cities at night, and room service and long wine lists and twenty-four-hour supermarkets. You're asking me to settle down in a place where they're still struggling to come to terms with the flush toilet.'

'That is understood. If you took up this offer you would have complete freedom to work out the proportion of time you would spend in Thulahn and the proportion you spent elsewhere. We would trust you to resign if you found that the amount of time you felt able to spend in Thulahn was inadequate to fulfil the role you had taken up.' He paused. 'You would be made very comfortable. We could re-create your house in California, if that was what you wanted. You would have a company plane at your disposal. And a choice of staff, of course.'

'Those sound like the sort of privileges a Level Two could expect.'

'Level Two status would be assured.'

Good grief. 'Assured?'

'The importance of our association with Thulahn will surely be obvious to our colleagues at every level, once the deal has been struck and we are able to let everyone know. I cannot imagine that they would fail to promote you to a level your position in the country and importance to the company would befit.'

This was indeed as good as saying it was mine. 'But the deal with the Prince isn't done yet?'

'Not quite. Technically there are still a few details to be ironed out.'

'Would me agreeing to all that you're proposing happen to be one of those details ?'

Cholongai sat back, looking surprised. 'No.' He looked up the not-quite-vertical slope of white superstructure towards the bridge of the ship. 'We are not sure if the Prince is simply holding out for better terms or whether he is genuinely beginning to have second thoughts. It is vexing. It may be that he is being struck by the enormity of what he is doing. He is ending several hundred years of tradition and taking something away from his own family, after all.'

'Just as well he's childless, then.' I was still a bit taken aback by all this. 'What exactly would be the set-up if we do take the place over? How do we make sure it's ours?'

Cholongai waved one hand. 'The details are complicated, but it would involve a sort of governing trust of all the Level Ones. The Prince would remain head of state.'

'And after him?'

'If he has no children, there is a ten-year-old nephew who is next in line. He is in one of our schools in Switzerland.' Cholongai smiled. 'He is making good progress.'

'Bully for him.' I tapped my fingers on the plastic table. I was thinking. 'Whose idea was this, Tommy?'

'What do you mean, Kathryn?'

'Whose idea was it to involve me in this way?'

He sat still for a moment. 'I do not know. That is, I cannot remember. The suggestion was probably made at a Board meeting, but when exactly, and by whom, I do not recall. Detailed minutes are not kept. That also is in confidence, by the way. Why does this matter?'

'Just curious. May I ask who knows about this?'

Cholongai nodded, as though he'd anticipated this question. 'Level One executives. I do not think anybody else does. J. E. Dessous and I have been delegated to take responsibility for the analysis and…decision.' He looked to one side as the steward approached with a large silver tray and what at first I thought was a lap-top sitting on it. It was a satellite phone. 'Excuse me,' Mr Cholongai said to me, and lifted the handpiece. 'Hello?' he said, then shifted into either rapid Chinese or Malay; I couldn't tell which.

He put the phone down and waved the waiter away. 'There is someone coming to see you,' he told me.

'There is? Here?'

'Yes. They have something for you. A present.'

I looked at him for a moment, glad that the Ray-Bans were hiding at least some of my confusion. 'I see.'

The noise of a helicopter thud-thudded unseen, somewhere behind us.

'Anyone I know ?' I asked.

Mr Cholongai's head tipped to one side. 'Perhaps. His name is Adrian Poudenhaut.'

Pran and I watched Poudenhaut's helicopter land where mine had set down. His was a sleek Bell with retractable undercarriage (I felt jealous). Poudenhaut stepped out, dressed in a light blue suit. He held a slim Halliburton. Pran moved to take the aluminium briefcase off him, but Poudenhaut clutched it to his chest.

We walked away and the Bell lifted off, stowing its wheels and dipping its nose towards the land, which was just visible as a dark line on the horizon.

'Ms Telman,' Poudenhaut said.

'Hello again.'

'Thank you, that'll be all,' he said to Pran, who smiled and nodded and walked away across the deck. Poudenhaut reached into one pocket and extracted a sizeable mobile phone, then into another and took out an L-shaped attachment for it. Together they made an even dinkier satellite phone than Mr Cholongai's.

He pressed a couple of buttons then held the phone to his ear, looking at me all the time. I inspected my own sunglassed image in his shades.

The phone made a noise. 'I'm on the ship, sir,' he said. He handed me the phone. It was quite heavy.

'Hello?' I said.

It was, as I'd expected, Hazleton's voice on the other end. 'Ms Telman? Kathryn?'

'Yes. Mr Hazleton, is that you ?'

'It is. I have something for you. Adrian will show you. The disc is yours afterwards.'

'Is it? Right.' I had no idea what the hell we were talking about.

'That's all. Nice to talk to you. Goodbye.' The line bleeped and went dead.

I shrugged and handed the instrument back to Poudenhaut. There was a bead of sweat in the hollow of his upper lip. 'I hope you know what's going on here,' I said, 'because I certainly don't.'

Poudenhaut nodded. He looked around, then pointed at a line of tall windows forward of where we stood. 'In here will do.'

The place must have been a lounge, perhaps a restaurant. The floor was bare metal plate with just a few strips of worn carpet and underlay strewn about. The suspended ceiling had been taken down and the light fittings removed. We sat in the gloom at the back by a small table attached to a metal column supporting the roof, surrounded by a forest of grey cables hanging from where the lights had been, all swaying slowly in the gentle swell.

Poudenhaut took off his shades and looked about. All around us were the grey fronds of the hanging wires. Forward of us there was a bulkhead with various hatches and doors set in it. In the other three directions, daylight glared through the windows like a vast, strident strip-light.

He flipped open the cover of the combination lock and clicked the three little wheels. He sprang the catches, opened the briefcase and lifted a little portable DVD player out.

'Oh, my,' I said. 'That's very neat, isn't it?'

'Hmm,' he said. I craned my head: there was nothing else in the briefcase. Poudenhaut frowned at me and clunked the case shut. He spun the little player so that it was facing me, hinged the screen up and — reaching over the top — stabbed at a button. The machine made discreet whirring noises and the screen lit up, though it stayed blank.

'I've been asked to show you what you're about to see,' Poudenhaut said. 'I need your word you won't say anything to anyone about this.'

'Okay, I guess.'

He looked like he wasn't sure whether this was really sufficient, but then said, 'Right.' He leant over and hit another button. The screen flickered.

Only I could see this: Poudenhaut was facing the rear of the screen. There was no sound. The picture was better than VHS, nearly broadcast quality. It showed a woman entering a building on a busy street. The woman was Caucasian, youngish and dark-haired. She wore sunglasses, a summer dress and a light jacket. Traffic was driving on the right-hand side of the street, and I guessed this was in the US somewhere from the automobiles. I got the impression the camera had been inside a vehicle. Small figures to the bottom right of the display indicated it was 10/4/98, 13:05; that would be April the way Brits show the date, but October if this was American; exactly a month ago.

The scene switched to a bedroom lit by sunlight on closed net curtains; the drapes moved slightly, as though the window was open behind them. It looked like the camera was sitting on top of a wardrobe or a cupboard, angled downwards. The image quality had deteriorated a little. No date/time display. The same woman — probably — led a tall man in a business suit to the bed and started kissing him. He was white, tanned, had black hair and a neatly trimmed beard. They slipped each other's jackets off, then they fell together to the bed. They started undressing each other, quickly. I looked up at Poudenhaut, raising my eyebrows. He stared back, impassive.

They both had good bodies. She sucked his dick (a little stubby for my taste, and with a distinct rightwards curve, but there you are), then they sixty-nined, then they fucked missionary position for a couple of minutes, without protection. Looked like they both enjoyed it. I cleared my throat. My, but it was hot in here. The screen flickered, and the couple were screwing again, him taking her from behind. They were both approximately facing the camera, but I got the impression neither of them knew it was there. I studied their faces. I had a vague feeling I knew the guy, but I wasn't sure. He took longer this time. It looked like real sex and not pornography because they just humped away with no cut-away shots of her face or his backside, and when he came he did so inside her, not over her face or her tits or anything crass like that.

Another few shots of them lying on the bed together, on top at first, then under a sheet, both talking and smiling and playing with each other's hair. Another flicker, then him leaving the apartment, hailing a cab. A yellow cab, so almost certainly the US. Possibly NYC. Flicker, then her leaving and walking away. The date/time display indicated they'd been together for just under two hours. Then, the end. Blank screen.

I sat back. Poudenhaut sat looking at me.

'Yes?' I said.

'It's finished?'

'Would you eject the disc and take it out?'

I sat forward and inspected the machine, finding the eject button. The disc appeared and I slipped it out.

'Please keep it.'

I popped it into a side pocket in my jacket.

'Do you know what you've just shown me?' I asked. Poudenhaut shook his head briskly as he turned the DVD player off, closed it and put it back in the briefcase. 'No,' he said.

'I just have this feeling it might not be what I was supposed to be looking at.' This was becoming more than slightly ridiculous: Poudenhaut with his fancy helicopter and his Hollywood-villain briefcase and minuscule sat. phone and spanking new DVD machine coming all the way out here just to show me a few minutes of amateur porn.

At least he had the decency to look confused. 'What—?' he began, then frowned. 'You…I believe you were supposed… expected to recognise a person.'

I thought back to the guy in the bedroom. Did I recognise him? I didn't think so. I shook my head.

'You sure?' Poudenhaut sounded worried now.

'I may forget a face, I never forget a…Never mind.'

Poudenhaut held up one hand. 'Would you wait a minute?' He moved about ten metres away through the pale grey fronds of the hanging wires. He stood with his back to me and tried to use the sat. phone. It didn't work. He shook it — which was, somehow, an encouraging thing to see — then tried again, once more fruitlessly.

'You'll probably find you have to go outside,' I called over to him. He looked at me. 'Satellite,' I said, pointing upwards. He nodded once and headed for the line of windows.

He stood in the sunlight, talked briefly and then started waving at me, motioning me to join him.

I left his briefcase where it was and strolled out. He handed me the phone. He was really quite sweaty about the face now.

'Kathryn?'

'Mr Hazleton?'

He laughed. 'Ah, the best-laid schemes, eh?'

'Gang aft agley,' I agreed.

'Hmm. One should not make too many assumptions. You aren't just teasing poor Adrian, are you ? You really didn't recognise anyone in that little film?'

'Did I see what I was supposed to see?'

'A man and a woman having sex in a hotel? Yes.'

I smiled at poor Adrian, who was dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. 'I see. Well, no, I really didn't recognise either of them.'

'How embarrassing. After all that secrecy.' A pause. 'I suppose I could just tell you.'

'I suppose you could.'

'Perhaps it's better if I don't, for now. You may remember of your own accord, given time.'

'I'd rather you just told me.'

'Hmm. I'd appreciate it if you kept this to yourself for the moment, Kathryn. Don't show the disc to anybody else. You may well find it extremely useful, in due course.'

'Mr H, if you're not going to tell me, I might be tempted to post it on the Web and see if anybody else can tell me who these two young lovers are.'

'Now, Kathryn, that would be very irresponsible. Please don't be petulant.'

'I was supposed to know by now. Why not just tell me?'

Another pause. The ship's horn blared, above and forward of us. Poudenhaut and I both jumped.

'What was that?' Hazleton asked.

'Ship's hooter,' I said.

'Very loud.'

'Yes, wasn't it? So, who was I supposed to recognise, Mr Hazleton?'

'I suppose I am being overly secretive. It's just that there's no need for Adrian to know.'

I smiled at Poudenhaut. 'Fine by me.' I turned and walked a few steps away, then smiled back at Poudenhaut. His mouth set in a tight line. He retreated into the shade of the lounge and crossed his arms, watching me.

I heard Hazleton take a breath. 'You didn't even start to recognise her?'

So it was the woman. I thought hard. 'No…'

'When you met her she may have had blonde hair. Quite long.'

Blonde. I thought of the woman's face (annoyingly, the image that had chosen to etch itself on my memory was of her just as she was achieving orgasm, her head thrown back, her mouth open in a shout of pleasure). I tried to ignore this, and to edit out the shoulder-length black hair and substitute blonde.

Maybe, I was starting to think, I had seen her once, or met her. Maybe I had a bad association with that face. Something I didn't want to think about. Oh-oh.

'No further forward, Kathryn?' Hazleton asked. He sounded like he was enjoying this.

'I might be,' I said uncertainly. 'She might ring a vague bell.' Definitely a bad association here.

'Shall I tell you?'

'Yes,' I said (you bastard, was the bit I only thought).

'Her first name's Emma.'

Emma. Very definitely a bad association. Yes, I'd met her, just once maybe. But who the hell was she, and why the bad association?

Then I realised, just as he spoke her second name.

Half an hour later I stood on the bridge of the Lorenzo Uffizi, braced along with the others against one of the equipment consoles still ranged beneath the windows, while the coast swept forward to meet us at thirty knots. The Lorenzo Uffizi was headed straight for a broad gap between a half-demolished bulk carrier and a wide, unidentifiable hull that was all ribs and missing plates. Spread out on either side of us, for kilometres in each direction, were dozens of ships of every size and type and in every stage of dismantling: some freshly beached and barely touched, others reduced to little more than the spines of their keels and a few girders; tiny figures dotted the vast slope of oil-stained sand and infinitesimal sparks glowed sporadically amongst the hulks, while slanted pillars of smoke rose from a hundred different sites on the remains of the ships, the salvage-littered shore and deep inland.

The faintest of tremors shook the vessel. I watched the bows start to rise as the edge of the console pressed against my pelvis and belly. The telegraph rang for All Stop. A few people cheered. Tommy Cholongai, still holding on to the wheel, laughed and wheezed as the deceleration forced him forward into it. The ship groaned and creaked around us and from somewhere below there came a distant crashing noise, like hundreds of pieces of crockery falling. Shuddering mightily, the Lorenzo Uffizi's bows rode further and further up the beach, gradually obscuring the view of the land dead ahead. Looking to port, I watched our wash go piling up against the rust-streaked hull of the bulk carrier in a great white sine of surf. Bangings and thuds sounded all around us, the deck seemed to flex beneath my feet and a window out on the far end of the bridge's starboard wing suddenly popped out of its frame and disappeared towards the glistening sands below.

The creaking and groaning and the steady pressure went on for a few more seconds, then with a final pulsing shake and a kind of softly transmitted thud that left me bruised for days and nearly hit my head on the window glass, the old cruise liner settled into her last resting place, the crashing noises ceased and the console stopped digging into me.

More cheering and applause. Tommy Cholongai thanked the ship's master and the pilot, and then with a flourish set the bridge telegraph to Finished With Engines.

I looked over at Adrian Poudenhaut, who had decided to stay aboard for the beaching but had looked distinctly green around the gills for the last ten minutes or so, calm seas or no. Still clutching his briefcase, he smiled wanly. I smiled back.

And as I smiled I thought, Emma Buzetski.

Because that was her name.

'Buzetski is her second name,' Hazleton had said on the satellite phone, half an hour earlier, just before he rang off. 'She's Emma Buzetski. You know, Stephen's wife.'