The Business

CHAPTER SEVEN

Just had a horrible thought.

You had a dream where you woke up and somebody had removed all your teeth last week. Michael, I have some bad news for you...

No, I'm serious. But it's about that. You recall the party I was going to see on the morning after that happened?

Yes. What about him?

He has a daughter. Very pretty, very Westernised, very pleased to see me, once, when her dad wasn't there. If you know what I mean.

Gosh, you're such a rake. Actually you're a fucking cretin. You risked jeopardising a deal that size by getting involved with a CEO's KID? I can't believe you're telling me this. Is this meant to endear me to you, Mike? Make me think hey, here's one worth promoting, spread the word around the Level Fours? Are you mad? Are you drunk? DICKHEAD, Mikey boy.

Calm down, will you? Look, it just fucking happened, all right? She came on to me. I mean she's not a child or anything; 19 I think. But I was practically raped.

Yeah, right.

Except she wouldn't actually let me - how shall I put it, go the hole way?

Go on.

I used my mouth.

Ah. See your problem/worry. Except what was done to you was done at this end, not that end. Of the journey, I mean, not your bod.

Still. I mean, don't you think?

You said the party concerned wasn't too bothered about your lack of dentition.

Quite unfazed.

Bad sign. Think back to your previous few encounters with him, post your tryst with his li'l girl. How was his attitude then?

Umm, well, frostier, maybe. I remember talking about that. It felt like we'd slipped back a rung or two in the negotiations. Thought it was just a ploy. But he was always really polite to me, I mean really.

You idiot. So he's frosty, then you lose half your teeth and he's the one wreathed in smiles. Didn't you ever suffer because of somebody, and - even if you had to tolerate them because of business - be really cold towards them, and then have your secret revenge on them and suddenly find it was easy, even more satisfying to be all sympathetic towards them?

I am in the presence of the master, aren't I? Or the mistress. Truly you are Yoda. Yodette, anyway.

Displeased with you I am. I can't believe...no, come to think of it, I can. You're a man. We're probably lucky you didn't try to shag his wife or have carnal knowledge of his favourite golf course or something. I mean, eighteen holes; the possibilities. Actually I don't know why I'm making light of this. In all seriousness, I'm very disappointed in you. That was a very stupid thing to do. The deal is totally done, isn't it? There isn't some last little tiny detail that could explode - oh sorry, could that be ejaculate - in our faces?

Yuk. Totally done, signed, sealed, delivered and set in reinforced ferroconcrete. Look, I've said I'm sorry, but at least I did tell you as soon as I realised.

Ferroconcrete is reinforced. And I bet you did not just think of this. And as I seem to recall telling you, Adrian G is your immediate superior while I'm on sabbatical, not me. Plus I just scrolled back through all this and you have not said you're sorry.

All right! I'm sorry! Really. Look, I don't have to tell AG, do I? He really doesn't like me. Say it ain't so. I'll make it up to you. This is all off the record, obviously.

Helps to say that at the start. You do have a lot to learn. How did you get to be an L4? Anyway, I won't tell AG, but in the event that anything does happen with the deal concerned, you're going to have to confess all to the relevant authorities. As the deal's done, and the CEO was apparently happy, we're probably OK, honour satisfied. But, like I say, in the event, you'll have to own up. And another thing: have you talked to the girl since? Has she said she confessed all to her pa? I mean it looks like he found out, but through her?

She won't return my calls. I'm starting to regret telling you this. Look, if something did go wrong later, this could end my career. You won't grass on me will you? Kathryn; please.

I'm not promising anything. If all you pay for this is losing a few teeth, we'll all have got off lightly.

Who's this We, white man? Might I point out that I've taken all the shit here; as far as the biz is concerned the phrase Scot free comes to mind, my little Caledonian chum. You, ie the company has lost fuck all.

Yes, and you'd better pray it stays that way.

I thought you were an atheist.

It's just a form of words; don't get hot under your dog or any other collar. Where the hell is your dumb ass - sorry, arse - anyway?

Home in a dark and rain-swept Chelsea. You?

I'm in Karachi, and a quandary.

Oh. Isn't that the new Toyota?

Never mind. You should be asleep. Do try not to fuck up any important mega-deals or lose any major body parts while in the land of nod.

Make it so, number one. Oh, forgot: Adrian G changed story again. Apparently it definitely and definitively was not our large secure friend Mr Walker he saw in that taxi the other day. My fault for getting totally the wrong end of the stick, allegedly. Just thought I'd tell you.

Right. So now we know. Night, and then again, night.

We'd been lifted off the Lorenzo Uffizi by the helicopter from Tommy Cholongai's yacht. For a while I'd wondered whether we'd be taken straight to the yacht and never actually set foot on the sands of Sonmiani Bay, but we did, plucked from the deck and lowered to the beach in groups of four, and stood in the shade of the enormous stem of the old liner while Mr C glad-handed the boss-men of the ship-breaking concern that would be scrapping the vessel.

Even while we stood there, the water still drying on the vessel's patchy red hull-bottom paint and draining from the weeds and encrusted growths that had accumulated under the waterline since her last scraping, a squad of little men and skinny boys pushing oxyacetylene cylinders on trolleys came jogging past us. They split into groups of two stationed every hundred feet or so down the length of the hull exposed above the now retreating tide, ignited their torches, flipped dark goggles down and started cutting into the ship's plates to form a series of beach-level doors.

The Pakistani bosses were all smiles and politeness and invited us to take tea in their offices further up the beach, but I got the impression they just wanted rid of us so they could get on with the job of taking the ship apart. Mr Cholongai declined their offer gracefully and we were all ferried out to the yacht in the little Hughes, apart from Adrian Poudenhaut, who was picked up by his fancy Bell-with-the-retractable-undercarriage, the swine.

There was a feast arranged on board the yacht, and something of a party. The Lorenzo Uffizi's captain and first officer and the local pilot received presents from Mr C. They didn't unwrap them but they seemed very happy with them all the same. Gorgeously attractive Malay girls wandered the teak decks and main lounge, serving cocktails and seafood.

'Mr Poudenhaut did not stay long,' Tommy Cholongai observed, joining me at the port deck rail. Most people were either in the air-conditioned lounge or on this side, in the shade. Even in the shadows, with a gentle breeze produced by the yacht heading parallel with the coast towards Karachi, it felt fiercely hot and humid.

'A man with a mission,' I said, and sipped my margarita.

'A present, I understood.' He held a glass of iced coffee.

'Yes,' I said, aware of the weight of the disc in my jacket pocket.

'From Mr Hazleton, it would be obvious to infer,' Cholongai said, nodding thoughtfully. He smiled. 'Forgive me if I'm being too nosy, won't you?'

'That's all right. Mr Poudenhaut was delivering something Mr Hazleton thought I ought to see. I take it you weren't aware of what it was.'

'Indeed no. Mr Poudenhaut's visit was as much a surprise to me as it was to you.' He glanced at me. 'It was a surprise to you, wasn't it?'

'Yes.'

'I thought so.' He looked out towards the shore. We had left behind the last of the scrapped ships' ragged outlines a few minutes ago. A thin, dark line of mangrove trees had replaced the tawny sands. 'Of course,' he said, 'given what I have told you about today, and given that the Level One executives all know of this matter, there is bound to be, oh, how would one say it? Some jockeying for position.'

'I think I'm starting to appreciate that, Tommy.'

'We shall be staying in harbour in Karachi for a day or two. I have to entertain various worthy but not very sparkling industrialists this evening; you are certainly invited, though I think you might be bored. However I would be honoured if you would join me for lunch tomorrow.'

'If I have time to do a little shopping when we get ashore I'll happily join you for both. Boring industrialists hold no terror for me, Tommy.'

Cholongai looked pleased. He glanced at his watch. 'It would be quicker to send you ahead in the helicopter.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Good.'

Having been met by Mo Meridalawah at the airport and transported across the ocean of poverty that was Karachi to the archipelago of shops where serious money could be spent, I had time to buy a new frock, a satellite phone and a DVD player.

'Hello?'

'Mr Hazleton?'

'Yes. Who is that?'

'Kathryn Telman.'

'Well, hello. Have you a new telephone, Kathryn?'

'Yes. A satellite phone. Thought I'd test it out. This is my first call.'

'Oh. I suppose I ought to feel honoured, oughtn't I?'

'You rang off rather abruptly yesterday.'

'Did I? I'm sorry.'

'Why did you want me to see that, Mr Hazleton?'

'What? The scene in the hotel? Oh, I thought it might come in useful for you.'

'It's blackmail material, Mr Hazleton.'

'It could be used as such, I suppose. I hadn't really thought of that. You weren't thinking of using it as such, were you?'

'Why should I use it at all, Mr Hazleton?'

'Oh, that's up to you, Kathryn. I simply thought to provide the material. How you use it is up to you.'

'But why, Mr Hazleton? Why did you provide it?'

'I'd have thought it was rather obvious, Kathryn. So that you would feel beholden to me, so that you would be well disposed towards me. It is a gift; I'm not asking for anything specific in return. But I know about the task that Tommy and Jebbet will have outlined to you by now, and it is a very important one for the company. That will make you a very important person. In a sense, it already has, even if you have not yet come to a decision. Have you, by the way?'

'Not yet. I'm still thinking.'

'That is sensible. It is a big step. A step that I, like the others, would like you to take, but you're right not to make the decision without serious thought. I'm sorry if I've given you even more to think about.'

'Did you set this up, Mr Hazleton? I mean, the filming.'

'Not I. You might say that the material fell into my hands.'

'And why do you think that I in particular might be interested in it?'

'Kathryn, it's not exactly common knowledge, but I think I know how you feel about Mr Buzetski.'

'Oh, you do, do you?'

'Yes. I like Stephen, too. I admire his integrity, his principles. It would be a pity if those principles were founded, as it were, on false premises though, wouldn't it? I thought that, as this piece of film existed, it might be of value to you. The truth can hurt, Kathryn, but it is usually preferable to falsehood, don't you think?'

'Mr Hazleton, do you hold any evidence of a similar nature concerning me?'

'Good heavens, no, Kathryn. This is not something I have any regular part in, or wish to encourage. As I said, the film fell into my hands.'

'And what exactly makes you think I feel anything in particular for Stephen Buzetski in the first place?'

'I'm not blind, Kathryn, and I am human. The same goes for the people who work for me. They understand emotions, they can empathise with people. Of course they make it their business to know how people in the company feel about their colleagues so that one doesn't accidentally place together people who hate each other. Just good business practice, really, and of genuine benefit to the individuals concerned, too. I'm sure you can appreciate that in the circumstances one doesn't have to try to discover who's attached to whom, to find out en passant, as it were. It just happens.'

'I'm sure it does.'

'Quite. So, you have the film, or video disc or whatever it's called. Frankly all this technology is beyond me. How you use it is up to you, though of course I entirely understand that you may wish not to use it directly, as it were. You may think it would be better if Stephen found out what has been going on without any reference to you, in which case I'm sure that a way could be found for him to discover the truth without you being involved in any way. All you would have to do would be to let me know.'

'You make it all sound very reasonable, Mr Hazleton.'

'Good. I'm glad.'

Stephen, help.

How? I'm in a quandary. Where are you anyway?

Home. Where are you?

Karachi. Pakistan. Everybody OK there?

Fine. Wow, you are trotting that old globe. What seems to be the problem, ma'am?

New job offer.

New job offer? What the hell can it be?

Well, for one thing it's in confidence.

You got it.

And also it's in Thulahn.

You have got to be kidding. No, you've got to be being kidded. That's the place in the Himalayas, right?

The same.

Explain. I can't wait. This isn't demotion is it? You haven't done anything foolish have you?

Oh, it's not demotion. And I have done lots of foolish things, but enough about my sex life. They want me to, well, it's hard to explain. Scout the place out. I can't give you all the details, but they want me to settle there. Live there, get to know the people, try and suss how they're going to react to future changes, anticipate their collective mood, I guess.

But there's nothing there, is there?

Mountains. Lots and lots of mountains. And nine hundred thousand people.

How much can't you tell me? Rough idea. Promise it'll go no further.

Shit. Well, it's important. And it would be good for my career, I'm told. But it's a totally radical change. It means giving up the way I live my life, it means giving up what I'm good at, job-wise, it probably means giving up seeing my friends as much as I do at the moment and that's already barely enough. With the job, I don't know I'd ever be able to step back into it. I mean what I do now is all so techy and it's all moving so fast I probably can't leave it for more than about - you guess - maybe a year? Eighteen months max and everything I know will probably be obsolete. What they're proposing is, well, big, so it'll easily go over that eighteen months. Cutting to chase, the point is this is one of those Warning - Not Undoable decisions.

Lordy mama. Don't know how to advise. Sounds like only you are in possession of the full facts.

Wish same could be said for my faculties.

It can. What's your gut feeling?

I must have become a ruminant because I seem to have at least two different gut feelings. One says Fuck it, take it, other just scrunches up into little ball in corner and squeals No no no no no! But which is the real me?

I know which one I'd go for.

Ah, Stephen, if only.

Emma's here at my side, so I'll just ask her...only kidding. When do you need to give them a reply?

Indefinite. They'd like some sort of provisional idea in the next couple of weeks, but I could probably stall into '99 if I wanted.

You're in Karachi. Close to Thulahn. Worth taking a few days there.

Well, about 2000 km, but yes, wasn't that convenient? Ah, well. You're right. I probably will. Only the Prince could be a problem.

Oh yes. He greatly admires and respects you, doesn't he?

Has the hots for me. yes.

Oh. Kate; you dismiss any and all professions of love as just lust. Maybe one of these guys is genuinely head over heels for you. Maybe they all are. It's a subtle form of self-denigration you're indulging in here, Kate.

Oh, suddenly I'm on line to Dr Frasier Crane. You're listening. I'd no idea.

So defensive, Kate.

Well, maybe in the words of the immortal Whitney Houston, I'm saving all my love for somebody else.

Anyway. I'm sure you can handle the Prince. Ahem.

I'm sure too, but seriously, it's a consideration.

Take that holiday, or whatever you want to call it. You're still on sabbatical, aren't you?

Doesn't feel like it, but yes.

So go.

Good idea. Hey, I'd get to choose staff. You wouldn't want to move to Thulahn, would you? I mean not now but if all this happens? (Just kidding, really.)

Kind of got commitments here. Schools, you know. Plus Emma not too keen on any incline beyond one in twenty. Probably a girl thing. High heels and stuff.

Yeah, commitments. Like I said, just kidding. You could always visit though, yeah, yeah, huh, huh?

Surely.

Don't call me...actually you can call me anything/time you want. Ah, dear. I think tiredness is catching up on me. Bed beckons. I shall to my sheets. Thinking of you. Have a nice day. and from this end, good night.

You are a rascal. Sweet dreams.

Sweet dreams indeed. I put a finger to my lips and kissed it, then touched the tip to the screen on the words 'Sweet dreams'. Then I laughed at myself and shook my head. I closed the lap-top's lid. The machine beeped at me and the glow of light from the screen cut out just before it came down to meet the keyboard. Only the TV's screen was left on now, tuned to Bloomberg, sound off. I looked out at the lights of the city, and then up at the cornice of the room, between wall and ceiling. Everything was built in. Nowhere to just plonk a camcorder. Come to think of it, it had probably been something more sophisticated that had spied on Mrs B and her lover: you could put a camcorder lens into a pair of glasses these days so maybe the camera had been concealed in a smoke alarm or something and the rest of the mechanism housed somewhere its bulk didn't matter.

I lifted the lap-top's lid up again; the screen flicked back on. I looked at the last few lines we'd exchanged. Commitments.

'Oh, Stephen,' I whispered, 'what am I to do?'

The DVD player was still in its box: I hadn't had the time or the inclination to try connecting it to my lap-top yet. The disc Poudenhaut had given me was still in my jacket pocket, hung up inside the wardrobe and smelling of smoke (all the industrialists on Mr C's yacht were heavy smokers). I didn't need the disc, or the DVD player. I could see Mrs Buzetski silently mouthing Oh, oh, oh, very clearly indeed, thank you.

I didn't save our exchange to the lap-top's hard drive; I just powered down. First the machine, then, after a shower, me.

Well, now, here was an interesting little treat: that nice Mr Cholongai had loaned me his company Lear. It was a good one, too; actually had facilities. The first time I was offered a lift on a private jet I was appalled to be told it might be an idea to visit the airport loo before we left as the plane didn't have a toilet. Finding that your ultimate corporate status symbol has less in the way of amenities than a modern express coach can take the gloss off the experience.

I should be old enough not to want to do this sort of thing, but, well. I discovered my ordinary mobile phone would work and attempted to call my pal Luce back in California. Voicemail. I tried another of my girlfriends in the Valley. She was on an exercise bike in the gym and was suitably impressed when I told her where I was, but too breathless to be able to talk much. Still in a telephonic mood, I drew various blanks, machines and more voicemails, then got through to Uncle Freddy.

'Guess where I am, Frederick.'

'No idea, dear girl.'

'In a Lear jet, all by myself, flying across India.'

'Good heavens. I'd no idea you knew how to fly.'

'You know what I mean, Uncle Freddy.'

'Oh, you're a passenger?'

'I am the passenger. I am outnumbered two to one by the crew.'

'Well, good for you. I suppose there are times when it's good to be in the minority.'

'Oh, really? Name one other.'

'Umm…Troilism?'

Given that only a few months earlier both India and Pakistan had been trading underground nuclear tests, it was probably a sign of how good our relations were with both states that the Lear was cleared straight through across both air spaces to a small airport at Siliguri, situated in the little bit of connective tissue that winds round the northern frontier of Bangladesh and beneath the southern limits of Nepal, Thulahn and Bhutan to join the main body of India with the appendage of Assam. The Himalayas, visible in the distance to the north throughout most of the flight as a deep sweep of glaringly white peaks, gradually disappeared under a layer of haze. I started playing Jagged Little Pill, but it was entirely inappropriate. Besides, I'd grown fed up with Alanis Morissette's little end-of-phrase gasps and hadn't forgiven her for entirely confirming the Brit prejudice that North Americans don't know the meaning of the word irony.

I looked through my discs and decided I didn't have any music suitable for this view. Instead I fired up the DVD at last and put it through the lap-top, glancing at the film of Mrs B and her lover (like Emma, it did come with sound — the volume just hadn't been turned up before), then clicking through the documentary and photo files on the rest of the disc. Depressing. Soon enough we dipped towards the ambiguous landscape that was neither plains nor foothills around Siliguri.

I had to change planes here. The Lear couldn't land at Thuhn: it needed about four times the length of runway there and it also wasn't really happy landing on anything other than smooth tarmac. As Thuhn's airstrip was composed of the sort of uneven gravelly earth that was pretty crap as a football park, let alone an airfield, this meant that the very nice young Norwegian co-pilot had to lug my bags across to the scruffy Twin Otter I recognised from the last time I'd made this trip.

This two-engined Portacabin was the pride and joy of Air Thulahn, and indeed the only aircraft it actually possessed. There was a little socket just outside the pilot's sliding window; jamming a stick in there with the Thulahnese royal flag attached instantly converted the plane into the Royal Flight. The plane was wittily nicknamed Otto. It didn't really look all that primitive — well, apart from the props and the fixed undercarriage and the odd dent or two in the fuselage — until the ground staff opened up the nose (which I'd fondly assumed might contain radar, direction finders, instrument landing gear, that sort of thing) and dumped my luggage in the empty space revealed.

The last time I'd climbed aboard Otto, at Dacca airport in Bangladesh, fresh off a PIA DC10 (terrible flight, perfect landing), I'd had to share the cabin with a gaggle of drunken Thulahnese bureaucrats (there were six of them; I later discovered this constituted about half of the entire Thulahnese civil service), two saffron-robed priests with funny hats and plastic bags full of duty-free cigarettes, a couple of peasant ladies who had to be dissuaded from lighting up their kerosene stove for a bowl of tea while in-flight, a small but pungent billy goat and a pair of vociferously distressed and explosively incontinent piglets. Oh, and there was a crate of hens, every one of which looked distinctly dubious about trusting their necks to such a patently un-airworthy craft.

What a fine old time we had.

On this occasion I was the only passenger, though there was a pile of crates secured by webbing behind the last row of flimsy seats and various sacks of mail occupying the front two rows. The pilot and co-pilot were the same two small, smiling Thulahnese guys I remembered from the last time, and they greeted me like an old friend. The preflight safety briefing consisted of telling me they suspected the last seat-pocket safety instruction card had been eaten by either a goat or a small child, but if I did happen to find another one on the floor or anywhere, could they have it back, please? They were due an inspection soon and these Civil Aviation Authority people were such blinking sticklers!

I promised that in the unlikely event I opened my eyes at any point during the flight, I'd keep them peeled for laminated cards or indeed photocopies floating past on the breeze or stuck to the ceiling during a section of an outside loop.

They thought this was most amusing. While my new flightdeck crew tapped gauges, scratched their heads and whistled worriedly through their teeth, I stuck my nose as close as I dared to the suspiciously smeared surface of the window and watched the sleekly gleaming Lear swivel its electronics-crammed nose round, briefly gun its twin jets and taxi towards the end of the runway. I suspect my expression at that moment would have displayed the same despairing regret of a woman who has in some moment of utter madness just swapped a case of vintage Krug for a litre of Asti Spumante.

'You want we leave the door open?' the co-pilot said, leaning round in his seat. He'd been eating garlic.

'Why would you do that?' I asked.

'You get better view,' he said.

I looked out between him and the captain at the tiny windscreen, only a metre and a half away, imagining it entirely full of rapidly approaching snow and rocks. 'No, thanks.'

'Okay.' He pulled the door to the flight deck shut with an uneven, flapping thump. The sun visor on your average family saloon gave a greater impression of solidity.

'Uncle Freddy?'

'Kathryn. Where are you now?'

'In a flying transit van heading straight for the highest mountains on Earth.'

'Thought it sounded a bit noisy. In Tarka, are you?'

'Tarka?'

'Oh, no, wait, that was the plane before this new one.'

'This is the new one?'

'Oh, yes. Tarka crashed years ago. Everybody killed.'

'Well, that's encouraging. I hope I'm not disturbing you, Uncle Freddy.'

'Not at all, dear girl. Sorry if I'm disturbing you.'

'Don't worry. I won't pretend this isn't partly to take my mind off the flight.'

'Quite understand.'

'But also I forgot to ask about the Scottish thing we discussed, remember, when we were fishing?'

'Fishing? Oh, yes! Who'd have thought you could nab a trout at this time of year, eh?'

'Who indeed. You do remember what we were — ah! — talking about?'

'Of course. What was that?'

'Air pocket or something. Hold on, a mail sack's just landed on my lap. I'm going to strap it into the seat beside me…Right. Did you get in touch with Brussels?'

'Oh, yes. Your man is on his way to, umm, where you were.'

'Good. Jesus Christ!'

'You all right, Kate?'

'Mountain…kind of close there.'

'Ah. Yes, it is a rather spectacular flight, isn't it?'

'That's one word for it.'

'Your pal Suvinder back there yet?'

'Apparently not, he's in Paris. Back in a few days. I may leave before he arrives.'

'Don't forget to watch out for the prayer flags.'

'What?'

'The prayer flags. At the airport. All around it. Terribly colourful. They put flags wherever they think people need spiritual help.'

'Really.'

'Still, it's true what they say, isn't it? You're more likely to be killed in a car than a plane.'

'Not when you're in the plane, Uncle Freddy.'

'Oh, well, I suppose. If you're going to look at it that way.'

'Right, just thought I'd check. How are things in Yorkshire?'

'Bit rainy. GTO needs a new big end.'

'Does it? Right. Okay.'

'You sound a bit tense, old girl.'

'Ha! Really?'

'Try having a snooze.'

'A snooze?'

'Works wonders. Or get absolutely filthy drunk. Of course, you have to do that a good while before the flight.'

'Uh-huh?'

'Yes. Equip yourself with such a bloody awful hangover that a fiery death in the mangled wreckage of an aircraft seems like a merciful release.'

'I think I'm going to ring off now, Uncle Freddy.'

'Right you are! Get some shut-eye. Good idea.'

The final precipitous roller-coaster descent into Thuhn was even more terrifying than I remembered. For one thing, I could see it this time; on the previous occasion we'd been in cloud until the last thousand feet or so and I'd ascribed the wildly uneven flying of that part of the flight to yet more severe turbulence. Approaching in mid-afternoon on a clear day, it became all too obvious that going into a succession of stomach-churning nose-dives and standing the Twin Otter on its wingtips was simply the only way for the tiny craft simultaneously to lose enough height and avoid a succession of towering knife-sharp obsidian cliffs and seemingly near-vertical boulder fields full of vast rocky shards like ragged black shark's teeth.

It was probably just as well there was an air of unreality about the flight. I felt woozy. I had the beginnings of a headache; it was probably the altitude and the thin air. They said it was better to take your time getting to somewhere as high as Thuhn; drive up, or take a donkey, or even walk. That way your body adjusted gradually to the thinning air. Flying in from sea level was precisely the way not to do it. Still, at least we were. descending now. I shivered. I'd dressed in jeans and a cotton blouse and kept a few clothes by my side which I'd gradually put on during the flight — a plaid shirt, a jumper, gloves — but I still felt freezing.

The plane levelled out in that last thousand feet of its approach, if you can call hurtling down at an angle of about forty-five degrees levelling out. I watched a stone shrine, a stupa, flashing past the window on a spur of rock level with the plane. I looked down. If we were at forty-five degrees, the slope was at about forty-four. I did not need to be a geometrician to know that the brown blur of broken ground was getting closer all the time.

The shadow of the plane — worryingly sharp and close to life-size — flickered over rocks, lines of prayer flags and straggling walls made from rough round boulders. Some of the tall bamboo masts anchoring the lines of prayer flags were about twice as far off the ground as the Twin Otter. I pondered Uncle Freddy's words about the siting of prayer flags, and the possibility of dying in a plane crash caused by well-meaning believers hoisting a fresh set of flags in the last obvious space around the airport, only to snag the plane and cause the disaster they were hoping to avert.

Suddenly there were buildings underneath, opposite and above us — I glimpsed an old man looking down at us from a window and could have told you the colour of his eyes if I'd been paying attention — and then I was terribly heavy, then light, and then there was a thump and a furious shaking and rumbling that meant we'd landed. I opened my eyes as the plane rattled and banged across the landing ground, raising dust.

There was a cliff edge about three metres away, and a drop into a deep, wide valley where a white-flecked river wound through sinuous fields of grey gravel, its banks terraced with narrow fields and dotted with sparse trees. Grey, black and then utterly white mountains rose beyond, their peaks like a vast white sheet hooked in a dozen different places and hauled sharply up to heaven.

The plane wheeled abruptly, engines roaring and then cutting out. That left only the roaring in my ears, then. The co-pilot appeared, looking pleased with himself. Through the plane's windscreen, not far in front, I could see a set of soccer goalposts. He kicked open the door, which whammed down and jerked on its chain like a hanged man. 'Here we are,' he said.

I unbuckled, rose unsteadily and stepped out on to the dusty brown ground. I was suddenly surrounded by a sea of knee- and thigh-high children kitted out to resemble small cushions, while a crowd of adults dressed in what looked like colourful quilts appeared and started congratulating the flight crew on another safe landing. The terminal building was still the fuselage of a USAAF DC3 that had crash-landed here during the Second World War. It was closed. A wind as cold and thin and sharp as a knife cut across the landing strip, raising dust and goose pimples. I patted a selection of worryingly sticky little heads and looked up past the jumbled buildings of the town to the steep slope of chaotically fractured rocks over which we had made our final approach. Prayer flags everywhere, like bunting round a used boulder lot. Beneath my feet were the markings for one of the football ground's penalty boxes. One of the male quilt-people came up to me, put his hands together as though in prayer and bowed and said, 'Ms Telman, welcome to Thuhn International Airport.'

I successfully resisted the urge to laugh hysterically in his face.

'I say, did you know that you can count up to over one thousand just using your fingers?'

'Really?'

'Yes. Can you guess how? I bet you can't.'

'You'd…use a different base, I suppose, not ten. Ah, of course; binary. Yes. It'd be…one thousand and twenty-four.'

'One thousand and twenty-three, actually. Zero to one thousand and twenty-three. Gosh, though, well done. That was very quick. I must have bored you with this before. Have I?'

'No, Mr Hazleton.'

'Then I'm impressed. And you know my name, and here I am and I've very rudely forgotten yours, though I'm sure we were introduced earlier. I do hope you'll forgive me.'

'Kathryn Telman, Mr Hazleton.'

'Kathryn, how do you do. I do believe I've heard of you.'

We shook hands. It was November 1989, in Berlin, the week the Wall came down. I'd squeezed myself into a Lufthansa flight from London (jump seat, snooty stewardesses) just that day, determined to be there for a bit of history that had seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. A whole bunch of the more adventurous Business high-ups had had exactly the same idea — Tempelhof and Tegel must have been double-parked with executive jets for those few days — and as a result almost by default there was a sort of impromptu meeting of various Level Twos and Ones set up for that evening. I'd decided to try and gatecrash that as well, and succeeded.

We were sitting down to dinner in a private room in the Kempinski after a chaotic evening in a collection of limos and taxis, touring the various places where people were swarming over the Wall, attacking it, demolishing it, wheeling bits of it away and pocketing it. Everybody was a bit drunk, and, I suppose, infected with the heady, almost revolutionary — make that counter-revolutionary — atmosphere of that particular time and place.

I had indeed been introduced to Hazleton at the reception before dinner. He was a Level Two at the time, but marked out for still greater things. He'd looked me over in an automatic, unfocused way. I was twenty-nine, already a Four, thanks to my inspired guesses about computers and IT. I looked pretty good; better than I had at nineteen. Hazleton might have forgotten my name but he hadn't forgotten what I looked like. He'd made straight for the seat at my side. Well, fairly straight: he bumped a couple of gold-painted chairs on the way.

He'd just nodded at me as he'd sat down and then ignored me throughout the first course, as though he'd really chosen this seat at random or had taken it reluctantly, then suddenly he'd come up with this unlikely chat-up line about digital digits. I had become used to this sort of thing from upper-class Englishmen. At least he had used the second person, rather than 'one'.

'And if one used one's toes,' he said, 'one could go up to over a million.' (Oh, so we were using 'one', were we?)

'Impractical, though,' I said.

'Yes, you'd have to take your socks or stockings off.' (Back to 'you', then.)

'I was thinking,' I said, 'of the difficulty of articulating your toes.'

'Oh. Yes. How do you mean?'

'Well, you can use your fingers to count because you can alter their state, bend each one to show whether it's a zero or a one, but very few people can do anything similar with their toes. They just sort of sit there, don't they?'

He thought about this. 'I can put my little toes over the ones next to them.'

'Really? On both sides?'

'Yes. Good, eh?'

'Then assuming you can put each of your big toes over the one next to them, you could count to, what, just over sixteen thousand.'

'I suppose so.' He contemplated his entrée for a moment. 'I can wiggle my ears, you know.'

'Never!'

'Yes. Watch.'

'Good heavens!'

We amused each other with a selection of childish antics like this for a while, then got on to puzzles.

'I've got one,' I said. 'What are the next two letters in this sequence? S, T, N, D, R, D?'

He sat back. I had to repeat the letters for him. He looked thoughtful. 'S, D,' he said.

'No.'

'Yes, it is. It's "standardised" with all the vowels taken out.'

'No, it isn't.'

'Why not?' he asked indignantly. 'That's a perfectly good answer.'

'The correct one's much better.'

He made a noise which sounded suspiciously close to a 'harrumph', and sat back with his arms crossed. 'Well, so you tell me, young lady.'

'Want a clue?'

'Oh, if you insist.'

'First clue. I'll write it down.' I took my napkin and lipstick and wrote: S T N D R D _ _.

He bent over the napkin, then looked up at me sceptically. 'That's a clue?'

'The gaps, the spacing. That's the clue.'

He looked unconvinced. He carefully extracted a pair of half-moon glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. He peered at the napkin over the top of them.

'Want another clue?'

'Wait, wait,' he said, holding up one hand. 'All right,' he said eventually.

'Second clue: it's a very simple sequence.'

'Really? Hmm.'

'The simplest. That's your third clue. Actually it's your fourth clue, too, and I've already given you the answer.'

'Uh-huh.'

He gave in at last. 'Well, I think the answer is S, D, and you're just being a tease,' he told me, folding the glasses and putting them away.

'The answer is T, H.'

He looked at the napkin. I wrote the last two letters into the space. 'No,' he said. 'I still don't see.'

'Watch.' I wrote a large 1 in front of the letters ST. I didn't need to add the 2, the 3 or the 4.

'Ah,' he said, nodding. 'Very clever. Haven't heard of that one before.'

'You wouldn't have. I made it up myself.'

'Really?' He looked at me. 'You are a clever little thing, aren't you?'

I used my wintry smile.

I woke up in darkness, breathless. I was gasping for air, drowning in what felt like a semi-vacuum beneath a huge and terrible weight. Darkness. Not just ordinary darkness but total darkness; profound and utter and somehow intensifying the breathlessness. Where was I? Berlin? No, that had been a dream, or something remembered. Blysecrag? Chilly enough for one of the turret rooms. I looked for my watch. The bed felt small and cold and odd. Nebraska? The air outside the bed, as well as feeling absurdly cold, didn't smell right. The bedclothes were far too heavy. My breath hurt my throat. There was a very strange smell in the air. Where the hell was I?

I extended my left hand and found cold, stone-solid wall. I reached up and touched wood. I saw a small glowing circle nearby on my right and leaned across to it. It felt like I was wearing all my clothes. My fingers closed around the watch. It felt very cold. According to the Breitling it was four fifteen. I tried to remember whether I'd reset it for the right time zone. Clattering across an uneven wooden surface, my fingers encountered the familiar lumpy shape of the netsuke monkey figure, and then the ribbed casing of my little flashlight. I clicked it on.

My breath smoked in front of me. I was in some sort of bed alcove. The ceiling of the room was painted bilious yellow and livid green. A row of demonic faces glared down at me, painted red, purple, black and orange. Their brows were arched, their ears were pointed, their eyes were huge and glaring, their moustaches were curled like waxed black hooks and their fang-like teeth were bared behind snarling carmine lips under cheeks as round and green as avocados.

I stared at them. The little Aspherilux threw a tight, even spot of light. The spot was shaking. I must still be dreaming. I really needed to get back to sleep properly and wake up again.

Then I remembered. Thulahn. I was in Thulahn, in the capital city of Thuhn, in the Palace of a Thousand Rooms, which had exactly sixty-one rooms. The bizarre painted wooden heads were there to ward off demons while the honoured guest slept. There was no light because (a) it was night, (b) there was no moon, (c) the room's window was covered by both curtains and shutters, and (d) the palace electricity generator shut down at midnight when the Prince was in residence; at other times, like now, it was turned off at sunset. I was cold because I was in a place where central heating meant having a full stomach. I was breathless because I'd come from hot and humid sea level yesterday morning to nine thousand feet by teatime. By the side of the bed there was a small oxygen cylinder and mask, just in case. No TV, of course.

I remembered the airstrip, being welcomed by a polite little quilted Thulahnese guy of indeterminate age called Langton something or other, walking with him at the head of a procession of adults and chattering children and being shown around the ramshackle town, entering the palace complex through brightly painted wooden gates and having a tour of its impressive state rooms before sitting down to dinner at a long table with what looked like a bunch of monks dressed in primary colours, none of whom spoke English. I'd sampled various consistencies and hues of beige food, drunk water and fermented milk beer, then suddenly it was dark and apparently it was time for bed. I'd felt wide awake — bewildered, dizzy, not connected to the world, but wide awake — until I'd seen the little cot-bed, and then I'd suddenly conked out.

I clicked the torch off. My feet felt down to the bottom of the bed and touched the cork-stoppered china hot-water bottle.. It was still warm. I hooked it with one foot and brought it up towards my bum as I curled up again and closed my eyes.

Why had I been dreaming of Berlin and Hazleton?

Because I'd been talking to Hazleton the day before, I supposed. Because that dinner was the first time we'd exchanged more than a few words. Obvious, really. Except that it wasn't. Some bit of my brain didn't like this explanation and kept insisting there was more to it. I put it down to lack of oxygen. Hazleton had felt my knee beneath the table later, and insisted he would see me back to my room that evening. I'd run away.

Why couldn't I dream of Stephen?

Stephen, married to Emma. Emma who went Oh, oh, oh, in total silence. Emma who was having an affair with Frank Erickson, a corporate lawyer for Hergiere Corp, who lived in Alexandria, Va, with his wife Rochelle and three children, Blake, Tia and Robyn. He and Emma had met in various hotels within the DC Beltway, usually around lunchtime, and had managed two weekends together, one in New Orleans when he was attending a convention and she had claimed to be visiting an old schoolfriend, and one at the Fearington House, an elegant country inn tucked away in the woods near Pittsboro, North Carolina.

I had the zip code and the telephone number for the inn; I even knew what they'd had to eat for dinner on the Friday and Saturday night and which wines they'd chosen to accompany their meals; I could have called the place up and asked them to reserve the same suite and put a bottle of the same champagne on ice. There were no videos of their tryst there, but I had a scanned copy of the bill. The DVD Poudenhaut had given me contained photographs of that bill, various restaurant cheques — all matched to still photos or other short pieces of video of the adulterous couple in those restaurants — receipts for flowers to be delivered to Mrs Buzetski's office in the graphic-design company she worked for, a receipt for a five-hundred dollar négligée in Mr Erickson's name, which I suspected his wife had never worn, and a whole variety of other bits and pieces of film and documentation that chronicled their affair in excruciating detail.

The film of them fornicating in the DC hotel room (the Hamptons Hotel, Bethesda, room 204, to be precise) was just the cherry on the cake. Somebody had gone to a huge amount of trouble over a considerable period of time to gather that evidence, and the more I thought about it, the less I believed Hazleton that the disc had just fallen into his hands.

How much of this sort of stuff went on? Was it just Hazleton, or were the rest at it as well? Did they have anything similar on me? Unlike Stephen, I'd never taken any vows, never made any promises, legal or otherwise, but what about the people I'd slept with? I tried to review the list of sexual partners I'd had over the years, looking for any that could be blackmailed or otherwise compromised.

As far as I could remember there shouldn't be a problem: I'd always tried to avoid married men just as a matter of course, and on the few occasions when I'd ended up in bed with one it had been because the bastard had lied (well, once or twice I might have suspected, but never mind). Come to think of it, Stephen ought to be grateful and flattered I was prepared to make an exception for him.

Maybe this had all been done for me, I thought. Maybe Hazleton really didn't make a habit of this sort of thing, but had set up this particular surveillance operation because he knew how I felt about Stephen, knew how Stephen felt about adultery and had seen a way, perhaps, to give my beloved to me and so leave me for ever in his debt.

I was too hot. The air outside the bed was still sharply chilly, but underneath the Himalayan pile of bedclothes it had suddenly become sweaty. I pulled off my jumper and thick socks. I kept them in the bed with me, in case I needed to put them on again later.

What the hell was I going to do?

Should I tell Stephen about his wife? Shit, it wasn't just the dishonesty or any advantage I might gain, it was safety: Emma and Frank hadn't used any protection that I could see.

I could phone Stephen right now. I could tell him the truth, that I had the evidence and Hazleton had given it to me. That was the most honest course, the sort of thing you could imagine justifying in court. But if I did? Maybe he would blame me, maybe he'd stick by her, maybe he'd think I was just trying to wreck his marriage. No win.

Or I could — even more easily, because it would take a single sentence with no angst, no trauma involved — ring Hazleton and say okay, do it. Let it happen. Let Stephen find out the truth and see what he did next, hoping that he'd turn to me, sooner or later. Maybe even arrange to be nearby when he heard the news, and so be the most obvious shoulder for him to cry on; up my chances at some little risk.

Or do nothing. Maybe he'd find out anyway. Maybe Mrs B would be discovered some other way, or Mrs Erickson would find out and tell Stephen, or Mrs B would grow tired of living a lie and announce she loved somebody else and wanted a divorce — hell, she knew a good lawyer. That was the best outcome: doing nothing and still coming out ahead; a low reading on the guilt-o-meter. But that still left me knowing and not doing anything.

I tossed and turned in the bed, still too warm despite the chilly air. I slipped off my loose cotton pants and rolled them up. I had my PJs on underneath.

The Palace of a Thousand Rooms. With sixty-one rooms. Ha: Blysecrag had more than that in one wing.

That would be the other reason I'd recalled my first proper meeting with Hazleton and the thing about counting to a thousand on your fingers. The Palace of a Thousand Rooms was called that because whoever had first built it had counted in base four, not base ten, so that — if you chose to translate it that way, and they had — their sixteen was our hundred and their sixty-four was our thousand. So the palace had been built with sixty-four rooms. Except that three rooms had dropped off during an earthquake in the nineteen fifties and they hadn't got round to replacing them yet. Different bases. That must be the explanation. That was why I'd had that dream-memory of dinner in Berlin, the week the Wall came down.

Only it still wasn't. In all my billions of neurons and synaptic connections, it seemed like it only took a few determined troublemakers to distract me from the sort of things I ought to be thinking about, like whether to tell my beloved he was being cuckolded, or whether I should abandon my brilliant career and move to Thulahn (What? Was I mad?).

Think around the problem. Don't call Stephen. Call his missus. Call Mrs B. Tell her you know.

No, call her — or have somebody else call her — anonymously and let her know only that somebody knows. Bring things to a head that way. Maybe she'd confess all (yes, and then Stephen — just, gee, a big soft galloot — forgives her and, heck, if their relationship doesn't, like, gather strength from the experience).

I could see that.

Or maybe she'd leave him. I could see that, too. Maybe she'd leave him and take the children. Maybe she'd leave him and take the children and leave the poor, gorgeous sap with nobody to turn to… (but wait! Who's that in the background? Yes, her, the attractive thirty-eight-year-old blonde — oh, but looks younger — with the Scottish/Bay Area accent?).

Well, heck, a girl could dream.

Shit, none of this was getting me anywhere, and I wasn't even sleepy any more. Tired, yes, but not sleepy.

I felt for the flashlight again. I switched it on, let the beam travel round the room while I took in where everything was, then switched it off again. I pulled on my socks, trousers and jumper, stuck my head under the covers. The warm air smelled muskily, pleasantly of perfume and me. I took a few deep breaths, then jumped out of bed, putting the covers back.

I felt my way to the window. I pulled back the thick, quilted drapes, folded the creaking wooden shutters to each side and opened the wooden-framed windows with their bottle-bottom panes.

No moon. But no clouds either. The town's roofs, the river valley, crumpled foothills and crowding mountains were lit by starlight, with eight and a half thousand feet less atmosphere in the way to filter it than I was used to. I couldn't see any other lights at all. A dog barked faintly somewhere in the distance.

The breeze flowed into the room like cold water. I stuck my hands into my armpits (and suddenly remembered that when I was a little girl we used to call our armpits our oxters) and leaned forward, sticking my head out into the view. What little of my breath the altitude hadn't already taken was removed by. the sight of that darkly starlit gulf of rock and snow.

I stayed like that until I started to shiver, then shut everything up with numbed fingers and crawled back into bed, keeping my head under the covers to warm it up again.

I shivered in the darkness. The capital city, and not a single artificial light.

Tommy Cholongai had given me an encrypted CD-ROM with details of what the Business was planning for Thulahn. There would be another all-year road to India, a university and a modern, well-equipped hospital in Thuhn and schools and clinics in the regional capitals. We'd build a dam in the mountains behind Thuhn that would provide hydro power and control the waters that washed over the broad, gravelly valley I'd seen from the airstrip, allowing the waters there to be channelled to one side so that a bigger airport could be built, one that would take jets. Big jets.

During the summer months the hydro plant would produce much more electricity than Thuhn would need; the surplus would be used to power giant pumps, which would force specially salinated water into a huge cavern hollowed out in a mountain high above the dam. The idea was that this water wouldn't freeze, and in the winter, when the main hydro plant was useless, this saline solution would flow down through another set of turbines and into another dam so that Thuhn would have power all year round. All power lines would be underground wherever possible; a minimum of disfiguring poles and wires.

Also on offer was a network of tarmac roads connecting the capital with the main towns, plus street-lights, a water treatment plant, drains and a sewage works for Thuhn initially, with similar improvements scheduled for the regions later.

The plan was to skip conventional wire or terrestrial microwave telephony entirely and go straight to satellite phones for every village and every important person. The footprints of various satellites we controlled would be adjusted to take in Thulahn and so provide additional digital Web and TV-based information and entertainment channels for those who wanted them.

Then there was the stuff the Business intended just for itself: a whole network of tunnels and caverns in Mount Juppala (7,334 metres), a few kilometres north-east of Thuhn in the next valley. That was where, if possible, the PWR would go. Ah, yes, the PWR. At no point in the CD-ROM was that particular acronym explained; even in a CD-ROM that had serious encryption, ran to maybe a dozen copies in the world and was restricted rigidly to those who needed to know, it seemed we didn't want to spell out the words Pressurised Water Reactor. This was the Westinghouse unit we'd bought from the Pakistanis and had mothballed.

There was some serious engineering involved in all this: basically we'd be turning quite a lot of Mount Juppala into something resembling a Swiss cheese. A hand-picked team of our own engineers and surveyors armed with everything from rock hammers to magnetic and gravitometric arrays had already probed, drilled, sampled, analysed, shaken, mapped and measured the mountain to within a millimetre of its life (only we knew it was three and a half metres higher than the guidebooks and atlases said).

The CD held several impressive sets of plans drawn up by some of the world's foremost engineering firms, each of whom had carried out feasibility studies on turning this vast lump of rock into a small self-contained city — none of whom, however, had been told where this mountain actually was. It was a big job. We'd be buying a couple of specially modified Antonovs to move all the heavy plant and machinery in. We reckoned we'd built up a fair knowledge-base concerning heavy engineering in extreme cold, thanks to our Antarctic base, but even so the whole Mount Juppala project might take a couple of decades. Just as well we thought long-term.

Was any of this something I wanted to be part of? Were we doing the right thing in the first place? Was the whole Thulahn venture just a huge act of hubris by billionaires with a bee in their bonnet about having a seat at the UN? Did we have any right to come in here and take over their country?

In theory we could build our new HQ with almost no impact on Thulahn: there was a contingency plan for building the new airport in the same valley as Mount Juppala; it would mean levelling off a smaller mountain, but it was less than had been done for the new Hong Kong airport, and we could afford it. Doing all we could do, undertaking every improvement we were prepared to offer, would change the entire country, and especially Thuhn, probably for ever, which sounded terrible given how beautiful and unspoiled it was and how happy the people seemed to be. But then you looked at the infant-mortality rate, the life-expectancy figures and the numbers who emigrated.

If we only offered these changes/improvements, rather than imposed them, how could it be wrong?

I had no idea. At the very least, before I decided anything, I needed a while here, just to start getting the feel of the place. This process was due to start tomorrow, with a visit to the apparently fearsomely weird Queen Mother, in her own palace, further up the valley.

Legend had it she hadn't left her bed for the last twenty-six years. I curled up under the weight of bedclothes and cupped my still cold hands, rubbing them and blowing into them and wondering why staying in bed for as long as humanly possible was considered even remotely weird in Thulahn.