Home

NATHANIEL TRIES SPYING

Malefactors find a living where they can, and I must admit that I greatly like to travel. I will cut a deal anywhere, and jets and big gleaming cars are so much more comfortable than the horses, mules, coaches and galleons upon which I once had to rely – though I must say that I have happy memories of broomstick trips with some of my favourite witches, not to mention a magic carpet flight or two. But the former all ended as small piles of cinders, whilst caliphs sank from sight. However dealing can sometimes develop into double-dealing, and then I grow fierce.

A multinational pharmaceutical group flew me to Basel, and then the Big Apple, a couple of months ago. The story started with a visit to my private detective contact. I keep in close touch with Jack - he generates some very good business for me, and I always kick back a generous slice of my takings. The assignment looked good.

‘These people are nearly ready to go public with a new wonderdrug of some kind, right up in the Viagra league.’ Jack leaned back in his chair and sniggered – he has that kind of mind. ‘But they’ve heard a whisper that a rival in the States plans to launch something very similar, perhaps just the same thing. They’re shitting themselves that the Yanks will pip them first past the post. They’ve got a great deal of money at stake.’

I murmured encouragingly. Multinational cross-border rivalry is always lucrative. Personal pride combines with corporate pride and mega resources: the chairmen of multinationals are often as vain as prima donnas.

‘They want you to steal the secrets.’

I stared at Jack. I tried my hand at a little alchemy, many, many moons ago. But complex chemistry is way beyond me.

He grinned. ‘The Yanks have a woman as financial director. She’ll be in New York next week, briefing bankers and analysts, talking to the press, that sort of thing.’

I began to see a light. ‘I’ll be a banker?’ I hazarded.

‘A mind like a computer.’ Computers impress Jack: he spends a great deal of time surfing the Net, and fancies himself as something of a dab hand at blackjack online.

‘Does she wear glasses?’

He shook his head. ‘Nice looking woman..’

I beamed. ‘But vain?’

Jack licked his lips. ‘She reckons herself one of the best. She wants to go straight to the top.’

He pushed a full colour photo across his desk, twelve by twelve. I was impressed. Dark hair, beautiful eyes, a smart primrose silk shirt. She looked a very intelligent bunny.

I felt my twin ends flicker a little. I knew this was one I would enjoy. I pushed the photo back. ‘How do I get to her?’

‘The Swiss want you to fly to Basel first. You’ll go as part of a team. You get her to give you whatever, then fly it straight back to Basel. The cash will be waiting.’

So I packed a bag. However Basel proved something of a hassle. I ran into some sort of demarcation battle the moment I called at the multinational’s headquarters, a big plate glass building overlooking the Rhine. The chairman wanted to send me, the financial director was set to pay me a quarter of my fee in advance in nice mauvy thousand franc notes. But the boffins raised cain. I think it was some kind of power struggle.

‘There are problems,’ the financial director explained suavely when I asked for my money. ‘We want you to go. But some people think we are taking too much of a risk. They don’t like strangers coming so close.’

People had told me that Swiss pharmaceutical groups could be considerably more secretive than small Zurich gnomes. Now I was learning the hard way, caught right at the sharp end. I frowned: I was growing annoyed. ‘Are you telling me the deal is off?’

‘They need convincing. A small demonstration, perhaps.’

I looked at the man sharply, but he was staring up at the ceiling. I wondered how much he knew about me.

‘Do they wear glasses?’

He shook his head slightly, still avoiding my eyes. Pennies began to fall into place. Boffins in one corner, finance in the other, chairman holding the ring. Finance wanted a nice secret weapon, a knuckleduster instead of a glove.

We met in the boardroom. The chairman had gone off to play golf, leaving the managing director in charge. The technical director was an arrogant bastard: I gave him a migraine that floored him in seconds. The rest of his team fled the room faster than a flock of sparrows with a sparrowhawk hot on their tails. I was paid quarter of an hour later.

The firm hired a Learjet to fly us across the Atlantic, and we took off in great secrecy. The finance director mapped out a neat little endgame as we sipped a nice Pouilly Fume high above Greenland.

‘Their bankers are hosting a big investment briefing as part of their build-up,’ he explained. ‘Nothing firm, but lots of blue sky.’ This Swiss was plainly proud of his argot. ‘They’re throwing a party afterwards, a glossy reception. Jack says you can charm as fast as you can kill. We want her charmed, in spades, and very quick too. She’ll be carrying all their technical data: we want it. She may leave it somewhere safe: you’ve got to get it.’

I beamed. This man was giving me a doll on a plate.

So Nathaniel went to the briefing, and Nathaniel went to the party. It took me some time to reach her, because she definitely ranked as the star of the show. But reach her I did, and I worked her at speed. I don’t think she quite knew what hit her. We smiled at each other, I gazed deep into her eyes, and she gave me her room number. She was dining with a group of kingpins, the big men of the business, but she told me to knock on her door at the witching hour, and I knew she would be panting.

So knock I did, and she was a real eyeful in sheer silken pyjamas, and panting was the word. She was also extremely athletic. Finance directors are conventionally dry, dusty souls. But Kathleen knew every trick in the trade, and would have made a damn fine whore, were she to have chosen to walk another shore. We fought a tourney in the lists of love, and I am a malefactor. But I think the honours were pretty near equal. Then I whispered my instructions, and she went off in a trance, to return with a nice fat folder of papers. I promptly began to dress, and suddenly she came back to reality, but it was too late.

‘You’ve ruined me!’ She was screaming her words – she must have had some excitable Latin blood in her. She tried to snatch back the folder, but I banished her into temporary blindness. ‘I’m going to be the laughing stock of the world.’ Her voice was a howl of defeat and despair. She began punching the air, but I sidestepped her neatly: these temporary fits wear off after a minute or two.

She recovered her sight as I was thinking of leaving. I did not want to open her door with so much din going on. But she had a fixed, glassy look in her eyes, and her room had a balcony. Such a pity, for she had a suite on the twenty-second floor, and the ground was a hell of a long way down.

I flew out with my friend the finance director a couple of hours later, and slept the six hours back to Basel, I felt I deserved it. He seemed a little cool when I woke for breakfast, but I assumed he had spent the flight reading Kathleen’s files, and was now completely zonked out.

I should have known better. A minion met me later that day, in the reception area of the big plate glass building, when I went to collect the rest of my money. I opened the envelope coolly, and counted my thousand franc notes, but I only found a quarter of my fee.

She was a pretty girl, but she had hard eyes, and I could tell that she was wearing contact lenses. She smiled thinly. ‘The director says that is your satisfaction.’

It was a strange word to use, and it made me see red. I took a deep breath. ‘Go back to him, and tell him that either I get the rest of my money, or I’ll fly straight back to New York and hold a press conference.’

The finance director saw me five minuters later. He looked rather grey, as though he had taken a beating. He was wearing dark glasses.

‘I’m sorry.’ He spread his hands wide. ‘The chairman won’t have it.’

‘Won’t have what?’ I snapped.

‘He told me to cut your payment in half.’

‘What the fuck for?’ I can grow quite abusive when I grow angry, and now I was very angry indeed.

‘Kathleen’s papers are trash.’ The finance director went on to explain. The Americans were on the same trail as the Swiss, right enough, but lagging some way behind. The big shenanigan in New York had been set up as a con job. The Americans needed money to close off their work, and counted on floating a big equity cum bond issue.

The Swiss could have bought in, and used a stake as a bid platform. Now all the American plans lay in tatters, at least for the time being, and flying Nathaniel to New York had been a total waste of money.

‘That’s why he has told me to pay you half, and not a franc more.’ The finance director shrugged. The matter was out of his hands.

I thought for a moment. Then a bright idea came to me through my anger. ‘Is he in the building?’

The finance director looked at me sharply. ‘Who? The chairman?’ He nodded.

‘Could you get to see him?’

He thought for a moment. I could see that he was both weighing his options, and trying to assess his strength. The New York fiasco had plainly painted a black mark on his door, but the technical director had also been worsted. We live in a world where smart men must act fast when they face sliding downhill, and my man knew he was sitting on a toboggan. But men are not immovable barriers.

He drew a deep breath. I could see that he was tempted, but also that he judged temptation most risky. ‘Can you do it?’

‘When he’s tried to screw me?’ I snarled, I was working myself up for a kill. ‘I can do it. No problem at all.’

He got to his feet. ‘You are putting my neck under a guillotine.’

I smiled coldly. ‘I’m going to promote you.’

Well, that was it. We took the special kingpin lift to the top floor of the building, and it was like entering a palace. Ankle deep carpets, original French Impressionists scattered along the walls in values totalling many, many millions, a table in a kind of central atrium bearing a solid gold bust of the group’s founding father.

The finance director pushed at a door, and we entered an outer office, with two nice looking women working at computer terminals, and a third, rather older woman watching them regally. She stared at the finance director and eyed me suspiciously, but I gave her a low-level love look to placate her, and she smiled at me. I do not think she was a woman who smiled at many men, short of kingpins.

The finance director pushed at a door, and we were in the chairman’s office. If the top floor of the building ranked as a palace, then this was the throneroom. Huge computer screens took up the whole of one wall, and the furnishings were most expensive. The chairman looked up – he was seated on a comfortable sofa, watching what looked like some costume drama set maybe two hundred years in the past. He half rose to his feet, and he did not look at all pleased.

‘What’s going on?’ That was all he said, because he had his heart attack there and then. Fortunately he had taken time off to play golf when he should have been watching me blowing his technical director away.

The finance director looked at me with a curious blend of admiration and fear, and then knelt beside his former boss. He looked up at me. ‘He’s dead.’

I nodded. ‘I always do a good job. Maybe you should double up my fee, now that you’re the new chairman.’

He nodded, and I paid the money into my Swiss bank account the same afternoon, before flying home.