MBA Page 8

  Of course, if Frank was not a renegade loner but linked to a cell, the threat assessment and response would shoot up the scale. However, even Greg’s hyperactive observation had not detected any evidence of a cell. Frank’s profile – his career as an academic, as well as whatever lay concealed beneath it – leaned towards the solitary. Greg had skimmed some of Frank’s published papers in the college library. While he could make little sense of them, compared to the publication lists of other academics at the college, the papers were few and mostly single-authored.

  After his swim and breakfast Greg drove the Lexus out to the boathouse, parking well back so as not to drive over any of the patches of discoloured grass that he had photographed from the air earlier in the week. The boathouse was one of two one-room buildings set in the woods close to the lake edge, a simple weatherboard hut with a sloping tile roof.

  As usual Frank’s boathouse was padlocked on the outside, but one of the things which had attracted Greg’s attention on previous visits was that Frank had reinforced the door-frame and fitted a second lock into it. He had also closed up the windows from the inside with plywood. By the middle of a summer’s day the interior would become unpleasantly warm. Greg listened for a minute or two, and then rapped on the door: nothing.

  Greg’s first goal was to look inside the hut. Then he would look at the grass patches, but that could be done anytime; pausing on a lakeside stroll was an innocent activity. An alarm was unlikely, as the structure had no mains electricity. To work inside the hut Frank had brought a portable inverter, producing 240v AC power from a petrol engine. Greg had seen and heard it, because the engine needed to be operated outside the hut.

  For his own purposes Greg had brought a heavy-duty battery-powered cordless drill with a circular hole cutting bit. He also had a small digital camera, a torch, instant glue, masking tape and a well-padded anorak. He would cut the hole near the corner of the hut, opposite to the road and to the patch of ground on which Frank usually parked.

  He chose a spot about two feet off the ground yet loosely covered by shrubbery. Too close to eye-level would cause the intrusion to be noticed sooner; too low would make it impossible for him to see what was inside. If he saw nothing, he would glue the circular plug of wood back. If he was unlucky, the hole might come out directly behind something large and close, which would mean cutting a second hole somewhere else. At some point Frank would discover all this, but with less than a week to the tower opening the balance of risk favoured action.

  He knelt down, pulling the anorak over his head and the drill to keep the shrubbery off and to dampen the sound. Some chaffinches still chirped in complaint. The ground at his knees became covered in a mixture of earth and light wood shavings which he would need to smear around in an attempt to disguise. He put the drill down carefully and reached for the torch.

  He took his time. The angle was awkward and the light beam narrow. Well, at least he had some vision; some angles were obscured but he had not come out directly behind a cupboard. He probed around with his pencil of light, trying to make out the outline of each object in his sight. After a few minutes he realised that although he was sweating and had dropped the anorak, he could do better by pulling it over his head to screen out the sun, killing the torch and letting his night vision kick in.

  First things first: there was definitely no boat, nor anything like parts of a boat. There was a workbench against the opposite wall, but from his low perspective Greg could not see what was on it. One dark rectangular shape stood perhaps four feet high. That it was electrical could be seen by the wire clippings of different colours scattered on the floor. Were there chemicals? He made out nothing drum-like, nor smelled anything except earthy wood. In a far corner he could see part of a plastic sack, like a 25-litre bag of compost from a garden centre; but even if he had been able to read more than the odd snatch of writing on it, there was no guarantee that the writing described what the bag now contained.

  Greg’s knees and back were complaining about his awkward position, but his morale was high. What he had seen might not be a smoking gun, but it was not an innocent doll’s house either. He took half a dozen flash photographs and decided not to glue the circular plug of wood back but tape it loosely in place, and kicked around the earth where he had been working. Then he turned to the circular patches of grass which he had noticed from the air.

  ---

  Greg had the Lexus ready when the dean’s assistant finished his twice-daily ten o’clock meeting with Tom, the tower-project manager. Ben climbed in the front seat and they set off on the 20-minute drive to the police headquarters with plenty of time to spare.

  ‘We’re there with the tower. Not exactly no worries, but we’ll get there in the end. Tom thinks the lift will be working by tomorrow evening.’ Buried in the pages of his notepad, Ben struck Greg as in a middling mood, a 50-50 mixture of tense and optimistic.

  ‘That’s good news, Mr Stillman.’

  ‘It will be if it happens. And it’s Ben, please. I want you to be part of this meeting with the police. We’re discussing traffic arrangements for the opening, that kind of thing. You’re the expert, really.’

  The invitation took Greg by surprise. Doubtless it would come with a catch, perhaps a favour needed next week, but even so it was a chance not to be missed to share with his passenger his morning’s findings, including the pictures on his camera. If Ben was Frank’s plant, then showing the pictures was forcing the pace. But if he wasn’t, then it was a chance to start raising Ben’s suspicions, even if his attentiveness right now was driven by relationship-building rather than smoking-gun images.

  ‘All the pictures really show is there’s no boat in the boathouse.’

  Greg persisted. ‘But the grass circles, and the tracks from the boathouse to one of the circles?’ Invisible from the ground unless you knew what you were looking for, Greg thought that the different colouration reflected re-growth of grass over scorched patches between one and two feet in diameter. In the undergrowth near one of the patches he had found a couple of inches of electrical wiring on which the insulation had melted.

  Ben twiddled with the melted wire. ‘It’s something, but it’s something to find out rather than something we have found out,’ he mused. Greg took it that the use of ‘we’ was deliberate.

  Ben continued, ‘It’s certainly not something for the police today. We’d look very silly if it’s just Frank being shy about being an over-age boy scout, flying model planes and crashing them a bit too often. You know, maybe radio-controlled ones he makes himself with small petrol engines.’

  Greg conceded the point, although he did not believe crashed model aircraft would make scorch marks two feet across.

  Ben hastened on. ‘What you’ve done is exactly right. You’ve been observant and you’ve brought what you’ve noticed to my attention. I agree that there’s something to explain, but the chances are it has a very simple explanation. The first thing we do is see what Frank says he’s up to in the boathouse.’

  ‘But that could tip him off.’

  ‘So we’ll be smart about it. He’s invited me to dinner tomorrow night. We know each other from before and, after all, he got me into this mess! We’ll chat, have a few drinks, I’ll get his story. And then we’ll see what we think.’

  Their meeting at Alderley district police headquarters lasted 40 minutes. Chief Inspector Haddrill was with a sergeant from infrastructure operations branch, formerly known as traffic. ‘Traffic’ had too much of a sense of movement about it to fit the road system in southeast England.

  The meeting went efficiently. Greg explained one or two things, such as the parts of the grounds which the college usually used for overflow parking, but took care not to appear suspiciously expert in police matters or vocabulary.

  Ben explained the guest list, the planned timings and general arrangements. Getting cars in and out smoothly would be the main headache, said Had
drill. As with any concentration of international business leaders there was some risk of a political protest, but Haddrill assessed it as low.

  Virtual Savings and Trust did not trip any of the major alarms – arms, animal testing, abortion clinics, gambling, GM crops, pornography, whaling – and while it was always possible that one of the visiting Russians might be on another Russian’s death list, the tower opening was not an obvious place to attempt a hit.

  Another possibility on Haddrill’s list was an attempted kidnap or hostage-taking. Again, with some simple precautionary measures, his overall assessment of the risk was low. For a couple of hours there would be a concentration of VIP targets in one place. But the other side of that coin was the private security the tycoons would have with them, in addition to the police presence. Ben confirmed that the Pinnacle family would certainly have some security people there.

  So Haddrill’s conclusion was that for both sets of reasons, traffic management and security, between 3pm and 9pm the college would become a one-way system. He opened out a map. Traffic would come in down Pynbal and go out over Crassock. At 3pm there would be a thorough sweep to identify all cars parked in the college and check them for any attached devices. From that time there would also be a checkpoint and camera on the approach to Pynbal. Expected cars would get windscreen stickers, unexpected cars would be turned back and everyone would be filmed.

  A vehicle recovery truck would be parked beside the checkpoint; if someone broke down on the winding roads the jam could be cleared quickly, and within a minute it could be parked across the road to close it. The Crassock end would have ‘No Entry’ signs and a periodic motorcycle patrol. Finally, from 5pm Haddrill would take personal charge from the mobile headquarters which would be parked at the college. Strictly speaking this was not necessary, he explained, but modern policing was all about customer service and personal leadership.

  Greg and Ben were impressed; Ben also got the hint. ‘Dean Gyro will be very interested in this, and he is an international expert on leadership. If your duties allow, he would be delighted if you could join him and his guests for dinner at 8pm.’

  Haddrill beamed and closed his colour-tabbed folder. Greg spotted his moment to throw something unexpected into the discussion and pounced. Afterwards, back in the car, Ben was not amused.

  ‘I guess that was your sense of humour, was it, Greg? Springing the Prime Minister on us at the end of the meeting?’

  Greg said nothing, keeping his eyes on the road.

  Ben continued, ‘I think if there was a possibility of the Prime Minister coming, I might just possibly have mentioned it to the police when I was going through the guest list. Or somewhere in between the discussion of demonstrations and kidnapping. For Christ’s sake, Greg, there’s no way the Prime Minister’s coming, and that’s not just me saying so, that’s from the dean personally. I know you meant well, and Dr Peach-Gyro means well, and I was sorry to have to come down on you so hard in front of the police.

  ‘But you see what would have happened otherwise? Right now they’d be checking with Number Ten, and Number Ten would say we’re raving lunatics. It would have embarrassed the college. If anything it would have made the Prime Minister less likely to come another time. Which, thanks to Dr Dianne, the dean is absolutely sure he will. But not this time.’

  ---

  Birthday or not, for the rest of the day Greg’s luck headed south. Even though he set off with Dianne Peach-Gyro at 4pm for a 7.30pm black-tie dinner, the traffic flowing into west London that Friday was excruciating. When Dianne was on the phone she was her cooing, solicitous self, especially when she murmured sweet words of absence to her husband. But that did not stop her biting through Greg’s neck in one clean snap when he mentioned Ben’s dismissiveness of the Prime Minister coming to Hampton for the opening. Ouch.

  Afterwards, Greg realised he had only mentioned it to break the boredom after Dianne’s phone calls had petered out somewhere near the Hammersmith flyover. It was lack of professionalism; for once his waiting skills had let him down.

  Whatever the reason, Dianne made sure that he had a surfeit of remedial practice for the rest of the evening. The dinner was at Alex Bakhtin’s mansion in Hyde Park, which raised Greg’s hopes of being sent back to start his weekend straight away: clearly Dianne would spend the night, and quite possibly the weekend, with Alex. Instead she kept him waiting, not just while the other guests arrived and drinks were served (Ed Lens was dropped off by a government car but his driver didn’t wait), but throughout the sit-down dinner.

  Greg burned a couple of sticks of jasmine by the side of the gravel driveway as he watched the waiters through the net curtains in the dining room. Greg knew from Alex’s driver that the curtains were designed to catch the flying glass of a bomb blast since some of his boss’s money was Russian. He motivated himself by thinking of how things might be when he moved into the job that Amelia had in mind for him in the autumn.

  When Dianne emerged, one of the last, she was on an arm which Greg had not expected – Mark Topley, the MP for Hampton and a minister in the Health Department.

  ‘Run us to the Kensington flat, would you?’ Dianne rested one jewelled hand on Greg’s arm as he held the door for her. Her walnut hair gave off the mixed scents of Chanel and cigars. ‘Greg’s such a sweetie, the tops. And then I promised it would be no bother to come back in the morning and get Mark to his constituency surgery for 9am?’

  ‘If it’s no bother,’ said the MP apologetically. ‘I absolutely don’t want to be any trouble.’

  ‘My pleasure, sir.’ As if I needed Saturday morning fucked as well, Greg thought. As if the minister didn’t have a driver of his own. As if what Mark Topley MP absolutely didn’t want was Dianne’s apartment as the pick-up address in the government car-service log. Servants of the public can’t be too careful.

  For the briefest of moments Greg thought of the fun he could have if he could have whipped out a police warrant card there and then. But then the thought was gone. His unique talent was to uncover larger hidden truths than a condom and a few grams of something in a married minister’s dinner jacket. He had a special role and purpose in the world. If Ben played ball and Frank lied to him about the boathouse over dinner tomorrow night, Greg might have his birthday present and be able to deliver it to Amelia before the weekend was out.

  3 The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, op. cit.

  SATURDAY 16 JUNE (MORNING & AFTERNOON)

  For the first half of Saturday morning, summer took a commercial break. As the sun rose the sky darkened and the temperature plunged. Winter previewed a series of new improved squalls with Siberian hailstones, rattling windows across London’s suburbs like a riot and startling the squadrons of horses assembled to Troop the Colour before the Queen.

  The Lexus which pulled to the kerb off Kensington Church Street at 7.30am shrugged the weather off, but Connie Yung was unable to do this. She rolled over in bed and pulled up the duvet. Why drive her beat-up Corolla to Guildford in this? Her appointment with Richard Vanish could wait another day. As Dorothy Lines had explained, what Connie had agreed to do wasn’t a real inquiry; certainly not one upon which any pressing decisions hung. What did have a deadline this week was her final MSc project. Predictably Connie was behind with this, so having a clear day to make her conceptual analysis less tangled would be good news.

  The hailstone riot beat Connie’s attempts to sleep hands down, leaving her to ponder (not for the first time) why she had said yes – yes to becoming a college governor, yes to doing some ferreting around Vanish, or indeed yes two years ago to being sponsored by her employer to do a part-time degree in healthcare management? None of these things were necessary to doing her job well; indeed the opposite, given the hours they consumed.

  As a personnel professional Connie knew part of the answer well enough. These were all markers of being a ‘high potential’, signs that she was ‘going plac
es’. But she did not want to go places; she had seen enough, and much of what she had seen – especially the politics and barely disguised egomania in the higher levels of private and public organisations – discomfited her.

  Shifting out of the private sector into the NHS after Bakhtin had wrecked her food-packaging business still felt the right decision, even though it had been a painful wrench. Private-sector values were accumulating within the NHS like plaque, but having really smart colleagues who did care about patients made all the difference. The idea of ‘going places’, whether getting promoted or simply acquiring power, just made her feel car sick. Yet label herself ‘low potential’? No thanks!

  A mystery of the 20th century – Connie put it down to the divine sense of humour – was why the shiny new ‘human resource’ profession had attracted so many individuals with scant feeling for, or ability to deal with, the complexity of being human. Connie wasn’t one of these, so she knew there was another dimension to her career puzzle; something difficult to pin down. Maybe because her big four-oh birthday was so close, some truths were too close to dodge – Help! Even closer was the lightning. Connie jumped out of her skin, so startled she didn’t even hear the thunder.

  When she had recovered sufficiently she took refuge in a faded silk summer dressing gown (summer!), put the kettle on and called Vanish. Afterwards she could ponder yet another of her yesses, said against all her intentions.

  Vanish said, ‘Next Saturday would be fine … but if you want to do something about it, it will be too late.’ There was no shred of pleading in his voice, only certainty. So Connie went to see him.

  The winter commercials finished in time for the Queen’s 11am parade, and the only things which pummelled Connie as she steered her Corolla down the A3 towards the miasma of Guildford Saturday shopping were questions. ‘If’ she wanted to do something? To do something about ‘it’?