Headhunter

  *

  After making love, showering and then making love again, they finally caught some fitful sleep before sleeping through the alarm and dashing out the door tired and harassed.

  It wasn’t until they were in the Departure lounge that Campbell finally got a message from Steve. It was brief and told him that he couldn’t fit a proper response in a text so had emailed it instead.

  Lawson was on edge and chattering and had spent ten minutes sitting at the table in the coffee bar with them whilst eyeing the wine bar across the vast space with a look of clear longing. Then he’d made an ‘executive fucking decision’ to get some proper drinks because that is what you must do on a plane. The actual time of day ceases to exist this side of the barrier, he insisted, and once you’d shown them your passport you were on holiday, even if you were actually at work.

  Campbell had no energy to protest and Lisa was swayed with the suggestion of a vodka and Red Bull to do the job that no amount of coffee was going to.

  In the bar Lawson got the drinks and though it was barely past eight in the morning, Campbell’s ragged feeling of exhaustion seemed to dull at the first swallow of the cold beer and after the third he figured that he’d feel a little better for a drink or two now, and soon enough the sleep would hit him all the harder. God only knew he didn’t want to be awake for the whole flight if Lawson was going to be this twitchy. He’d not seen him hit the toilets yet and come back looking coked up, so he could only assume that this was some other sort of natural nervous energy brought on by the trip.

  After two beers Campbell reached for his phone to check email before changing his mind. What if Lawson asked what he was looking at? What if what Steve had sent him was scary enough to make the fear obvious, then what would he tell Lawson? No, he’d wait until the other man went to empty his no-doubt full bladder. But the other man held on so Campbell yielded first and once he had found a cubicle and locked himself in, he opened the email app and noted again that there was no signal, not here in this bathroom, encased in ceramic tiles from floor to ceiling.

  Back at the table Lawson was hurrying Lisa into finishing her drink and pointing at the departures screen.

  ‘Flight’s up,’ he said. ‘Time to get on board Dan.’

  He swore to himself and followed them to the gate, all the while Lawson chattering that little louder for the lager he’d drunk three pints of.

  When they found their seats there was respite.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Lawson had told them with a knowing look and slipped into a seat across the aisle.

  Campbell opened his email with as much haste as he dared and all the nonchalance he could muster, which was very little.

  Dan,

  Looked over your notes and had a dig around myself for stuff on all your Cayman companies - how do I say this? I don’t think you want to get on that plane mate.

  He didn’t read the rest until they were in the air, paralysed as he was in his seat. You don’t get back off a large passenger plane you’ve just boarded unless you want to meet some policemen and anti-terror officers, not in this day and age. Not without a very good reason. So he sat there staring out the tiny window, feeling like a cartoon character who had just stepped out into empty space, just before the drop.

  FORTY FOUR

  When you go up in an aeroplane, you are ultimately left with two possibilities; you land or you crash. Daniel Campbell was starting to see the distinction blur.

  Steve's email had been relatively brief on detail and data but clear enough in tone. A fresh pair of eyes, objective, almost sceptical, had assessed the information and found the same conclusion as Campbell had. There was something very wrong going on and now he was heading right into the heart of it. He'd been cautioned against going by his friend, but the caution had arrived too late. Now he was set on a course that he could not easily escape from and would simply have to let play out.

  The pre-flight alcohol had been burned off by the shock and no amount of forcing his eyes closed would bring on sleep. He was wired and edgy and stuck in this steel tube for another ten hours. The only mercy was that Lawson had flamed out early with all his hyperactivity and edgy excitement and was asleep before the plane had cleared UK airspace.

  Lisa had complained of the energy drink repeating on her and headed for the Ladies and Campbell had taken the chance to read Steve’s email again.

  Looks as though you were on the right lines about this stuff. They are all interlinked and it's all a bit incestuous. They all seem to own bits of each other's bonds or shares, and have very little in the way of tangible or traceable trading or clear activity records. They've all filed accounts but they're sparse to say the least and they don't show up in any press that I can find. At all. They're all registered or listed where they are supposed to be but without knowing where to look and what for, you'd never find them. Like they're meant to be invisible. I don't think Ponzi is the right description, but they certainly feel like bricks in a pyramid. And I don't really like the idea of who might be behind something like that, or where they're hiding. Walk away mate, and make an anonymous call to the relevant authorities when you're clear.

  It wasn't so much that his friend had seen the same thing as he had and that it had spooked him too, it was that neither of them could figure out what it was.

  Campbell had spent some time after the incident seeking out thrills and excitement, shunning the predictable and the safe, somehow looking to rediscover that addictive feeling of being entirely in the hands of fate. Never more alive than when courting death. He had travelled the world in search of it, leaving the beaten path whenever he could, trying everything once, twice, even the things he didn't like. Especially those things. Relishing the psychological and physiological reactions it induced in him whatever they were.

  He had struggled and fought so hard to get his boring life back that when he got it, he didn't want it anymore. That's what the travelling and the caving and boxing were about, and that’s what had led him to chase down this new job at Scorpio with its work-hard, play-hard culture and the new and unfamiliar professional territory he would have to tread. No coasting here; fail to produce and you were done, that’s what he’d first thought. You had to survive and you had to be good and ballsy and take risks just to achieve that.

  Except it was beginning to distort and shift that sense of survival and risk, beginning to look reckless and unpleasant rather than just challenging.

  Lisa returned and took her seat, pressing the button overhead to call the attendant. She asked for coffee and water and then reached into the seat-back for the magazine.

  Campbell tried to quell the turmoil of his thoughts and land on a solution, some sort of easy exit. Feign sickness or a family emergency perhaps? Could he not just quit his post and demand to be sent home? Refuse to cooperate? Nothing seemed feasible and as he tried to imagine playing along with whatever charade he was going to be asked to participate in he became aware of another feeling worming its way in. Curiosity. Maybe he wanted to know he was wrong to suspect something untoward or maybe he wanted to have his suspicions confirmed so that he could feel vindicated and not cowardly and paranoid. But either way, he wanted to know, there was no escaping that. The question was, how much?