She watched the young man for twenty minutes. He seemed a likely prospect. His conversation identified him as a Telecoms software engineer, while his bright yellow socks featuring Butt-Head on one ankle and Beavis on the other suggested the lack of any woman in his life.
‘Christ, he’s even got an anorak,’ Payne sniggered.
‘Be a good boy and go play with yourself, Freddie,’ she whispered, rising to her feet.
Anorak Man had gone to the bar to refill his glass and she squeezed in beside him, close enough to demand his attention and for him to feel her presence through the sleeve of his jacket. Startled, he turned, and his eyes began to flicker in embarrassment, dancing across her chest like a ride of the Valkyries until, with an act of willpower that made his jaw crack, at last he found her face.
‘Hi,’ he croaked while his mind raced through any number of memory banks in search of something appropriate to say. ‘Er, can I buy you a drink?’
‘I was just getting one in for my friend.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he apologized, diving into his glass as if an Old Bailey jury had just pronounced him guilty of multiple molestation.
‘No problem,’ Mary reassured. She paused before adding: ‘He’s going in a minute.’
Anorak Man brightened, sensing a reprieve.
‘You could always buy me a drink when he’s gone …’
Ten minutes later they were sitting side by side, elbows propped on the sticky-top table, within twenty they were into the world of geeks and gigabytes, and it took only another couple of pints before he was laying in front of her all the wondrous possibilities of cyber communities and 3-D graphic accelerators. Mary had been fortunate in her choice. Anorak Man turned out to be Roy, whose fascination with computer programming was matched only by his passion for science fiction films and photography. A creature, if not of the night, then certainly of many darkened rooms – and of Chingford, where he had a modest flat to which she was soon invited after expressing an innocent interest in learning how to go active on the Internet.
Payne was waiting for them outside the pub as they left. He’d spent three tours tracking active service units through the rat runs of Ulster. He smiled. Following a flapping anorak was going to be as simple as sin.
Above all else, Elizabeth was a practical woman. She had sat all afternoon and well into the evening in her small and windowless office at The Kremlin, waiting for an asteroid to strike and relieve her of any responsibility for sorting out her problems, but after the sun had set and the sky turned to darkness there was still no sign of any ball of fire hurtling from the heavens, so she had done what any practical woman would do in the circumstances.
She panicked.
Ignoring the fact that the restaurant had less than a fifty per cent cover that evening – and what did a few hundred pounds matter when she was in the steam bath for tens of thousands? – she opened a bottle of Irish Cream and got drunk.
She hated Irish Cream, that sickeningly sweet confection of coffee and Irish alcoholic ineptitude, but in the first place she simply wanted to get drunk and in the second, she felt she needed a little punishment. Punishment for the past and the present, and perhaps for what she might yet do. She also drank it because it cheered her up – an inconsistent attitude, perhaps, but why should a practical woman bother with consistency? The Irish Cream cheered her because it reminded her of a time when she was younger and had a refined taste for adventure, and of an evening spent in the company of a hotel mini-bar liberally stocked with the stuff. There had also been a young companion. Couldn’t remember his name, but it was never going to be a long-term relationship, not with a teenage backpacker from Palo Alto.
Nor, it appeared, with Vladimir Houdoliy.
There was some small consolation in the fact that at least the uncertainty had been stripped away. She had at last heard from Vladimir that morning, not directly but via the People’s Bank of Odessa. A Mr V. Voroshilov of the bank’s legal department had written on paper so thin it was almost transparent to inform her that she could have neither the wine nor her money. The ownership of the wine, it seemed, was the subject of a vigorous dispute between Mr Houdoliy, the local community council for the city of Odessa (who regarded the wine as some sort of treasure trove) and the administrator of the health board (who had run the palace as a mental home for more than two decades). So convoluted had the wrangle become that there was even talk of an elderly Romanov putting in a claim on the basis that the bottles with the double-headed eagle had undoubtedly been stolen from the Tsar’s personal cellars at Massandra.
Since ownership of the wine was in question, it could not be released. Moreover, since her money had been deposited in legal payment for the wine, that could not be released either, until the Ukrainian justice system had decided who was the legitimate owner of the wine, and who was due the money. Mr Voroshilov regretted, but she would understand that the bank’s hands were tied, and since the dispute covered property rights that went back into the mists of time, he could give no indication as to how long the legal fog might take to dissipate. Indeed, he could give nothing but his most sincere regrets.
‘May your mistress be diseased and your wife forever vengeful, Mr Voroshilov,’ she mumbled, raising her glass in toast.
It made her feel a little better, the cursing and the bottle, but it still didn’t wipe away the fact that she was now the dollar equivalent of seventy thousand pounds in a hole.
So what was a practical girl to do? She’d already done the panicking bit and was now bored with the indulgence. She didn’t do tears and smashing of fragile china, not without an audience at least. Which left only friends. A Rolodex of names and telephone numbers stood on her desk, a brief history of her entire time. The contacts, entanglements and adventures of her adult life, the good and also the bad. Once she had kept shoeboxes full of mementoes – letters, cards, trinkets, the menu of an enchanting dinner or the keepsake of an enchanted night. An odd cufflink. A pressed rose. Memories that were tied up in her boxes and under her control, to be brought out and relished, then locked away before they could cause any complications – until her sad, insecure husband had found them and, in a hail of accusation during one of their final tumultuous rows, had burned the lot. But not the Rolodex and its contact numbers. Almost casually she flicked her way through, turning it in the manner of a lottery wheel, dancing from one memory to another and relying on fortune to dictate what number might come up next.
Suddenly it had stopped and was screaming at her. A name from the past. That name. A name that could make light of her current problems with one swish of his Mont Blanc pen. Oh, but a name that would undoubtedly make for new problems. A business proposition, that’s all it would be, she argued with herself. So what if it entailed taking a few risks? Her whole life was at stake and it’s what any practical woman would do.
Then she thought about the risks and argued with herself some more. It took another glass of Irish Cream before she was finally convinced. Only then did she pick up the phone.
The apartment in Chingford was pretty much as Mary had expected, untainted by any trace of feminine influence. Abandoned laundry had spread across the furniture like a rainforest intent on reclaiming lost lands. The spider plant propped on the windowsill had already shrivelled in fright.
Geek City.
But twenty-three-year-old kids weren’t notoriously tidy – for twenty-three years was what Roy admitted to being, and a kid is what Mary (at some damage to her own sense of eternal youth) regarded him as. He had a self-deprecating sense of humour and, beneath the anorak and unironed T-shirt, a lean and muscular body. There were weights lurking in a corner, running shoes by the door. He scurried around clearing up cereal bowls and magazines. Soon she could hear him scrabbling in his bathroom cabinet. He emerged reeking of aftershave.
She couldn’t resist a wry smile of amusement. He made her feel almost matronly.
‘Used too much, haven’t I?’ he confessed, melting a little in misery. He proceed
ed to cover his confusion by rushing round the room and removing several drying shirts from the backs of chairs. ‘Bet you wouldn’t know it, but I’m not used to bringing women back here.’
Her smile turned to laughter, and soon he was laughing, too.
‘Sorry, I was forgetting. We came here to discuss computers. Seem to have this habit of making a complete fool of myself.’
She placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re no fool, Roy. That’s why I’m here, remember?’
It was a lie, as uncomplicated as it was unfair. She intended to make a complete fool of him.
‘Let’s go for it. I’ll log on.’
‘How about ordering a takeaway first? I’m famished.’ Her eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘We may be here some time. I’m a very slow learner.’
It was while he was in the kitchen ordering a Red Fort Special with extra popadoms and don’t-forget-the-mint-yoghurt-sauce that she set to work. From her bag she withdrew what seemed like a telephone wall box, plastic, standard white. Next she unplugged the cable that led from Roy’s modem to its telephone point on the wall, and in between the two inserted her own small box before reconnecting the modem. The operation lasted no longer than a sparrow’s breath and her device added less than two centimetres to the depth of the telephone point. It was almost indistinguishable from the original and was securely hidden behind the usual chaos of wires and connections that wrapped themselves around each other behind his terminal. In a thousand nights, Roy would never notice.
Anyway, as he logged on, he was in a state of deep distraction. Distracted by Mary, by her proximity, and most of all by the fact that, as he switched his attention from the onion bhaji to the lamb pasanda, Mary swivelled the mouse and appeared to stumble into the twilight world of soft-porn news groups that began to smother the screen in lurid images.
‘Does this …? Do they …? Can they really …? Wow, now I see why you spend so much time with your keyboard,’ she chided gently.
He didn’t respond, uncertain where this was leading, finding it easier to hide inside his can of Tartan bitter.
‘You like this sort of stuff, Roy?’
‘Er … Don’t most guys?’
‘Some girls, too. Although most of this seems …’ she rolled the mouse around in slow, gentle circles – ‘a little tame?’
He took another swig from his can. Maybe he was on to a good thing here. ‘I can do much better than that.’
‘Can you?’ she responded, goading him with innocence.
There are standard protocols for the design of computer networks that are supposed to ensure that the systems are secure. Available only to the authorized. Which means no illicit access, no getting caught with your bits in the wrong bundle.
Yet like many other things in the world of computers, these protocols are a piece of virtual reality. In other words, they don’t really exist. For in spite of these protocols there is an equally standard tradition that every software engineer tasked with designing those security systems always leaves a back door, his or her own private entrance into the Forbidden Garden, which allows it to be accessed twenty-four hours a day from wherever he or she chooses. It’s a form of intellectual copyright, a claim of ownership over the system they themselves have developed.
It is also a form of larceny, for once you have access to hardware that far exceeds the capabilities of anything you might have tucked away in the spare bedroom at home, there’s an almost irresistible temptation to expropriate a portion of it, to store within its vast memory banks a few thousand megabytes of your own. It’s much like taking the corporate Ferrari for an illicit spin while the boss’s back is turned. As a result, buried deep within the root directories of almost every substantial corporate mainframe computer are caches of private contraband, usually high-resolution images of photographs and video clips that gobble up far too much memory to be accommodated on domestic PCs.
It took no more than twenty seconds for Roy to access the Telecoms computer with its vast store of information, which included a library of tawdry pictures that the Telecoms software engineers, in the manner of software engineers everywhere, had accumulated. With a flurry of mouse strokes Roy put on display his formidable computer skills and, alongside them, his considerably less formidable sense of taste.
As he dialled the access numbers, and then the passwords, the digital data recorder she had installed across the telephone point tracked it all. The DDR copied everything, all the numbers and notations that made up the entry codes to the Forbidden Garden. It was some little while later, as Roy was excusing himself in order to straighten his duvet and arrange a little mood music on his radio alarm, that she unplugged the DDR and stuffed it back in her bag. Telecoms’ back door was left swinging open. Poor sap would never know.
Mission accomplished. Objective achieved and all in under two hours. Soon she would be back in the car where Freddie Payne was waiting, securing her escape route.
Freddie Payne. With his irritating smirk and molesting eyes. Dribbling all the way back with asinine comments about nerds and nookie. ‘Did the anorak put up much of a struggle, dear?’ Sneering. Demeaning her.
He was a lot like Gittings.
She disliked Freddie. She wanted to spend as little time in his company as possible. Didn’t give a damn about him freezing his balls off in the car; in fact, she positively approved of the idea.
Roy had returned from the bedroom. He’d changed out of work clothes into a wash-tight T-shirt and Levi’s and showed none of the wearied sinews and frayed ardour that clung to her husband. The eyes were bright, hopeful, not threatening or taking advantage – hell, she was the one taking advantage. As her own eyes wandered from brow to biceps, and inescapably to butt, she discovered something wonderfully spontaneous about all that fresh muscle and raw hope, something so very different from what she had known.
She thought of Payne lingering outside, wriggling in discomfort, and she smiled. Catching the moment, Roy smiled, too. Poor dear. His thoughts were entirely elsewhere.
Bless him. He had so much to learn.
‘Sorry, Freddie. Tutorial lasted longer than I expected,’ she offered in excuse as she climbed into the car. ‘And turn the heat on, will you? Christ, it’s freezing in here.’
He sulked all the way back.
In Goodfellowe’s humble opinion, it had been altogether one of his finer inspirations.
Because of his absence from the emergency meeting of the executive committee he had not been able to prevent Beryl from appointing a new treasurer-elect but Goodfellowe could, at least, oil the slippery downward path that awaits the unwary who enter upon the world of politics.
It was not the new treasurer’s fault that his name was Rodney. The name had presumably been appended long before anyone realized he had a slight speech impediment which turned all his Rs to ruination. Poor Wodney. Neither could he be blamed for the fact that he had a face that appeared not yet fully formed, even in his late twenties, with an Adam’s apple that worked overtime as if he’d just swallowed a sparrow.
In fact, he had just enjoyed cold cherry soup, one of The Kremlin’s most popular hors d’oeuvres, a middle-European pleasure he had shared with Goodfellowe and Beryl. Relations between Goodfellowe and Beryl had now changed, becoming indisputably less venomous from the moment Rankin had telephoned the chair-monster to inform her of her Member’s new significance in public life. ‘A quiet role. Behind the scenes for the moment. But in the Prime Minister’s view he’s one of the favoured few. Going places. Hold on to him.’
So Goodfellowe had invited Beryl and her new protégé to dinner at The Kremlin, where he got everything at discount, in an attempt to reestablish some form of diplomatic relations. An innocent invitation. Yet opportunities in politics are there to be grasped rather than to be studied, and if the gesture had begun as a token of good faith it was not to last, for as the evening wore on, the pouring of oil on troubled waters had been accompanied by copious quantities of alcohol, from which arose a significa
nt opportunity. At first Goodfellowe had poured to drown his own discomfort, then for his own enjoyment, but soon he had begun to exploit the advantage of playing on home turf and had corralled a steady stream of other Members to linger at their table for a glass of wine while they sang his praises and fussed over his guests. Beryl’s initial response to the adulation and alcohol was to flush gently from the top of her breasts, following which she stiffened and took a little more time over everything, but the flush on Rodney went straight to his cheeks. He wasn’t used to so much excitement and attention. Or to being out of bed after ten.
The flush on both of them increased when, after dessert, the Chief Whip himself approached to insist that they join him in a glass of dessert vodka.
‘My name’s Wodney,’ the treasurer-elect introduced himself, holding on to Rankin’s hand as a countryman clings to tradition. He only let go in order to join in a fresh round of toasts.
‘One more?’ Rankin enquired. ‘On me?’
‘I think we may have had enough,’ Beryl responded, trying to recover a dignity she felt she had somehow mislaid. The red tide had swum high up her bosom and was about to attack her throat.
‘But no, let me,’ blurted Rodney. ‘Excuse me for butting in, Bewyl, but this is a ware tweat.’
‘A what?’ enquired Goodfellowe, quietly choking.
Rodney struggled to repeat himself.
‘Yes, I think we’ve had enough,’ Beryl repeated, more stiffly.
‘I insist. Tweasuwer’s turn.’
‘Treasurer-elect,’ Beryl enunciated with feeling, as though to emphasize that elections, even the rigged ones, don’t always turn out as expected.