something Mark liked to think about. Jez might have gone to his boss; might have done anything. And physically, at an animal level, Mark was frightened of Jez. But a strong man with a definite purpose did not over-dwell on such minor setbacks, and all Mark had done was lie low for a month or two and not do any rummaging around other people’s desks or terminals – though, because he was a strong man acting on a plan, he stuck to the plan, and kept on coming in to the office before anyone else. That way there would be no change in his behaviour when he went back to his scheme. This was how you had to think if you wanted to get things done.
After six weeks, Mark had gone back to work on his plan, and had immediately had a breakthrough. One of his old mates from back-office days now worked in Compliance, the section of the bank which monitored staff’s adherence to the various laws and codes of practice and risk-control models. Dropping in to visit him one day, Mark found him out of the room, having left behind on his desk a Post-it pad covered in numbers. The string of digits was, Mark guessed, the strongly encrypted password to something. Taking a big risk, Mark came round to the terminal and checked the log-in and found that while his colleague had a weekly changing password he also – because those passwords were impossible to remember – kept a file of passwords, to which he now, he found, had the key. It was really as easy as that, if you knew what you were doing. Mark had already found an old account which had once been used to balance trades at the end of the day and which was supposed to be for short-term, twenty-four-hour- only use; but precisely because it hadn’t been used in so long, he was now able to delete it from Compliance’s systems without any discrepancies appearing. So now he could log on to colleagues’ accounts without their knowledge, trade, park the profits (and losses, if there were any, though that was unlikely) in the no-longer- dormant account. The system was supposed to flag anything which seemed statistically anomalous – but he could use his access to Compliance to track any alerts, and sign off on them, before anyone else noticed. He was in business.
The plan was simple. Trade, not on his own account, obviously – he was no thief, thank you very much! – but on the bank’s, until he had made, say, ?50 million. Serious money. An amount which didn’t risk the bank but which was irrefutable evidence of his talents. Then, fess up. Tell them what he had done and let them draw the obvious conclusion: that he was a risk-taker with a proven talent for delivering spectacular returns, and there were fifty million reasons for giving him what he wanted – which, in the short term anyway, was Roger’s job.
Mark had this very week made his first trades. The City was going through an anxious phase, with rumours of all sorts of nasties emerging from the US derivatives market, but Mark had always believed that it was during bad weather that you found out how good a sailor you were. He had bought some derivatives taking a long – optimistic – position on the Argentine peso, measured against the yen. Within seventy-two hours, there had been a 6 per cent movement in the currency in the right direction. Thanks to the magnifying effect of derivatives and leveraging, Mark had come close to doubling this bet, which meant doubling the bank’s money. He had closed the position and hidden the profit in the no-longer-dormant account. Then he had gone on to make a big bet on the dollar, the highly out-of- fashion dollar, against a basket of other currencies, and that was going so well that he was still running an open position, and was well on his way to doubling his money again. This was not mere evidence that he might have a talent for this kind of thing: it was not an indication: it was the thing itself. This was what genius looked like.
It had been difficult getting to the position where he was able to do what he wanted. That was fine with Mark, the difficulty was part of the point. This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing most people were capable of thinking of, or capable of doing. His face, his mask, his Thomas Pink shirt and Gieves & Hawkes suit and Prada shoes might not be exceptional (though to the person who studied them, there were signs that this City uniform was more carefully put together, more thought through, than most), but the person inside them was a once-in-a- generation talent. Given that, it had to be admitted that Roger was a grievous disappointment. Mark deserved a better figure to outwit, surpass and overtake. He had once seen Roger as a worthwhile antagonist, someone who merited his efforts to outdo. But it was increasingly clear that his boss wasn’t that person. He just wasn’t up to the role of Mark’s enemy; he wouldn’t even be a footnote in his biography.
‘Bring the paperwork, would you?’ said Roger, proving the point, as he drifted in his airy, athletic way towards his own office door. For such a tall man he had an indecisive, soft manner of movement, as if his determination to get where he was going might fail him at any moment. He had a folder under his arm, which for Roger, clearly, was good enough reason to let his junior colleague carry everything else. He was just so oblivious, that was the thing about Roger which really irritated Mark – which properly got under his skin. What would it take for Roger to notice what was going on around him? A bomb under his chair? Mark wouldn’t put it past him to not-notice. Well, he’d certainly notice when his deputy turned around and told his bosses – Roger’s bosses – that he had just made fifty million quid while Roger was looking out of the window thinking about how to pay for his wife’s Botox, or whatever it was he thought about. Maybe the inside of Roger’s head was like one of those
Roger, with his thin folder, and Mark, with his armfuls of paperwork, arrived at the meeting room. Lothar was sitting there already at the head of the table, red-faced and fit-looking, his own single folder on the table in front of him, beside a large plastic glass with a bright green liquid inside, presumably one of his nasty-smelling health drinks. Lothar said what he always said at the start of meetings, one of the few words which made his German accent fully apparent:
‘Chentlemen.’ He made it sound halfway between a statement and a question.
80
Shahid had taken to sitting on the floor in the corner of his cell. He wasn’t sure why, and it wasn’t part of a conscious plan; it wasn’t as if it offered him a more interesting view of his bed and his toilet. But since he had found out that the police thought he and Iqbal were part of a plot to use stolen Czech Semtex to blow up a train in the Channel Tunnel, he had lost his earlier confidence that things were somehow going to turn out all right of their own accord. Up until now, although what was happening to him was ridiculous, he had never lost a basic trust that there was a larger justice working in his favour. Now, however, that belief was fading. The plain fact was that the police did not believe him. They thought Iqbal was a bad guy, which as far as Shahid knew might well be true – ‘You know a lot more about him than I do,’ as he kept telling all four of his interrogators, over and over again – but they also thought that he and Shahid were closely involved with each other. Instead of Iqbal, Belgian semi-nutter from more than a decade ago who self-invited, it was Iqbal-and-Shahid, co-conspirators, peas in the pod, two halves of the same naan. It turned out that his internet use was being monitored and that Iqbal had visited jihadi websites, corresponding in encrypted emails, and reading and downloading all sorts of terrorist how-to information – which was nowhere to be found on Shahid’s computer. What that meant was that Iqbal had been doing things on his own laptop. But none of that had anything to do with Shahid. It had nothing to do with him! Nothing! To do! With him! NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM!
‘OK, he’s been using my wireless broadband,’ said Shahid. ‘You know when he came to stay with me. Look at the dates. You can obviously do that. You won’t find a single jihadi site anywhere on the records before Iqbal came to stay. It’s not that hard to work out, is it? Two and two, meet four.’
‘Tell us again about the last time you saw Iqbal,’ replied the heavy, sagging policeman, who was the very worst of them for never seeming to have heard what Shahid said. And they began, all over again, again and again, the same true stories, the same interruptions. It was a small comfort that even his interrogators were beginning to look bored and tired, though not nearly as bored and tired as Shahid himself felt. On and on and round and round and now Shahid was back in his cell, sitting on the floor, which he had come to like doing as he found he lost his belief that things were going to be all right; the contact with the floor and the wall, the fact that to sit like that he had to be curled in on himself, was comforting. Everything else might not make sense, but at least gravity was still gravity.
There was a knock on the door of the cell. This in itself was not routine. When they came to take him for interrogations, they just opened the door; when they brought their terrible bland food, they just shoved a tray through the hatch. Nobody ever knocked. Shahid sat there for a moment, then said, he hoped sounding ironic,
‘Come in.’
The door opened and a policeman came in, followed by a middle-aged woman in a trouser suit, carrying a slim
