Thus it was that when Martha, Jo and the German were finally bundled off in vans by the Sutherland and Caithness Constabulary, they left behind them a crudely-inscribed but extremely visible message on the perimeter wall of Dounreay power station.
ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD, it read. YOU
SMELL, MONTALBAN. YOURS, VANDERDECKER.
SEVEN
Gerald—you remember Gerald—was puzzled. He squashed the plastic cup in his hand into a spiky ball and dropped it in the waste-paper basket, where it bounced off a heap of shareholders’ circulars and rolled onto the floor under his swivel chair.
Actually, Gerald wasn’t the only person in the City of London that morning who was seriously puzzled, and we only single him out because we have already been introduced to him and know what a level-headed sort of fellow he usually is. If Gerald can’t understand it, it must be odd.
It was. Something extremely unpleasant was happening to the dollar, and Gerald didn’t like it. His relationship with the dollar was rather like Heathcliffe’s relationship with Cathy, although which of them was which at any given moment it was generally difficult to decide. But if something bothered the dollar, it bothered Gerald. It was like telepathy.
At the next desk, Adrian was getting into an awful tangle with the Deutschmark, while Imogen had washed her hands of the yen and was having a quiet sit down and a cup of lemon tea. In fact, virtually all the occupants of the glass tower that housed Marshall Price Butterworth were behaving like ants whose queen has just died; there was a great deal of activity and absolutely no unified purpose. And over the whole organisation hung the dreadful possibility that if this went on much longer they were all going to have to miss lunch. It was as bad as that.
Black Thursday, as it has since come to be known, started in the usual way. The breakdown of Middle East peace talks took some of the shine off oil and vague fears on Wall Street about the possibility of the restoration of the Jacobites caused the pound to fall two cents in early trading, but good figures from the banking and insurance sector helped the FTSE to perk up a bit, and only the lost, violent souls whose business it was to follow the vertiginous progress of the Hang Seng were having anything but a perfectly average day. Then it happened. Somewhere in the ether through which the faxes hurtled invisible the notion was spawned that something too ghastly for words was about to happen to the National Lombard Bank. Nobody knew where it came from, but such instances of parthenogenesis are so commonplace in the Square Mile that nobody ever bothers to ask. Consult anyone who has had anything to do with the markets since they introduced the new technology and they will tell you that all such rumours originate with a little man who lives in a converted railway carriage in Alaska and phones them through to the newspaper seller at Liverpool Street station. It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation.
Once the rumour had started, it grew. Nobody believed a word of it, of course—nobody ever does—but as custodians of the trust of countless small investors they saw it as their duty to wipe as many millions off the price of everything as they possibly could, and so the process was set in ineluctable motion. In the short time it takes for a message to bridge the Atlantic on fibre-optic wings the rumour had hit New York, and from there it moved on, faster than light and considerably faster than thought, to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Paris, Geneva and all the other financial capitals of the world. So swift was its development and transmission that within two hours of its immaculate conception it was prompting market-makers in the Solomon Islands to get out of cowrie shells and knocking the bottom out of the reindeer futures market in Lapland.
Gerald took another long, unfriendly look at the screen, scratched his ear with his left index finger, and decided to take an early lunch. The dollar, he decided, was only doing it to attract attention to itself, and if he ignored it then it would stop playing up and return to normal. It was not, perhaps, the view that Keynes or Adam Smith would have taken, but it made about as much sense as anything else. He picked up his personal organiser, scribbled a note saying “Sell” on his scratch pad to remind him when he came back, and tottered off to the Wine Vaults.
All the time in the world, said Vanderdecker to himself through teeth clenched tight as masonry, we’ve got all the time in the world, so let’s not get all over-excited about a little puff of wind in the North Sea.
The gale howling through the shredded canvas of the mainsail was so loud that Vanderdecker was compelled to stop talking to himself and shout to himself instead. All around the
Out of the tiny corner of his eye which was still operational, Vanderdecker noticed something, and he edged out from under the insufficient shelter of the beer-barrel. “Sebastian!” he yelled, “pack it in, will you? This is neither the time nor the place.”
As soon as the first bolt of lightning had split the velvet sky, Sebastian had hurried on deck with a great lump of magnetic iron ore in his hands. He kept it specially for thunderstorms, and although he had so far failed to attract a single sky borne volt with it there was always a first time. Up to a point, Vanderdecker admired the man’s ingenuity, to say nothing of his tenacity, but he wasn’t in the mood for a swim if a baffled thunderbolt went straight down through the soles of Sebastian’s invulnerable feet and reduced the
“Take in all sail!” Vanderdecker shouted, but nobody was listening, as usual. That’s what’s wrong with this bloody ship, mused its captain as a wave broke over the side and tried to pull all his hair out, too much bloody apathy. Nobody cares if all the sails get ripped into dusters. So what? We weren’t going anywhere anyway. Only this time they were going somewhere; they were going to Geneva to see Professor Montalban, with five barrels of radioactive deodorant safely lashed down in the hold. The one time I want to get somewhere, I run into the worst storm in fifty years. Tremendous!
Just then there was a horrible rending sound; timber, grievously maltreated, giving way. The yard arm of the mainsail had cracked under the pressure of a freak gust, and its own weight was dragging it down on a hinge of splintered wood. Down it came with shattering force on the back of Sebastian van Dooming’s head, crushing him onto the deck like a swatted cranefly. Old instincts die hard; before he knew it, Vanderdecker sprang forward and knelt over his fallen crewman, shielding his crumpled body from the violence of the storm.
“Is that you, skipper?”
“It’s all right,” Vanderdecker said, as Sebastian’s large eyes slowly opened. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” Vanderdecker promised.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Sebastian exclaimed, picked himself up, and shuffled away through the driving rain, muttering something about it just not being fair. Vanderdecker shook his head and retreated back to the cover of the beer-barrel.
When, eventually, the storm had blown itself out, Vanderdecker hadn’t the faintest idea where they were. By a miracle—or sheer force of habit—the ship had stayed in one piece, but only just. The sails were in tatters, the mainmast was completely useless, and the whole structure of the vessel had been so badly knocked about that it was patently obvious that major repairs would be needed just to keep her afloat. Just my luck, Vanderdecker raged in the silence of his mind, just my perishing luck.
Ironically, there was now no wind whatsoever; the ship sat there like a rubber duck in a bath all the rest of the day, and when darkness fell the stars were clear and bright in a cloudless sky. With their help, Vanderdecker worked out more or less where he was and then faced up to an agonising decision.
The first mate’s report on the damage forced him to admit that a change of plan was inevitable; unless it was patched up pretty damn quick, the ship would be going nowhere except down. And there was only one place, in the
