the bang of an electric lock, disappeared into a room behind the guichet. Within a very short space of time a spruce young man, close enough to the striped-trousered official of Ned’s imagination to make him smile, came through into the banking hall.
‘How do you do, sir?’ he said in English, extending a hand. ‘Pierre Gossard. Would you like to come through?’
Ned found himself in an expensively furnished office whose main features were a Louis Quinze desk and two matching chairs. Gossard sat down behind the desk and pointed to one of the chairs.
‘Just one or two formalities,’ he said, tapping into the keyboard of a desktop computer which was perched incongruously on the heavily ornamented desk. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to write for me the opening password phrase?’
He passed over a compliment slip and Ned wrote down ‘Simon Says’ and handed the slip across the desk to Gossard who glanced at it briefly, looked at his computer screen and nodded. He passed the paper back to Ned.
‘And the secondary phrase?’
Ned wrote ‘This is a stick-up’ and passed it over again. Gossard smiled thinly and pushed the compliment slip into a small metal box.
‘Security paper,’ he explained. ‘It is no more. Well, everything seems to be satisfactory, my dear sir. How may I help you?’
‘Well, firstly I’d like to know how much is in my account.’
‘Mm-hm …‘ Gossard typed at the computer. ‘You understand that since the account is linked to leading share indices on the European bourses I can only give you the balance as from close of trading on Friday. Quite a substantial sum has accrued over the past thirty years.’
Ned nodded as if talk of share indices, bourses and substantial sums was a matter of everyday conversation to him. Gossard wrote a figure down on a fresh compliment slip and handed it to Ned who looked down.
‘That’s in Swiss Francs?’ he said gulping slightly.
‘Just so,’ said Gossard.
Ned swallowed again and did a rapid calculation in his head. Roughly two and half francs to a pound. Good heavens.
‘As for what I would like to do with the account,’ he said as naturally as he could manage. ‘I should like a little time to think. Perhaps we can meet again on Friday? You don’t need anything else from me, I take it?’
‘No indeed, sir. Since your account is as old as it is, it does not fall under new disclosure rules. But it is not old enough to qualify for inspection under the recent Jewish reparation schemes.’
‘Excellent,’ said Ned. ‘Friday morning, eleven o’clock?’
‘I shall look forward to seeing you, sir.
Ned was still trembling when he reached his suite at the Hotel D’Angleterre. He sat on the balcony sipping coffee and looking out over the lake. He watched a rainbow shimmering in the spray of the fountain.
Staring into the rainbow, Ned wept.
‘Oh, Babe. Why aren’t you here with me?’
He looked down at a hotel notepad on which he had jotted a set of numbers.
‘It is indeed a substantial sum,’ he whispered to himself, the tears dropping down onto the paper. ‘Even with the price of a cup of coffee being what it is today, three hundred and twenty-four million pounds is still a substantial sum. Oh, Babe, there is such a thing as Justice. Truly there is.
IV. Thoroughly Thought Through
Simon Cotter arrived in England by private plane in the autumn of 1999. His reputation for financial adventuring preceded him.
There was not an. ambitious young person in Europe who did not want to catch the attention of this remarkable buccaneer. No one rode the dot.com bubble harder, funding young, energetic and ambitious dreamers whose ventures, when floated on the European technology exchanges, made opening valuations that caused the eyes of seasoned traders to pop. Some said that the swollen, iridescent membrane of e-commerce would soon burst, but for the moment no one was soaring higher than Simon Cotter of CotterDotCom. The doomsayers insisted that the balloon was given its stratospheric lift by hot air and that the world was growing giddy with altitude sickness. The faithful maintained that the venture was fired by a true spirit of innovation and enterprise and would last beyond the lifetime of the sceptics.
Cotter was not yet forty, but the gossip had it that he owned twenty-five million for every year of his life. A website tracked his estimated fortune against the fluctuation of the markets, one day in October it showed him earning four million pounds sterling in just eight hours of trading. The Man of the Millennium had arrived and, to the excitement of the British press, he was about to make his home in England, the land – some claimed – of his birth.
He was unmarried and said to exude a magnetic appeal that had men and women alike gasping and moaning with admiration. Cynics asserted that a dead sea- slug with that kind of money and power would radiate charisma and sex-appeal. That isn’t necessarily so, it was pointed out to them – look at Bill Gates. Not all that is gold, glitters.
That no one knew where Simon Cotter had come from with such indecent speed added greatly to his mystery. One moment the world was Cotter free, the next he was bigger than Harry Potter. Poems were written on that very subject, taking advantage of the happy accident of the rhyme.
The man was rumoured to be able to speak nine languages and play an unbeatable game of backgammon. The French believed that he was French, but the Germans, Italians and Austrians also claimed him for their own. The Swiss pointed to his head offices outside Geneva, not five kilometres from where the World Wide Web itself had been devised and declared Cotter to be Swisser than a yodel. Others tapped the sides of their noses and whispered gravely about the Russian mafia, Colombian cartels and other dark and dangerous corners of the world. Geneva might be the birthplace of the World Wide Web, they said, but it was also the world’s financial laundromat. Where there’s brass, there’s muck, they said. It can’t last, they said. It’s brightest just before the dusk, they said. Wiser heads were silent and disdained to take any notice of the mutter in the gutter. Talk it was that pushed prices up and talk that pulled them down again. Any fool could talk. Prattle and tattle were cheap and getting cheaper. What was this telephony revolution, with its faxes, pagers, cellular and satellite phones, email, intranets and real-time video- conferencing but a cheap and faster way to chatter and gossip and jabber? If it was more than that, then it could keep for the moment. Give us time to think, they said. We who wait on the platform may arrive later than those that jump aboard the speeding train, but we’ve a better chance of a good seat and a restful journey. We get there in the end, sounder in wind and limb. Only bandwagons are to be jumped upon, and bandwagons always crash at the first dangerous corner.
Cotter too kept his own counsel. His spokesmen would announce with great puff and pizzazz the latest bright young venture that CDC was funding and he might from time to time attend the launch of a favoured new dot.com enterprise in person, but the Robespierre of the Digital Revolution himself gave no interviews and threw out no theories for the world to chew over and tear apart. With his dark hair, his beard and the sunglasses that never left his face, the press had other nicknames for him too. The CyberSaviour they called him and the Jesus of Cool.
When he did, uncharacteristically, reveal to a London financial journalist at one of his company launches in Lausanne that he would soon be coming home, England sighed with pleasure and pride. He was immediately offered tickets to the Dome for Millennial Eve, the membership of four clubs, accounts with a dozen tailors and the opportunity to be interviewed on Channel Four by Chris Evans. This last offer he turned down.
‘I’m really so uninteresting,’ he emailed to the producer. ‘You’d be much better off with somebody else. Believe me, I’d only bore you.’
He was not believed and the crush of press waiting to meet him at Heathrow would have gratified a pop star.
Amongst the Britons who watched the footage and listened to the comment and analysis that spilled out in the media over the next few weeks were many who sat down immediately to compose letters to him, explaining their ideas for world-beating new internet sites or simply begging for money, employment or a charitable donation.
The reactions of three different individuals are of particular interest, however.
Ashley Barson-Garland MP, QC, had recently won the curious Commons lottery that gives the right to backbenchers to try and push their own Private Member’s Bill through parliament. Barson-Garland had been very keen to sponsor new legislation that would prove his party’s commitment to the family. He knew that in the next election, whenever it came, each party would attempt to represent itself as the true champion of Family Values. He believed that, since his party was almost certain to lose that election, he could do himself a great deal of good by making a name for himself as the Tories’ most prominent spokesman for the Family Agenda. When the dust of defeat had settled and the present leader had gone, as go he must, the Tories would look to someone like Ashley to lead them to victory in 2005, which he had for so long marked down as the year that would see him installed in Downing Street.
The Bill he had drafted called for the strictest laws yet on the control of the internet. All British Service Providers would be held accountable in law for any unseemly traffic that passed through their pipelines. Barson-Garland called for an all-embracing firewall to be built around the island to keep the British family safe from the ‘tide of filth’ that threatened to ‘engulf’ the ‘young and vulnerable’ and other ‘at-risk members of the community’. (He had long ago overcome any scruples about using clichés. They worked. For some extraordinary reason, they worked and only a fool would consider himself above their use.) Under the terms of his proposed Internet Service Providers Act, an independent agency would be set up arid given the right to sweep all email randomly, much as police had the right to point speedguns at road traffic. Anyone who opposed such legislation might regard themselves as a friend of liberty, but Barson-Garland would demonstrate that in reality they were nothing less than enemies of the Family. Only those with suspect agendas or something to hide could possibly object to the purification of cyberspace. Ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens would welcome such a move.
He did not expect his Bill to be passed into law, Private Members’ Bills almost always failed, but it was a way to plant a (patriotic) flag in the territory of family and to ‘force the agenda’. The Labour government already attempted to prove its family credentials by talking of family tax credits, child income allowances and other mechanisms that provoked yawns even from those who benefited directly from them. With his Bill, Barson-Garland had staked a claim that would force New Labour to play or pay. If they opposed him, he could make great political capital of their folly.
The middle-class tabloids were already on his side. Ashley Barson-Garland’s Great National Firewall appealed to the ‘instincts’ (as they preferred to call bigotry and prejudice) of the ‘vast majority’ who worried about ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers and ‘rampant’ Euro federalism. What was the internet after all, but backdoor cultural immigration of the most pernicious kind? Children
