Payback (10 page)

Penny
shuffled in his seat, regretting mentioning it. But there was no way out now. ‘I get the feeling sometimes that he’s able to communicate non-verbally. Bolitho feels the same.’

Barton
turned to look at him with a mixture of disgust and disbelief, suddenly alarmed at the kind of man Penny might prove to be. He knew that professionally the academic was controversial, but was he also some kind of New Age weirdo? There was too much riding on this for Penny to turn out flaky. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that this native’s got some kind of extra-sensory perception?’

‘
It’s not so strange,’ Penny replied defensively. ‘There have been well-documented tests on Australian aborigines.’

Barton
glowered. ‘Well, don’t waste time and my money experimenting on that here!’ he snapped. ‘We need him for one thing. And one thing only. Got it?’

Penny
looked out of the window. They were passing a long building on their left. Someone had told him it had been a brothel. It seemed a highly appropriate coincidence. Never before had he felt so acutely that he was prostituting himself and his profession. But he had no choice other than to honour his Faustian pact with the man, as the only way to fund his own genuine research. ‘Got it,’ he said, clenching his fist in hidden anger.

From
the front seat the Carib caught his eye and grinned maliciously.

*

Lydia was feeling a little lost. She was now on her fifth coffee of the morning and not really tackling the paperwork accusingly covering her desk or the unopened e-mails stacking up on her screen.

The
phone rang but she just stared at the thing. She got three types of calls. From clients, with whom she had to be bouncy, pleasant and keen-sounding. From mates in the industry—some of them competitors at other agencies or media independents. Trade gossip and off-the-record note-swapping was an important source of market intelligence for her. And then there were endless ‘Hi Lydias’ from media-owner juniors trying to flog space, or meet their weekly target of calls. These she regarded as mere box tickers. Higher up the pecking order were the slightly more tailored callers crowing about the latest BARB and how they were delivering in buckets. The better ones personalised the approach: ‘I’ve got an interesting proposal for your car client.’ Or more cunning still: ‘I was chatting with your big cosmetics client yesterday, and she thought this would be a
really
great idea...’

Finally
she did take the call: some minion in Topmags trying to tell her about a new weekly magazine targeting the over-fifties. With a small scream, she slammed the receiver down, burying her head in her hands.

Philip
had noticed her mood and eventually made an excuse to come in to her office. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘You’re huffing and puffing, and you’ve just been fidgeting around all morning.’

He
was trying to help, but what could she say to him? That she had perversely chosen to make her living out of encouraging indiscriminate mass consumption, by supporting an economic system that was trashing the world and all that lived in it. That—as usual—there was no man in her life. That her head had been crammed full since childhood with nightmare images of animal slaughter and cruelty. That even at her age, her parents’ broken marriage still made
her
feel guilty. Or that any day now she would be called on to fire-bomb one of her own father’s labs?

Instead
she simply shrugged her shoulders, knowing full well that these were things she barely understood herself.

The
Warriors call had not yet come, but she had since met again with the team selected by Sam Thrower, going over the detail of the raid time and time again. No one could take away the maps, building plans or photographs. Everything had to be committed to memory. It had all left her edgy and afraid. She had never been as brave as she seemed to the outside world, even as a headstrong child.

Her
screen beeped as a new urgent e-mail message added itself to her list of twenty or more still unread. Casually she moved the mouse and clicked on it. The mail was simply a reminder of an office function that evening. One of the popular agency suits was having a leaving party and the serious drinking was to begin around eight at the local pub. Was she going?

She
certainly needed to relax, and knew that Thrower would give them at least twelve hours’ notice for the raid. A booze-up sounded good. Tapping in an ‘accept’ and sending it, she forced herself into a more positive mood and launched into her work. She had a client, Philip’s only major client and his career meal-ticket, threatening to consolidate all his group media buying into one of the media independents. This was a growing trend in the market. The independents did not offer advertising services—creative work and production—just media buying. And by specialising and using the muscle of handling huge budgets, they could obtain amazing deals. They did have counter-balancing weaknesses, however, which could negate any financial savings: because there was only an arm’s-length relationship with the creatives and account handlers—the suits—their media planning could be weaker, and some clever buying ideas lost. But when hard-pressed clients looked at price alone, and retailers generally did, the independents were hard to beat.

As
a result she now faced a simple test. To better the leading media independent on a £6 million DIY store TV campaign planned over spring and into early summer. March to June is the heaviest period for TV advertising after the pre-Christmas run September to November, and retail the second biggest spending sector, after food. A very tough, competitive market.

No
time like the present, she pluckily told herself. Stabbing at the key pad, she called Metropolis, the new sales contractor for the recently combined London, south, south-east and Channel Island regions. This territory accounted for almost a third of the homes in the country. They were powerful. And they knew it.

‘
Mike, hi. Lydia here. How’s the new baby? Getting any sleep?’

‘
I sleep at my desk. We’re booked solid so far ahead, I barely have a job here.’ Like a feral cat, he had already in just those fleeting seconds scented that she was in trouble.

‘
So if I was looking for 1,500 ratings over sixteen weeks...?’

He
was surprised. This was a serious budget after all, and firmly put her, not him, in the negotiating driver’s seat. ‘Oh, I’d prop a couple of matchsticks under the old eyelids for that kind of money,’ he replied, his tone signalling his willingness to deal.

When
she had finished with him, with a brilliant fifteen per cent discount under her belt, she got up to grab another coffee and stood chatting for ten minutes with a girlfriend in the department, one of the media researchers. The other woman had a boyfriend problem, whilst—as Lydia ironically remarked—
hers
was a no boyfriend problem. Feeling a little better, she got back to her desk to find a frightened-looking Philip hovering.

‘
I just took a call for you from Mike at Metropolis,’ he blurted. ‘He was just clarifying something on our DIY spring campaign you’d just been agreeing with him. He’s got the idea that we’ve got £6 million to spend with him.’

She
blanched. ‘And what did you say?’

‘
I just said that I’d get you to call him.’

Closing
her eyes, the colour slowly drained back. ‘Good man.’

Her
relief told him all he needed to know, and he was appalled. ‘Lydia, what are you doing? You know the budget’s for a national campaign. No more than £2 million should go to Metropolis, even if we weight up London.’

‘
Never mind. Leave this one to me. All right?’

He
snorted. ‘I know what you’re going to try, and it’s suicide. You won’t get away with it!’

All
this could mean was that she was agreeing the phoney inflated spend with him, on the AB Deadline, to get the kind of discount she would never otherwise have got near to with a piddling £2 million campaign. Then, very late in the day, just before Easter, she planned to spring the news on them that the client had been forced to slash the budget for some impeccable reason—a warehouse fire, or some such lie. Then she would use all her own, and all FKT’s goodwill and future spending potential and lard them with ‘jam tomorrow’ arguments in an attempt to cling on to the same level of discount.

‘What will you say to him?’

‘
I don’t know what I’ll say. All right? All I do know is that I’ve just done the impossible. And it might be enough to keep this balls-aching, whining client happy.
Your
client. And you in a job, Philip,’ she snapped. Retail was always a pain. ‘Now get out of my face on this. It’s a risk, I agree, but one I had to take.’

Philip
disappeared, looking hurt, leaving Lydia herself now afraid of what she had done without any further prompting from him. Damn it, she had only done it to save his ungrateful neck. It was all so unfair. As ever, Lydia was proving herself nothing like as tough as she seemed to others. She had inherited her father’s chutzpah and temper, but not his thick skin.

This
time she got up and went to the women’s room. Not because she needed to, but to get some space. The place was empty and she stood looking at herself in the mirror, under the bright, harsh lights. She looked terrible. Pale, tired and waspish. What was the point in worrying, she tried gamely to ask herself. After all, she could any day now incinerate herself accidentally, arming the incendiary device. Or find herself behind bars as a common criminal. That at least made the thought of a rocketing over her Metropolis bluff a little more bearable.

It
also made that evening’s office booze-up suddenly more appealing. What the hell. Who knows? She just might forget all her good intentions and, for once, succumb to the groping, closing-time advances of one of the less obnoxious agency Lotharios. Everybody else around her seemed to be screwing someone or other in the place. ‘The agency that lays together, stays together’, was the company’s 1980s motto, and that at least had not changed much. Better yet, there was that new creative whom she definitely fancied, and who had smiled at her on the stairs earlier. And it had been such a long time.
Too
bloody long.

*

As he waited for his colleague to come down, Perry Mitchell sipped his tea, lost in thought, watching the grey Thames through the green-tinted, bomb-proof glass of the terrace at MI6’s headquarters. So much had changed since his days in Queen Anne’s Gate, and later Century House. In summer, sharp-suited staff now sat outside sipping cool drinks, like embarrassed extras in some glossy American TV soap opera. He had even seen tourists taking photographs of them, as guides on open-topped buses crossing Vauxhall Bridge pointed out the two spy centres. MI6 and MI5 now glower at each other across the Thames. In Service vernacular, ‘the other side’ has always referred to north or south of the river.

‘
It must be fun being retired, Perry.’ The young officer’s voice bounced Mitchell out of his reveries. Neil Gaylord was a liaison man with the boffins in the Defence Intelligence Staff’s Scientific and Technical Directorate, and one of the few officers in MI6 with a science degree. He had obtained it while serving with the Royal Marines, the same place he obtained his broken nose as unit boxing champion. With a name like Gaylord, he always joked, there had been no choice but to learn how to fight. Here at Vauxhall Cross he reported in through the Director of Requirements and Production, number two to the chief, Allan Calder. His remit was Counter-Proliferation, and liaison with the Cabinet Office’s Proliferation Counter-Intelligence Group.

‘
Semi
-retirement’s a wonderful thing. What is it you call people like me now? Re-treads? Still. Time now to catch up on all that gardening I always missed.’

Gaylord
smiled weakly at the thought of Mitchell anywhere near a potting shed. ‘So. Get here with your bus pass, did you?’

‘
Life in the fast lane to life in the bus lane.’ Mitchell did not stand but waved Gaylord to sit down—subtly making clear his retained senior status. ‘How’s Mary and the baby?’

‘
Asleep mostly, when I leave—and get home.’

‘
You should get seconded to GCHQ and join the trade union.’

‘
Handy for the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Perhaps I will!’

They
joked and gossiped for a few minutes longer before Mitchell hauled them back to why he was there. He thought he had detected a patronising trace element of kindness from the younger man, as if he were talking to some retired buffer as a favour to make him still feel important.

‘Now. We private sector wealth creators can’t waste time jawing with junior civil servants, you know. After all, your time is taxpayers’ money,’ Mitchell said in mock protest. ‘I mean, just think how many more hip replacements could have been paid for if you’d stayed in your perfectly serviceable Waterloo slum high rise, eh?’

The
smile in return was a little more watery than before, knowing that Mitchell had meant something of what he had just said. ‘As you say. Let’s get down to work. Shall we stay here, or go up to my office?’