Smart Moves Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  SMART MOVES

  Adrian Magson

  For Ann. My own Lilly-Mae who makes me believe in myself.

  ONE

  I never thought of guys having bad hair days.

  Bad razor days, sure. Relentless stubble and scraped skin is no joke – try kissing my grandmother. Bad head days, too, from too much of the wrong kind of booze. But that’s commonplace for anybody with a real life. Some problems, though, can’t be overcome with a slap of skin balm or a handful of pills.

  ‘You’re laying me off?’ The words dropped into the room like a stun grenade and rolled across the carpet. I stared at my boss, Niall Dunckley, in disbelief.

  ‘Sign of the times, Jake,’ he replied flatly. ‘Sorry.’ I wondered if that was the beginning of a smile threatening to edge past his bloodless lips. They went well with his fish eyes and the strands of lank hair carefully arranged over his balding head. The overall effect gave him the appearance of an undertaker’s assistant. The kind who stays late at work for all the wrong reasons.

  ‘Why?’

  Pathetic response, I know. But being laid off is having someone say, ‘We don’t need you.’ Or, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ Or, ‘We found someone we like better.’

  Even in this business – what am I saying, especially in this business – it’s akin to a death sentence. A bullet behind the ear. A quiet visit from a bad person on a dark night. I mean, I didn’t know for sure if that had ever happened, but people talk. You hear stuff.

  I should explain. I have this oddball kind of job; I work for a side-line operation in a multi-divisional business called HP&P. Nobody knows or cares what the initials stand for, or precisely what the company’s core business is. But I know it has its fingers in a great many pies from civil engineering to shipping to nightclubs – and allegedly, a few things in between.

  It’s the in-betweens which we’re encouraged not to ask about.

  Not that I’m in that sector. I’m a project troubleshooter, and it’s my job to solve problems in faraway places. A gentle talk here, a nudge there, a discreet payment if something gets stuck in the pipeline, that kind of thing. The company operates on a time-sensitive schedule, and delays are unhelpful to the bottom line. As are glitches caused by local officials trying to muscle in and cause problems for their own ends.

  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t use physical pressure – I don’t have to. A sweetener with a local regional governor or a union boss usually does the trick, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. If that doesn’t work, I make a report to Niall Dunckley at HQ in London, and that’s the last I hear of it. Because by then all the talking and offers and mild threats of lay-offs will have been exhausted and it’s time to call in the big guns and for me to catch a plane out. I don’t actually know what the big guns are, but that’s where I’m encouraged to turn and look the other way.

  The job pays well and I rarely get to follow up on a previous visit. If I do, it’s usually bad news because the project got canned and there’s a lot of name-calling going on. I’m just there to see that everybody knows whose fault it really is: theirs.

  Over the three years I’ve been doing this I’ve managed to refrain from asking too many questions. It’s one of the main requirements of my job description. Come to think of it, it’s the only requirement. Don’t ask, don’t nose, don’t look.

  And because I find it easier to take the money and not rock the boat, I’ve gone along with it. My bad, as the kids say. Still not sure what that means but it sounds about right. It doesn’t mean I’m dead from the neck up and haven’t occasionally put two and two together and made seven. Being suspicious and doing something about it isn’t always that simple. Or wise.

  My job might, at least in some parts of the civilized world, be regarded as slightly unethical. The use of money – slush funds as some people like to call it – to solve problems is never on the up-and-up. Sure, it’s been going on since time began and will continue. Bungs, bribes, emoluments, skims, unscheduled performance bonuses – call them whatever the hell you want – do serve a purpose. They oil the wheels.

  In that sense, I’m a bag man.

  The first time I thought my job was a little unusual was a year ago. Until then it had been pretty much the routine: get on a plane, talk to people, find out what the problems are and look for a solution. It meant asking questions of local representatives and negotiating our end of the argument to get things moving. If I couldn’t get agreement there and then, I’d make a POH – project-on-hold – report and head for home. The rest was up to Dunckley and his management team. The big guns.

  But I’d never been asked to deliver a package before.

  This was an envelope to go to Denver, Colorado. Actually, I never made Denver city itself, just the airport arrivals hall. I’d been met by a sweaty guy in a suit, clutching a shiny briefcase. He looked stressed. A lawyer, I figured, since most lawyers wear stress like a second skin and these were the people I seemed to meet a lot: men in suits and shiny cars, with that money smell mixed with a vague hint of effluent. He handed me a business card which matched the photocopy in my pocket and, in return, I gave him an envelope, before making my way up the stairs to the departures lounge for the return trip, as per instructions.

  As I turned to look back down the stairs, I caught a flash view of Sweaty Suit being hustled away by two police officers, one on each arm. He didn’t look happy. For some reason I was relieved he didn’t look back and shout, ‘There he goes!’

  When I got back to the office I relayed this incident to Dunckley. He listened, made a note or two on a lined pad, then gave me a sideways look before saying it was probably a private or local issue and to forget all about it. End of.

  Strange stuff like that had happened on a few other occasions, and each time I’d come close without being picked up. It was like I was charmed. Eventually I came to the conclusion that, whereas delivering these documents seemed to be an OK job, collecting them was a whole other issue.

  Then a guy doing a similar job in another division disappeared. Just like that. His name was John Baddeley and we’d met a few times like ships in transit, one of us leaving, one arriving. It took me a few days to realise I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks, although that wasn’t surprising because he travelled as extensively as I did. When his desk was taken over by another suit I asked where Baddeley was, but the new guy shrugged and said he didn’t know and looked at me like I should go away. I asked around, but nobody knew a thing – not even the people he worked with. In fact, it was obvious that lips had been zipped and I should stop poking my nose in.

  Two days later, I chanced on a news item about a body found floating in the river by Tower Bridge. A suicide, it was speculated, or a drunk who’d wandered too close t
o the embankment. It happens all the time along that stretch of London’s waterway; once in, with the cold and the currents, people don’t always come out alive.

  It was John Baddeley.

  I asked around some more, and before I knew it I was being marched into Dunckley’s office and being told to mind my own. Accidents, he’d said heavily, sometimes happened, and Baddeley had been reportedly stressed of late and must have found it all too much.

  ‘It’s a dangerous place, the river,’ he’d pointed out unnecessarily, ‘especially with a gutful of booze and a confused state of mind.’ He made it sound no worse than tripping and falling into a puddle on a wet Friday night.

  ‘Confused?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Dunckley’s voice was a snap, and he gave me his best fish-eyed look. His demeanour took on a whole new level of cold, and I sensed something I hadn’t really associated with him before: he might look like a creep but there was something about him that suddenly told me he’d be a dangerous man to cross. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe I’d never had cause to. As if to reinforce the message, a stranger came in and stood by the door. I hadn’t seen Dunckley call anyone, so I guessed he had a panic button beneath his desk. A quick flick of the foot sideways and help was on the way. The newcomer wore a smart, purple-toned security uniform but that was the only civilized thing about him. The rest was all bunched muscle and scar tissue and a wave of aggression coming off him like electricity.

  ‘Actually, I don’t.’ I turned back to Dunckley; it was easier on the nerves than looking at King Kong. I nodded backwards. ‘Who’s this?’

  Dunckley sighed and ignored my question. ‘You do good work for us, Jake. Always on time, never any issues, no questions asked. Until now, anyway.’ He leaned on his desk and stared hard at me. ‘Don’t go spoiling a fine record.’ He pointed at the door. ‘Now go about your business – our business – and forget the rest.’

  The suited primate held the door open for me, and I took it as my signal to leave. But the way he leaned towards me and sniffed the air as I passed was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced.

  It hadn’t taken a genius to confirm that this weird division I worked for was connected with something very unusual and not entirely above board.

  And now I’d discovered they didn’t need me.

  TWO

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Dunckley said, bringing me back to the present. ‘Other divisions have had to lose personnel, too.’ He shuffled some papers into a folder. My personnel folder, I read upside-down. He must have been going through it in the moments before giving me the deep six.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ I queried, waiting for some sign of regret, a tiny glimmer of conscience which might help us both overlook the times we hadn’t seen eye to eye, when the grit of corporate life had insinuated itself between us and worked up a sore spot of cold-eyed politeness. It hadn’t been often, but it had happened.

  It was like trying to outstare a dead sheep. He shifted his gaze to somewhere above my right shoulder and cleared his throat. ‘It’s the economic downturn, I’m afraid. It’s hit us all.’

  Economic what? Now, I might play three wise monkeys and spend my time sitting in airport lounges waiting for flights to God knows where, and therefore be slightly divorced from the day-to-day business, but even I knew HP&P was rolling in cash. Strike that: Dunckley and his business partners were rolling in it. Financially speaking, the business was shitting banknotes. True, I didn’t know where it was all coming from, but then, I knew not to ask.

  ‘We’re restructuring,’ he continued smoothly. ‘I’m afraid your job is no longer seen as viable. All that travelling around the world… Computers are taking over and face-to-face is no longer the way to go.’

  ‘It’s not?’ That was news to me. Hadn’t he said not long ago that they were pleased with my work? Besides, how could a computer deal with a local union boss in the Lower Amazon, for heaven’s sake? Or face down a chieftain in the Upper Niger river basin who was threatening to bring out his workers on strike if they – meaning he – didn’t get a nice fat bung? Some of the places I had to visit didn’t even have electricity most of the time, and any computers left lying around pretty soon went missing, courtesy of the local bad boys.

  ‘No. Lower costs, faster turnaround, that’s the new maxim,’ he blathered on. ‘Speedier solutions are needed these days to keep ahead of the competition.’ He stood up and marched over to the window, on the outside of which hung a box filled with a line of tulips, where he rocked back and forth on his heels like a general reviewing his troops. ‘We’re moving over to secure servers and encrypted systems, and we’ve decided to invest in a big video conferencing facility. It should be up and running within three weeks.’ He turned and smiled as if he knew one end of a video conferencing facility from the other, and stretched his neck out from his collar trying to make himself appear taller. ‘As for your job, we’re going over to local agents; they’re cheaper and… well, less concerned about project-on-hold reports, if you know what I mean. It’s a new world, Jake, and we need to take a tougher line with contractors and local officials or we lose business. And we can’t afford to do that. What can I say?’

  Sorry, Jake, might have been a start. I take it all back, Jake. Just kidding, Jake. We’d be completely screwed without you, Jake.

  I don’t believe you, was what I wanted to yell at him. But I did believe him, which was the problem. I could sense it in Dunckley’s voice and see it in his face. Somewhere along the line I’d asked one too many questions, voiced one too many concerns and, as far as Dunckley and HP&P were concerned, my time was up. I consoled myself with the thought that I was at least being offered a free walk out of the building rather than a swim in the river.

  ‘What do I tell Susan?’ I managed to mutter. It was more to myself than him. I mean, how do you tell your wife that you’ve hit the buffers, job-wise? Some might take it reasonably well, after the initial shock. Pick up the pieces and soldier on. But Susan didn’t do soldiering, on or otherwise. She had a predilection for order and ‘everything in its place’ verging on the obsessive, and that included our individual jobs: mine with HP&P and hers as co-owner of two – or was it three now? – high-end shops catering to the wealthy fashionistas of West London. She’d been doing it since before we met, and was clearly successful and enjoyed it. What she didn’t quite enjoy was my job, which had caused the occasional grit in the ointment.

  I wasn’t one for unnecessary change and my job hadn’t been a major issue, most of the time, as far as I could recall. Well, apart from one time when I’d arrived home a day late, and she’d swung round to continue a defensive argument I should never have started. A meat tenderizer was something never to bring to a dispute, not unless you were an underworld gang enforcer. But Susan’s arm had swung out under the weight of the implement, and centrifugal force had done the rest. Explaining away the grid-pattern bruise on my face to clients had been a week-long nightmare of embarrassment.

  Now this. How would I confront her with such a bombshell? There sure as hell wasn’t an easy way, short of lobbing a message tied to a brick through the front window. Whatever I did, she’d go ape-shit.

  Dunckley said nothing, but began to look shifty, as though this was a topic he didn’t want to get into. He clearly preferred to be on the more secure ground of economic restructuring and downsizing, of corporate planning and system implementation or even sending big guns into dark places to unstick projects-on-hold. Much more his cup of tea than giving some poor sap the elbow and having his wife and kids with no roof over their heads. Not that I had kids – but the principle was the same.

  It reminded me that he wasn’t without problems of his own, family-wise. Office gossip had it that not long ago his eighteen-year-old daughter, Melanie, had gone over the wire one night to live life to the full in sunny California. A week later his wife had scarpered to Ireland with her night-school art teacher to join a retro-Sixties hippie commune
. Sensible woman, in my view; fancy waking up every morning to see Dunckley’s comb-over crawling across the pillow towards you.

  ‘I don’t need to stress how important it is that you remember the confidentiality agreement you signed when you joined us,’ he reminded me. To make certain, he held up a copy. It promised fire, brimstone and blood if I ever breathed a syllable about my work. I’d thought it a bit over the top at the time, but hardly worth worrying about, so I’d never questioned it. I wasn’t in the habit of discussing work outside the office, anyway.

  But now things were different. I knew stuff. And Dunckley was reminding me of the dangers of talking out of school. Jesus, I’d been dumb. And now it had come back to bite me where it hurt most.

  ‘I’ll try to remember,’ I said grudgingly, my mind on the gorilla in the suit.

  ‘Don’t just try, Jake – do it.’ The bloodless lips snapped together, and I felt a chill touch the room. Dunckley could do sinister at the drop of a hat, and I wondered if he’d ever had to carry through with a threat himself. He wasn’t big but he had the look of someone who could be mean if he chose. I decided I didn’t want to find out. I was turning to leave when he added, ‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Jake. Don’t even think of blabbing about what you did for us. Especially to the authorities.’

  Bloody hell that was a wide field. ‘I was an errand-boy, that’s all. Why should the authorities be interested?’

  He rolled his eyes. It gave him the platform he’d been waiting for. ‘Don’t pretend,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t ever wonder what happened once you put in a POH report.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ I had, of course, but beyond reporting one it had never been my problem.

  ‘Right. So you think if someone started throwing their weight around and making demands above what we’d agreed they got a mild telling-off? A strongly-worded letter?’ His mouth curled in derision at my apparent innocence.