Iain Banks - The Business

Additional cooks, servants, entertainers and so on decamped from a series of coaches and minibuses. I spotted Miss Heggies at one point, surveying everything that was going on from a third-floor gallery window. She looked like a proud, solitary old lioness whose territory had just been invaded by about three hundred loping hyenas.

Our own security people swarmed over the place, chunkily crew-cut and sober-suited to a man and a woman, most of them in dark glasses, all of them with a little wire connecting one ear and their collar and muttering into concealed lapel mikes. You could tell the ones new enough never to have encountered Blysecrag before by the sheen of sweat on their foreheads and their look of barely controlled professional horror. With all its lifts, cellars, walkways, passages, stairways, galleries, dumb-waiters, laundry-handling wardrobe hoists and complexly interconnecting rooms, securing the house in any meaningful sense was simply impossible. The best they could do was sweep the grounds, be grateful there was never less than a two-kilometre distance between the high wall that bordered the entire estate and the house itself, and try hard not to get lost.

Prince Suvinder Dzung of Thulahn arrived from Leeds-Bradford airport by car. Twenty years earlier, the Prince had lost his wife of a few months in a helicopter crash in the Himalayas, which was why he didn't arrive in one of the machines now. His transport was from Uncle Freddy's collection: a Bucciali Tav 12, which must count as one of the world's more outrageous-looking cars, having a hood — or bonnet, as we'd say here — about the same length as a Mini. Shortly after sending the e-mail to Brussels that would dispatch somebody Freddy and I trusted to Silex in Motherwell, I joined Uncle Freddy on the front steps to greet our guest of honour.

'Frederick! Ah, and the lovely Kate! Ah, I am so glad to see you both! Kate: as ever, you take my breath away!'

'Always gratifying to be compared with a blow to the solar plexus, Prince.'

'Hello hello hello!' Uncle Freddy shouted, apparently of the opinion that the Prince had become suddenly deaf and deserved greeting in triplicate. The Prince accepted a hearty handshake from a beaming Uncle Freddy and imposed a prolonged hug upon me before planting a moist kiss on my right middle finger. He fluttered his eyelids at me and smiled. 'You are still right-handed, my lovely Miss Telman?'

I pulled my hand away and put it behind my back to wipe it. 'In a fight I'm a southpaw, Prince. How nice to see you again. Welcome back to Blysecrag.'

'Thank you. It is like coming home.' Suvinder Dzung was a marginally tubby but light-footed fellow of a little more than average height with glisteningly smooth dark olive skin and a rakish, perfectly black moustache, which matched his glossily waved and exquisitely sculpted hair. Educated at Eton, he spoke without a trace of a sub-continental accent unless he was profoundly drunk, and when in England dressed in Savile Row's conservative best. His major affectation, apart from being a bit of a show-off on the dance floor, was his collection of gold rings, which glittered with emeralds, rubies and diamonds.

'Come in, come in, come in, old chap!' Uncle Freddy said, still apparently addressing a triumvirate of princes and waving his shepherd's crook so enthusiastically that it nearly felled the Prince's private secretary, a small, pale, beady-eyed fellow called B. K. Bousande, who was standing at the Prince's side holding a briefcase. 'Oops! Sorry, BK!' Uncle Freddy laughed. 'This way, Prince, we have your usual suite.'

'My dearest Kate,' Suvinder Dzung said, bowing to me and winking as he turned to go. 'See you later, alligator.'

I laughed. 'In a while, Cayman Isler.'

He looked confused.

'Well, thank God we didn't put much money into Russia!' Uncle Freddy exclaimed. He passed the port to me and picked up his cigar from the ashtray, pulling on it and rolling the smoke round his mouth. 'What a fucking débâcle!'

'I was under the impression we put quite a lot of money into Russia,' Mr Hazleton said, from the other side of the table, opposite me. He watched as I poured myself a small measure. I had permitted myself a relatively unphallic Guantanamo cigar along with my coffee.

The evening's fun was barely begun: we had been promised the run of the casino later, where we would each be given a stack of chips, plus there would be dancing. So far there had been no mention of anything as vulgar as our buying Suvinder Dzung's country off him. I handed the port to the Prince.

There were eleven of us around a small dining-table in a modest room set off Blysecrag's cavernous main dining room. We had been many more for dinner, our fellow diners having included our titled photographer, a television presenter, a couple of Italian opera singers — one soprano, one tenor — a French cardinal, a USAF general, a pair of boyish pop stars I'd heard of but didn't recognise plus an older rock singer I did, an American conductor, a cabinet minister, a fashionable young black poet, a couple of lords, one duke and two dons; one from Oxford and one from Chicago.

After pudding, we had excused ourselves to talk business, taking the Prince with us, though as I say not much business had actually been talked so far. All this to impress Suvinder. I wondered if we weren't appearing a little desperate. Maybe we were anticipating problems during the negotiating sessions, which would start tomorrow.

There were a few of our own junior people present, too, lurking quietly in the background, plus a couple of the Prince's servants, and — standing with his feet spread and his hands clasped in the shadows behind his boss — the taut and bulky presence of Mr Walker, Hazleton's chief of security.

'Well, we did,' Uncle Freddy told Hazleton, 'depending on what you call a lot of money, but the point is we put in a lot less than most people and a hell of a lot less than a few. Proportionately, we're ahead when the pain's shared out.'

'How comforting.' Mr Hazleton was a very tall, very imposing man with a broad, tanned, slightly pock-marked face under a lot of white hair, which was as millimetrically controlled as Uncle Freddy's was wildly abandoned. He had a deep voice and an accent that seemed to originate somewhere between Kensington and Alabama. When I'd first met him he'd sounded like an archetypal smooth English toff (as opposed to Uncle F's batty variety), but, like me, he'd lived in the States for the last ten years or so and had picked up some of the local intonation. This gave him an accent that was either quite charming or made him sound like an English actor trying to sound like somebody from the Deep South, depending on your prejudices.

Hazleton was cradling a crystal bowl of Bunnahabhain in one large, walnut hand and pulling on a cigar the size of a stick of dynamite.

I've always found it hard to look at Level Ones like Hazleton without automatically multiplying the image they presented to me by their wealth, as though all their money, possessions and stock options acted like giant mirrors, proliferating them across any given social space like opposing mirrors in a lift. These days, we were getting close to being able to assume that anyone at Level One was a billionaire; not quite in the same financially stratospheric league represented by Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei, but not far off it; maybe a factor of ten away.

The only other Level One exec present was Madame Tchassot, a small, brittle-looking lady of about sixty who sported tiny glasses and wore her unfeasibly black hair in a tight bun. She had a thin, pinched face and was chain-smoking Dunhills.

Besides Uncle Freddy there were five other second level people, including the recently promoted Adrian Poudenhaut, Hazleton's protégé and main man in Europe. He was a tall but podgy Englishman with a mid-Atlantic accent who until I'd come along had been the youngest person to make it to Level Three. We'd never got on, though Uncle Freddy had a soft spot for him because he was another petrol head and so always got a tour of the car collection when he came to Blysecrag. He was rumoured to have some sort of thing going with Madame Tchassot, though nobody was sure, and as she rarely left Switzerland and he was often at Hazleton's side in the States, it could only have been pretty sporadic. Personally I found the very idea of the two of them bumping uglies profoundly unsettling.