Iain Banks - The Business

'Yes, to meet some very important — oh, for Christ's sake. What is all this about? Quickly, Kate, please, I need to get back in there.'

'It's very important I see your dental-records file, Michael. I'm going to hand you over to Mr Adatai now. Please authorise him to let me see it, then you can get back to your meeting.'

'Okay, okay; put him on.'

The standard human mouth contains thirty-two teeth. Mike Daniels must have had good, conscientious parents who got him to brush his teeth thoroughly after each meal and snack and in the evening before retiring, because he had had a full set — with just a couple of fillings in lower bicuspid molars — when he'd been drugged in a London club a month earlier, had about half of his teeth removed and then been left in his own bed in his flat in Chelsea.

I sat in Mr Adatai's warm and luxurious waiting room with a bunch of recent Vogues (well, this was Chelsea), National Geographics (of course) and Country Lifes (I thought of the dowager Queen in her giant bed in the old palace, and — sitting in that warmth — shivered).

I looked at the diagram of Mike Daniels' teeth. I took a note of those that had been taken and those that had been left. I closed the file, stared at a potted palm across the room and did some mental arithmetic.

In base ten, a ten-figure number. Two point one billion and some change. No need to use your fingers at all.

My mouth went dry.

From the start that morning I'd considered staying in London overnight, and had brought a few bits and pieces in a travelling bag, but in the end, after leaving Mr Adatai's — in fact, on the kerb while the taxi was pulling up — I decided to head back to Yorkshire. I rang Miss H to tell her I'd be staying at Blysecrag that night.

We had dinner on the train, my lap-top and I, looking through a load of files I'd downloaded about the Pejantan Island deal and the Shimani Aerospace Corporation. This was the deal that Mike Daniels had been flying out to Tokyo to sign when he'd been dentally assaulted — hence the anguished call to me that night in Glasgow.

Pejantan Island is a piece of guano-covered rock in the middle of the southern part of the South China Sea, between Borneo and Sumatra. It is, to put it politely, undistinguished, except for one thing: it is almost bang on the equator. Shift the place three kilometres south and the zero degrees line would go straight over it. It's less than an hour's flight from Singapore, just big enough for our purposes — or, rather, the purposes of the Shimani Aerospace Corporation, for we were merely investors — and it was uninhabited. The idea was to build a spaceport there.

Now, this is high-horse territory for me — though I do know what I'm talking about, and it is my job — but space, and anything associated with getting into it, is going to be so fucking big, and soon, it's frightening. Space is already very big business indeed and it's going to get a lot bigger in the near future. The US through NASA, Europe through ESA, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and various other minor players are all desperate to grab as much of the launch market as possible, and private enterprise is determined to catch up.

I've seen detailed plans of about a dozen different ways of getting into space — even leaving out the exotic far-future stuff like giant elevators, rail guns and giant lasers — using craft with helicopter-like rotors with rockets in the tips or — well, never mind; the point is not that, if we're lucky, one of them might just work, it's that all of them might work.

Whatever method you use, the best place to launch stuff into orbit is from the equator, or as close to it as you can get (which is why NASA chose southern Florida for its spaceport and the SU had to settle for the delights of Kazakhstan). The Earth, just through rotating, gives you a free energy boost to help lob your payload above the atmosphere, and that means you can lob more, or use less fuel, than you could if you launched from further up or down the curve towards the poles.

One space-launch concern — in which I am delighted to say we have some investment — is taking advantage of this by using two huge ships, a command-and-control vessel and the rocket-carrying ship itself to send payloads up from the oceans on the equator. The time before last that I was in Scotland I got to clamber over the launch ship while it was in dry dock in Greenock, on the Clyde. It was just techy heaven. These are real ships, built for an entirely pragmatic, unromantic, unsentimental, return-hungry consortium, but they are just such a fabulous, Thunderbirds-style idea I'd have been seriously tempted to recommend investing in them just for the sheer mad beauty of the project. Happily, it looks like a good business deal, too.

But you never know. The ships will only be able to handle stuff up to a certain size. To be on the safe side, we're also the major investor in the Shimani Aerospace Corporation's Pejantan Island project, which — if all goes according to plan — by 2004 will be sending state-of-the-art rockets roaring into space with their valuable satellite cargoes.

This was heavy engineering, cutting-edge technology and serious science. The budget was jaw-dropping. So were the returns if we'd all got our sums right, but the point was that the bigger the project and the bigger the budget the easier it is to hide things in both of them.

Like this little item here: a tracking station in Fenua Ua.

Now, why Fenua Ua? I looked up a map of the Pacific. Why not Nauru, or Kiribati, or even the fucking Galapagos?

Sipping my coffee somewhere around Grantham, I used the mobile and the lap-top's modem to do some more long-range Web searching. Eventually, as the train sped through the night, picking up speed after Doncaster, deep in some otherwise entirely ignorable PR nonsense (which just goes to show you never know where something useful will turn up), I found a little video clip of Kirita Shinizagi, chief executive officer of the Shimani Aerospace Corporation, visiting Fenua Ua earlier this year and inspecting the site for the new tracking station.

Next stop York, the guard's voice said over the speakers, while my head was somewhere between London, Tokyo, Fenua Ua and Pejantan Island.

I disconnected the mobile from the computer. The phone rang. Hazleton's number came up on the display. I hesitated two, three rings before answering.

'Hello?'

'Kathryn?'

'Mr Hazleton.'

'Kathryn, I was so sorry to hear about Freddy.'

'Thank you. Will you be able to make the funeral, Mr Hazleton?'

'Sadly, no. Kathryn, are you able to think straight? Or are you too distraught? If this is a bad time to talk about things, I can always wait.'

'I think I can still string two thoughts together, Mr Hazleton. What was it you wanted to talk about?'

'I wondered how you felt you'd got on in Thulahn. I was going to ask before, but of course we were rather overtaken by events when you realised that Freddy was in hospital. We never did finish that conversation.'

'No, we didn't. I recall that at the time I was about to ask you if you'd had any hand in suggesting to the Prince that he ask me to marry him.'

'You were? I don't understand, Kathryn. Why would I want to interfere in your private life?'

'That's all right, Mr Hazleton. I've had more time to think since then. The question no longer applies.'

'I see. I confess I wasn't entirely sure I'd heard you right when you told me that at the time. However, I've spoken to Suvinder since, and yes, he was, and is, very serious about it. I understand you turned him down. That's very sad. Of course it's entirely your decision and you must do as you see fit, but the Prince did sound very dejected.'

'He's a better man than I thought he was at first, Mr Hazleton. I've come to like him. But I don't love him.'