Iain Banks: The Business

Blysecrag was used as a convalescent hospital during the Great War, then it and the estate fell into disrepair as the Cowle family struggled to cope with the ruinous costs of upkeep. It was an army training centre during the Second World War, then the Ministry of Defence sold it to us in 1949; we too used it as a training centre. Uncle Freddy bought it from the company in the late fifties and has lived here since the early sixties. The Business started the refurbishments but he completed them; the restoration of the steam catapult and the reflecting lake's underwater lighting system, recently converted to run on North Sea gas, was all his doing.

I returned inside and closed the windows. The servants had hung my suit carrier in one of the two huge wardrobes and left my other bags on the bed. I looked around but there was no TV in here: Uncle Freddy thought he was making a huge concession to modern technology by having a special room to watch television in. Blysecrag had speaking tubes, servant-signal wires, pneumatic delivery tubes, a domestic telegraph system and its own baroquely complicated field-telephone-based intercom network, but only a handful of TVs, and they were mostly in the servants' quarters. I'm a news junkie; normally the first thing I do in a hotel room is switch on the TV and find CNN or Bloomberg. Never mind. I shivered in my clothes, just briefly. Here I was in a huge house stuffed with antiques and swarming with servants, waiting for the vastly rich and powerful to arrive, and it was all entirely familiar to me. I had one of those moments when I reminded myself how fortunate I'd been, and how privileged I had become.

As usual the first thing I unpacked, even before my toiletries bag, was a little netsuke monkey with a dolorous expression and eyes made from tiny chips of red glass. I placed it on the bedside table. I set the monkey — usually along with my watch and a torch — by my bed wherever I am in the world, so that I always have something familiar to look at when I first wake up. The sad-faced little figure was one of the first presents I ever bought myself after I left school. Embedded in its base is a thirty-five-year-old pre-decimal coin; the same twelve-sided thruppenny bit that Mrs Telman handed to me from her gleaming black limousine that wet Saturday afternoon in 1968.

Uncle Freddy wanted to fish. I dressed in some old jeans, a sensible shirt and a thick woolly jumper I found in a drawer; the house provided a life-jacket-equipped waistcoat with too many pockets, and a pair of thigh-length waders. An ancient jeep driven with geriatric abandon by Uncle Freddy himself bounced us down a grassy track to a boathouse by the broad lake with the fountain; the pair of wolfhounds bounded after us, scattering spittle to either side as they ran. In the boathouse we picked up two old cane rods and the rest of the paraphernalia associated with fly fishing.

'Are we likely to catch anything at this time of year?' I asked as we tramped along the shore, loosely accompanied by the dogs.

'Good God, no!' Uncle Freddy said, and laughed.

We waded into shady shallows not far from where the river met the lake down an ornamental weir decorated with chubby stone cherubs.

'Well, the bastards are up to something,' Freddy said, casting far out into the gentle current. I had told him about my visit to Silex Systems and the odd behaviour of Messrs Rix and Henderson concerning the locked door. He glanced at me. ' As long as you're sure you're not imagining all this.'

'I'm sure,' I told him. 'They were both perfectly polite, but I could tell they really didn't want me there. I felt about as welcome as a mole on a bowling green.'

'Ha.'

'I took another look at the plant's figures afterwards,' I said, making a reasonable cast myself. 'They show some odd fluctuations. They're like an oil painting: the further away you stand, the more convincing they look, but get up close and you can see all the brushstrokes, all the little blobby bits stuck on.'

'What the hell can they be up to?' Uncle Freddy said, sounding exasperated. 'Could they have another production line going in there? Could they be building their own chips and selling them independently?'

'I thought about that. Finished chips are worth more than their weight in gold, more than industrial diamonds, but I don't see how they could have hidden the capital plant. The raw-materials purchases would barely show in petty cash, but the machines, the whole line…they can't have hidden that.'

'Silex. They're not wholly owned, are they?'

I shook my head. 'Equal forty-eight per cent with Ligence US. The other four per cent is owned by the employees. Rix and Henderson are our guys, but via Mr Hazleton.'

'Shit,' Uncle Freddy said. Mr Hazleton is a Level One executive; a single level above Uncle Freddy and the highest of the high, one of the all-but-untouchable principal players of our company and a full member of the Board. He would be showing up later on today with some of the other power players. Uncle Freddy — a frustrated Level One man if ever there was one — harboured certain resentments concerning Mr Hazleton. 'Do we have a legal route in there?' he asked.

'Only through Hazleton,' I told him. 'Or another Level One intervening.'

Uncle Freddy snorted derisively.

'Otherwise we'd have to wait until the elections next year,' I said. 'Though we'd have to start campaigning now. And I've no idea who might be plausible replacements.' (I'll have to explain about these elections later.)

'We should just get a chap in there,' Uncle Freddy said.

'I think so. Want me to talk to somebody?'

'Yes. Get a fellow from one of the European offices. Somebody who knows what they're doing. Scottish, I suppose, but not based there, or London.'

'I think there's someone in Brussels who might do. If you'll authorise it I'll see if I can persuade Security to put them on secondment.'

'Right you are. Yes. Think that's the least we should do.' Then Uncle Freddy's line, until that point lying in a lazily straightening S shape across the ruffled waters, jerked suddenly and disappeared under the surface. He looked surprised. 'Well, I'll be—!' he exclaimed, and braked the suddenly spinning reel.

'Let's hope that's a good omen,' I said.

The Business has understandings with several states and regimes, and over the centuries we'd carved out our own little territories in various places. We have, for example, a small factory in the US military base on Cuba at Guantanamo, which produces the only authentic Cuban cigars it is more-or-less legal to sell in the US (though they're so exclusive and expensive, and their production legality so ticklish, they're never advertised. Rumour has it that it was one of those which President Clinton… well, never mind).

Usefully close to Guantanamo is the small Bahamanian island of Great Inagua, which is not truly independent but has its own semi-autonomous parliament; we have interests there, too. On the US mainland, we own a couple of casinos and a few other business ventures in the Rez (as it's usually called; formally it's the Wolf Bend Native American Reservation) in a desolate corner of Idaho where — again conveniently — the full remit of US law does not apply.

We are the only non-governmental organisation to have a permanent base on Antarctica, in Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land, between Dronning Maud Land and Coates Land. Purchased from Argentina during the Junta, this is the closest we've come so far to having our own statelet and has the handy attribute of being both excruciatingly remote and effectively beyond the reach of international law. The more lurid company rumours have characterised Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land as our Siberia; our very own gulag. However, no one I know has ever heard of anybody being sent there against their will, so I reckon it's just a story to help keep people well behaved.