Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Day turns into night. There is nothing to do, but we stay at our desks until the New York market closes, in the hope that some magical buyer might appear, pay off our debts and let us keep our jobs. That doesn’t happen, so we move our operations to Life, where we sit in anxious silence around a table, nibbling trail mix; then somehow it is morning again, and cleaners in orange uniforms are hoovering about my feet.

The day does not start well. Excelsior announce they will not roll over a hundred-million-dollar loan due to be repaid tomorrow; in New York, two sets of lawyers move into AgroBOT HQ — one drafting documents for any potential third parties that might come forward with a rescue plan, the other preparing papers for bankruptcy. ‘And that’s the good news,’ Gary McCrum says.

Word from Oran is that the Caliph has been overthrown.

‘Overthrown, dismembered, and fed to his own dogs,’ Gary clarifies.

‘But … how? Wasn’t he in some hideout with his bodyguards?’

‘It was the Imperial Guard that did it,’ Jurgen explains. ‘Apparently they were unhappy about the extent of the coalition’s bombing campaign.’

‘And this has been verified?’

‘See for yourself,’ Gary says. He takes out his phone and shows us a video of a bearded man weeping in terror as a carving knife is brought to his neck –

‘Turn it off,’ mutters Ish.

‘We have not spoken to the bodyguards,’ Jurgen says, ‘but our sense is that the line of credit is no longer on the table.’

‘So what are our options?’ Jocelyn Lockhart asks.

‘We don’t have any options,’ Gary McCrum says grimly. ‘We’re finished.’

‘But we’ve done nothing wrong ,’ Brent protests. ‘A whole bank can’t go down because of a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours, it doesn’t make any sense!’

‘Ordinarily I would agree,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, the thing about these unsubstantiated rumours is that they are true. We have learned that among our recent acquisitions is several billion euros of now-worthless Greek debt.’

Stunned silence, then, as Jurgen seems content to leave it there, someone does the necessary: ‘Why … would we buy … several billion euros of Greek debt?’

‘That is an interesting question,’ Jurgen says, like a medical professor discussing an anatomical curiosity in a textbook. ‘The answer seems to be that we did not know we were buying it. In a spirit of counterintuitiveness, it appears that due diligence was rushed through. Furthermore, this debt had been carefully concealed within several layers of shells, swaps, special purpose vehicles, like a computer virus that waits inside another file.’

‘Concealed by who?’ Jocelyn says. ‘The Greek government?’

They have always seemed too inept and lazy to come up with this kind of machination.

‘Not exactly. If you remember, just before they joined the EU, the Greeks hired Danforth Blaue to cover up the enormous holes on their balance sheet.’

Another silence. Jurgen smacks his lips together, as if he has just enjoyed a particularly delicious snack.

‘So …’ Slowly Ish puts it together. ‘Danforth Blaue took this toxic debt and hid it away, and then we came along and bought it?’

‘Someone else bought it, and then Agron bought them, and then we bought Agron,’ Jurgen says.

‘All that glitters isn’t gold,’ Kevin says, shaking his head. ‘Porter’s memo,’ he explains, seeing our baffled faces. ‘That must be what he meant.’

‘Buying Agron was Porter’s idea , you fool,’ Gary snaps.

‘So?’

‘So, if he had actually known it wasn’t gold, surely he would have just not bought it , instead of sending everyone some unintelligible riddle about how we shouldn’t buy it and then buying it.’

‘Maybe he was testing us,’ Kevin says. ‘You know, like God.’

‘Wait a second,’ Ish says. ‘Porter was CEO of Danforth Blaue. If Danforth’s responsible for us buying a bunch of toxic crap that looks like it’s going to drag us under — doesn’t that mean that Porter’s just pulled a huge con on Porter? He’s basically bankrupted himself?’

‘Fuck.’ Jocelyn Lockhart rubs his jaw. ‘Poetic justice.’

‘The great genius,’ Gary says sardonically. ‘No wonder he’s keeping his head down.’

‘It is true that the takeovers have not worked out exactly as planned,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, it would be a mistake to write off Porter’s strategy too soon. The very scale of AgroBOT’s impending collapse means that it cannot be allowed to happen. Thanks to his expansions, we are so big now that if we go down, an untold number of trading partners and counterparties will be pulled down with us, bringing the entire global banking system grinding to a halt. In a matter of hours, money will stop coming out of ATMs. In two or three days, there will be no food left on the supermarket shelves. By the end of the week, petrol will have run out, followed shortly by electricity. Within a month, the very fabric of civilization will have totally collapsed. We have seen in many movies what the consequences will be. Gang of cannibals will rove the ruined highways. Families will shiver in the darkness of sewers. Strange, millenarian cults will perform human sacrifices to artefacts once taken for granted by us and now worshipped as gods. Ordinary public sector workers will now wear dog collars and Mohawks, and drive futuristic, weaponized vehicles powered by paraffin. An endless metaphorical night will swallow the Earth, although in practice the current diurnal system of sunrise and sunset should continue unaffected.’

Somewhere in the middle of this we have forgotten why it constitutes good news.

‘Because it means that the market has no choice but to refinance us!’ Jurgen says, with a shrill, falsetto laugh. ‘Porter’s acquisitions policy has been underwritten by nothing less than civilization itself! So you see, this is no more than the storm in a teacup! What is everyone so worried about?’

He glides away, repeating this last phrase to himself like a mantra.

‘He’s putting an awful lot of faith in this too-big-to-fail thing,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says slowly.

‘Did I ever tell you about my Aunt Nelly?’ Ish says. ‘She was always bragging that her tits were too big to fail. Every Saturday night she’d go out without so much as a lick of lippy on. “Don’t need it,” she’d say. “Got these.” Then one day she was leaning over her fishpond and she fell in.’

‘She drowned?’

‘No, but when they brought her to Emergency, that’s where she met my Uncle Nick.’

The morning grinds on, white-bitten and slow as a glacier. We sit stiff-backed at our desks, row upon row, like children in some terrorized classroom, and whenever the lift doors open, we all whip round in unison, each expecting, though we don’t admit it, to see a cohort of security guards troop out: Reinaldus, Esteban, Timoleon, the same surly men we’ve nodded to as they sat slouched in Reception on so many mornings, now transformed — stalking through the office, distributing boxes, rousing us from our desks, like stuporous, torpid jungle cats who one day find the door to their cage left open and instantly reassume their true natures, the contempt in their eyes telling us everything we need to know …

‘We have enough capital to trade till the end of the day.’ Liam English tries to make this sound positive.

‘And after that … ?’ A circle of chalky faces, like some ghostly Greek chorus.

‘After that, ah, we’d be looking for either a buyout or a government intervention.’

‘Except nobody wants to intervene,’ Jocelyn says.

‘But what about civilization?’ Kimberlee asks. ‘The apocalypse? Don’t they care about the apocalypse?’