A Delicate Truth A Novel

Close protection and hostage negotiators available at immediate notice. Marlon will respond to your personal and confidential inquiries.
    Email address and box number also in Houston, Texas. Free-phone number for your personal and confidential enquiries of Marlon. No names of directors, officers, advisors or uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers. No Elliot, first name or surname. The parent company of Ethical Outcomes is Spencer Hardy Holdings, a multinational corporation whose interests include oil, wheat, timber, beef, property development and not-for-profit initiatives. The same parent company also endows evangelical foundations, faith schools and Bible missions.
    For further information about Ethical Outcomes, enter your key-code. Possessing no such key-code, and assailed by a sense of trespass, he abandons his researches.
    A week passes. Each morning over breakfast, all day long in the office, each evening when he comes home from work, he plays Totally Normal Man as instructed, and waits for the great call that may or may not come, or come when it’s least expected: which is what it does early one morning while his wife is sleeping off her medication and he’s pottering in the kitchen in his check shirt and corduroys washing up last night’s supper things and telling himself he really must get a hold of that back lawn. The phone rings, he picks it up, gives a cheery ‘Good morning’ and it’s Elliot, who, sure enough, has seen the ads in the estate agent’s window and is seriously interested in buying the house.
    Except that his name isn’t Elliot but Illiot , thanks to the South African accent.
     
    *
     
    Is Elliot one of Ethical Outcomes’ brand-new international team of uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers ? It’s possible, though not apparent. In the bare office in a poky side street off PaddingtonStreet Gardens where the two men sit a mere ninety minutes later, Elliot wears a sober Sunday suit and a striped tie with baby parachutes on it. Cabalistic rings adorn the three fattest fingers of his manicured left hand. He has a shiny cranium, is olive-skinned, pockmarked and disturbingly muscular. His gaze, now quizzing his guest in flirtatious flicks, now slipping sideways at the grimy walls, is colourless. His spoken English is so elaborate you’d think it was being marked for accuracy and pronunciation.
    Extracting a nearly new British passport from a drawer, Elliot licks his thumb and flips officiously through its pages.
    ‘Manila, Singapore, Dubai: these are but a few of the fine cities where you have attended statisticians’ conferences. Do you understand that, Paul?’
    Paul understands that.
    ‘Should a nosy individual sitting next to you on the plane enquire what takes you to Gibraltar, you tell them it’s yet another statisticians’ conference. After that you tell them to mind their fucking business. Gibraltar does a strong line in Internet gambling, not all of it kosher. The gambling bosses don’t like their little people talking out of turn. I must now ask you, Paul, very frankly, please, do you have any concerns whatever regarding your personal cover?’
    ‘Well, maybe just the one concern actually, Elliot, yes, I do,’ he admits, after due consideration.
    ‘Name it, Paul. Feel free.’
    ‘It’s just that being a Brit – and a foreign servant who’s been around the halls a bit – entering a prime British territory as a different Brit – well, it’s a bit’ – hunting for a word – ‘a bit bloody iffy , frankly.’
    Elliot’s small, circular eyes return to him, staring but not blinking.
    ‘I mean, couldn’t I just go as myself and take my chances? We both know I’m going to have to lie low. But should it happenthat, contrary to our best calculations, I do bump into someone I know, or someone who knows me, more to the point, then at least I can be who I am. Me, I mean. Instead of –’
    ‘Instead of what exactly, Paul?’
    ‘Well, instead of pretending to be some phoney statistician called Paul Anderson. I mean, who’s ever going to believe a cock-and-bull story like that, if they know perfectly well who I am? I mean, honestly, Elliot’ – feeling the heat coming into his face and not able to stop it – ‘Her Majesty’s Government has got a bloody great tri-Services headquarters in Gibraltar. Not to mention a substantial Foreign Office presence and a king-sized listening station. And a Special Forces training camp. It only takes one chap we haven’t