Capital

pencils; on the bottom slip of a set of Post-it notes (the bottom slip chucked away when a new password was set); on notepads left beside monitors. He collected five passwords in as many minutes. His dream was to find his way into another department, Compliance, and unlock some of their passwords. Compliance’s job was to make sure that the bank was obeying all the idiotic legislation designed to make the City safe for the timid and the frightened and the conventional and the weak, all the pathetic little bits of string with which governments tried to tie down the giant. Access to Compliance’s systems would be useful for the things he had under way. Root access and administrator privileges for the bank’s mainframe would be even better; but that would not be easy, and it would be silly to focus on something likely to be unachievable.
    A few more passwords in this room, however, would be very easy to achieve. All he had done so far was gather the low-hanging fruit. Jez, the room’s most successful trader, moved more money than anyone else, and dealt with more accounts, and so access to his systems would be very handy. Jez was someone Mark greatly disliked, not least because he could sense in him a real competitor, someone whose view of life was very similar to his own. Jez liked to win. Well, they would see who would win. Mark went to Jez’s desk. He switched on the monitor and was greeted by a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s arse in pink knickers, freeze-framed from the opening shot of Lost in Translation . Despite himself, Mark smiled for a moment. He ran a search for ‘Password’ but nothing came up. He hadn’t expected it to. Then he stepped back and had a look around Jez’s desktop. A rule of thumb was that things were always in the most obvious place. Arsenal mug, blank yellow legal pad, copy of Mountain Bike Monthly , Casio calculator in its plastic case. Mark peeked inside the mug, flicked through the magazine, riffled the legal pad, checked the underside of the keyboard, and opened the two desk drawers, both of which were empty apart from stationery and a Caffè Nero loyalty card. Jez might have been forceful and noisy but he kept nothing personal at work; interesting. As he was putting the office junk back, though, Mark felt something else, a piece of paper lying flat pressed against the back of the lower drawer – and had the secretive person’s instinctive feeling for when he might have come across a secret. But the piece of paper was hard to get a good hold on, it seemed to have stuck to the metal at the end of the compartment, so Mark was stretching and reaching and trying to get his fingers around the piece of paper to pull it out without crumpling it too much, which would give away that it had been taken out and looked at, when he heard a voice loudly say,
    ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
    Oh no. Jez. He stood at the entrance of the room, his hair wet from a shower, a bag of sports kit over his shoulder. This can’t be, thought Mark – it’s only two minutes past six – and then he thought, oh no, he must be here to get something done in Tokyo, and at the same time how useless that thought was since here he was up to the neck in shit and sinking fast. And then Mark realised he had a big problem: he had turned on Jez’s computer monitor. There was no possible, no conceivable, innocent reason to do that. If Jez moved three or four steps into the room he would be graced with a look at Scarlett Johansson’s bum-cheeks, and Mark would be out of a job. Even while the thoughts were running through his mind, Mark was moving: he jerked backwards from the drawer and pushed it shut. It would not be possible to look more like a man with a guilty conscience. He felt complicated, nauseating things happen in his stomach.
    ‘Stationery. Legal pad . . . couldn’t find mine. I know you used them, thought I’d take one, didn’t think you’d mind.’
    Jez just stared at him. He hadn’t moved and he looked angry, suspicious, hostile.
    ‘Been to the gym?’ Mark said.
    Jez started chewing gum. He must have had a piece on the go and then suddenly stopped when he came into the room and saw Mark. But other than that he didn’t move or speak.
    ‘Good habit,’ said Mark. He moved slightly closer to the edge of the desk, where the monitor’s off button was no more than nine inches away from his hand. But Jez had a perfect view of his upper body and there was no way he could just reach out and