Capital
and was well on his way to doubling his money again. This was not mere evidence that he might have a talent for this kind of thing: it was not an indication: it was the thing itself. This was what genius looked like.
It had been difficult getting to the position where he was able to do what he wanted. That was fine with Mark, the difficulty was part of the point. This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing most people were capable of thinking of, or capable of doing. His face, his mask, his Thomas Pink shirt and Gieves & Hawkes suit and Prada shoes might not be exceptional (though to the person who studied them, there were signs that this City uniform was more carefully put together, more thought through, than most), but the person inside them was a once-in-a-generation talent. Given that, it had to be admitted that Roger was a grievous disappointment. Mark deserved a better figure to outwit, surpass and overtake. He had once seen Roger as a worthwhile antagonist, someone who merited his efforts to outdo. But it was increasingly clear that his boss wasn’t that person. He just wasn’t up to the role of Mark’s enemy; he wouldn’t even be a footnote in his biography.
‘Bring the paperwork, would you?’ said Roger, proving the point, as he drifted in his airy, athletic way towards his own office door. For such a tall man he had an indecisive, soft manner of movement, as if his determination to get where he was going might fail him at any moment. He had a folder under his arm, which for Roger, clearly, was good enough reason to let his junior colleague carry everything else. He was just so oblivious, that was the thing about Roger which really irritated Mark – which properly got under his skin. What would it take for Roger to notice what was going on around him? A bomb under his chair? Mark wouldn’t put it past him to not-notice. Well, he’d certainly notice when his deputy turned around and told his bosses – Roger’s bosses – that he had just made fifty million quid while Roger was looking out of the window thinking about how to pay for his wife’s Botox, or whatever it was he thought about. Maybe the inside of Roger’s head was like one of those Simpsons cartoons depicting what Homer was thinking about: tumbleweed drifting past, a mechanical monkey doing somersaults, a hamburger. Yeah, that’s probably what it was like to be Roger. Like being Homer Simpson, except taller and richer and working in a bank. For now, anyway.
Roger, with his thin folder, and Mark, with his armfuls of paperwork, arrived at the meeting room. Lothar was sitting there already at the head of the table, red-faced and fit-looking, his own single folder on the table in front of him, beside a large plastic glass with a bright green liquid inside, presumably one of his nasty-smelling health drinks. Lothar said what he always said at the start of meetings, one of the few words which made his German accent fully apparent:
‘Chentlemen.’ He made it sound halfway between a statement and a question.
80
Shahid had taken to sitting on the floor in the corner of his cell. He wasn’t sure why, and it wasn’t part of a conscious plan; it wasn’t as if it offered him a more interesting view of his bed and his toilet. But since he had found out that the police thought he and Iqbal were part of a plot to use stolen Czech Semtex to blow up a train in the Channel Tunnel, he had lost his earlier confidence that things were somehow going to turn out all right of their own accord. Up until now, although what was happening to him was ridiculous, he had never lost a basic trust that there was a larger justice working in his favour. Now, however, that belief was fading. The plain fact was that the police did not believe him. They thought Iqbal was a bad guy, which as far as Shahid knew might well be true – ‘You know a lot more about him than I do,’ as he kept telling all four of his interrogators, over and over again – but they also thought that he and Shahid were closely involved with each other. Instead of Iqbal, Belgian semi-nutter from more than a decade ago who self-invited, it was Iqbal-and-Shahid, co-conspirators, peas in the pod, two halves of the same naan. It turned out that his internet use was being monitored and that Iqbal had visited jihadi websites, corresponding in encrypted emails, and reading and downloading all sorts of terrorist how-to information – which was nowhere to be found on Shahid’s
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