Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (30 page)

He had, however, given his answer as quickly and adroitly as he needed to in order to make the lie sound convincing.

“Very well,” she said. “But Barnaby, I do not like this ‘just drinks.’ It makes me feel cheap. I am over in England for work, you call me, you want to hook up, it’s fine. But I want to feel special, you know? Not just some
putain
you can have for the price of a cocktail or two.”

Her expression was forlorn, her lips crushed and bitter.

Now was the right moment for Barnaby to bring out the gift, a necklace from Garrard, a lustrous confection of black diamond beads and a cabochon emerald drop, suspended on thin white-gold chains. Zurie’s eyes widened and sparkled as she opened the velvet-lined case.

Barnaby’s PA, Veronica, had chosen well. But then, with the kind of budget he had set her, how could she not?

“Ohhh,” Zurie gasped, and that single syllable confirmed, once and for all, that she
would
be coming back to his house this evening.

She wasn’t going to make it plain sailing, though.

“I still do not know why I am even seeing you,” she said as she stowed the necklace safely in her Louis Vuitton clutch bag. “I do not know if you deserve me.”

“You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world, and I deserve the best.”

“But it hurts. It hurts me every time.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am.”

“I always feel so used afterwards, so insignificant.”

“Don’t you think, somehow, that that’s what you really want? Deep down?”

She said, “No,” but her eyes were telling a different story.

“Don’t you think,” Barnaby went on, “that what we have works precisely because of the way it makes you feel, that extreme of emotion? Put it this way: would you rather we were dull and ordinary? Do you really want to be like those millions out there?” He gestured, indicating the brilliantly lit expanse of London – the polite white Victorian façades, the black office-block obelisks. “They don’t have nearly the same pitch of excitement as we do. They will never know the intensity of what you and I share. Night after night they couple in their beds, listless and bored and indifferent, barely even thinking about what they’re doing, going through the motions. They are tiny flickering little birthday-cake candles, whereas we... we are
incandescent
. We are fireworks. We burn more brightly than they can ever imagine.”

“Flames leave scars.”

“Which is why we get together so rarely. We both need time apart to recover afterwards. Our relationship will never become stale and routine like everyone else’s does, as long as it is intermittent and spectacular.”

An old cigarette surrendered to a fresh one. Zurie inhaled a lungful and let it out in a long, controlled plume. Her hands were trembling slightly. Apprehension? Anticipation? Both, most likely.

She drained her drink. “Buy me another,” she said.

A SPREE ACROSS THE WORLD

T
HE
PR
DEPARTMENT
had had a brainwave. They wouldn’t simply gather together some ostensibly hostile journalists for Barnaby to charm and win over. Said journalists would travel with him on a spree across the world, flying in his private jet to various GloCo sites where they would meet the workforce, be shown the environmental safety protocols the company had put in place, and above all have a chance to get to know Barnaby Pollard as a person, to see that he wasn’t an unfeeling, inhuman monster, to discover the man behind the mogul.

The five who were chosen were a motley lot. One was the environmental issues correspondent for a national left-leaning broadsheet, a shapeless landslide of a woman who wore a crystal pendant and endless layers of chiffon and favoured the colour purple. Another was the founder-editor of a homespun magazine called
Higher Consciousness
, available mostly at health food shops. He looked grubby and malnourished, as though he subsisted on a diet of whatever he could forage from the nearest patch of woodland. There was a blobby eco-blogger whose mushroom pallor suggested he seldom left his basement lair, and a timid Goth documentarian who had won an IDFA award at the Amsterdam festival last year with her short film on the plight of the narrow-mouthed whorl snail in Britain’s imperilled wetlands.

The fifth and final journalist was the smartest-dressed and most attractive of them, though that wasn’t saying much, given how low the bar was set. She had striking red hair and eyes of a shimmering greeny-blue. Her name was Lydia Laidlaw and she was a freelance writer who contributed articles to a variety of publications, both mainstream and esoteric, offering an ecological slant on everyday topics. She had, for instance, used miniature GPS transponders to track the journeys of numerous items of domestic rubbish from doorstep dustbin pick-up to final resting place in a landfill. Collating the data, she had established that council waste departments did not always use the directest routes or the nearest, most convenient disposal sites but that they could, with a little organisation rejigging, streamline the whole system significantly and thus reduce carbon emissions from their fleet of garbage trucks by nearly a quarter. No one had yet acted upon her findings, although a handful of councillors had made noises about possibly doing so in the near future. She epitomised the slogan ‘Think global, act local.’

As Barnaby’s Gulfstream G650 soared away from London City Airport, his heart sank. He was committed to spending a little over a week in the company of these worthies and weirdoes. In no way did it look as though it was going to be fun. Already the purple-clad harpy, Dorothea, was muttering darkly about the vast quantities of aviation fuel a plane like this one consumed and how it had been scientifically proved that the “bleed air” being cycled into the cabin from the jet’s engines was laced with organophosphate particulates which were incredibly carcinogenic. Meanwhile the man from
Higher Consciousness
– real name Frank Denham, but he had rechristened himself OwlHenry on the advice of his animal spirit guide – had begun badgering the stewardess about the vegan option on the in-flight menu. Could she absolutely guarantee that the dish contained no animal products? Were the ingredients stored in a separate compartment in the fridge, well away from the meat and dairy sections? Was she sure no cross-contamination could occur?

Barnaby broke out a bottle of 2002 Cristal and helped himself to a generous glassful.

It was going to be a long week.

LYDIA LAIDLAW

T
HEIR FIRST DESTINATION
was Alaska, and for at least half of the fourteen-hour journey none of the journalists approached Barnaby. They sat at one end of the cabin, he at the other, with Jakob Beit stationed close by him. The journalists didn’t appear openly hostile, but their skulking, suspicious demeanour left him under no illusion that they regarded him as the enemy.

This didn’t prevent them from taking full advantage of his hospitality, however. They devoured the delicious snacks and meals the chef rustled up for them in the galley, and kept ordering more – even emaciated, self-mortifying OwlHenry.

Barnaby, meanwhile, teleworked on his Falcon Northwest Fragbook DRX and drank his champagne, getting slowly, quietly tipsy.

Lydia Laidlaw finally broke the détente. She strode the length of the cabin and slid into the creamy, plush leather-upholstered seat opposite him. Barnaby glanced across the aisle at Jakob. His bodyguard, who had spent the most of the time since takeoff dutifully glowering at the journalists, was now fast asleep.

“Too busy to chat, Mr Pollard?” Lydia asked.

Barnaby shut his boutique laptop and forced a smile. “I was waiting for one of you to make your move.”

“Shouldn’t you be the one making the move?” she shot back. “We’re here for your benefit, aren’t we?”

“I thought this was a mutual thing. You get unfettered access to me, and I get...”

“Favourable coverage?”

“Something like that. If I win your approval.”

“A big ‘if,’” Lydia said. “Still, I feel that you should be wooing us, not treating us like lepers.”

“Wooing?”

“Wooing. The effort has to come from you. We’re your guests. You could be a better host.”

Barnaby regarded her. One thing he was sure about – Lydia Laidlaw was not his type. She was a plump, rounded creature, heavily breasted, generously hipped, with cherubic cheeks and a dimpled chin. Her face radiated sweetness, but also a steely inner strength, evident in the straight, forthright nose and permanently arched eyebrows.

At a PR-department briefing yesterday, he had learned that Lydia was not afraid of confrontation. She had once investigated a criminal gang who were charging to dispose of construction industry waste in line with regulations but were in fact fly-tipping it and pocketing the commercial waste rate fees. A man had ambushed her outside her home, beating her with a baseball bat badly enough to land her in hospital. She had published her exposé nonetheless, which had led to prosecutions, fines and jail sentences. On another occasion she had faced harassment and intimidation from the boss of a dye factory which was flushing used toluene into a nearby river instead of sending the solvent off to be properly treated. She had secretly recorded him haranguing her on the phone, saying he knew where she lived and he was going to pay some men to go over there and gang-rape her if she didn’t leave him and his company alone. The recording would have been inadmissible as evidence in court since it had been made without his consent, but its mere existence, cached on Dropbox and a number of other data storage sites, gave her sufficient leverage to blackmail the boss into accepting his environmental responsibilities. The upshot was that the factory switched to using closed-loop recycled toluene, the greenest option available.

Lydia Laidlaw, then, was not someone you should fuck with.

Nor was she, as far as Barnaby was concerned, someone you should fuck.

Just not his type.

The very antithesis of his type.

And yet, as she sat in front of him in the smoothly gliding jet, for someone reason he couldn’t stop staring at her.

It was her eyes that fascinated him the most. They weren’t simply greeny-blue, he realised. They seemed to shift between the two colours. One moment there was more blue than green in them, the next more green than blue. It had to be a trick of the light. Whenever the Gulfstream banked or made a minor course correction, its position relative to the sun changed. The sunlight then struck Lydia’s irises from a different angle, exposing some subtlety of pigmentation, emphasising the striations of one hue at the expense of the other. Perhaps that was the explanation. Yes, it must be.

“Mr Pollard?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I was saying,” said Lydia, “before you somewhat rudely drifted off into your own thoughts, that being standoffish doesn’t lend you an air of mystique. If that’s what you’re hoping for, then I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not working.”

“No. I wasn’t hoping that at all. That’s not the intention. I’m... shy.”

She let rip with a snort of pure scorn. “You? Shy? Hah! Yeah, right. The megabucks jetsetting energy tycoon, shy? Pull the other one.”

“Reticent, then. Reserved.”

“Does that line work with all the supermodels you pull? ‘I’m reticent. Please don’t be fooled by my aloof exterior. I’m a sensitive soul underneath.’”

Barnaby felt his cheeks growing warm. “I don’t only go out with supermodels.”

“Actresses, ingénues, fashionistas, professional arm-candy, whatever you want to call them – it’s all the same thing.
They’re
all the same thing. I’ve seen the pap-shots in the papers: you at some society event or other – Henley, Ascot – squiring your latest bit of leg-over. Those scrawny size-zeroes, just about identical to one another. Highlights, ribcages, big greedy eyes... You change them as often as most people change their underpants.”

“I know what I like when it comes to women.”

“And you like what you know.”