“He must have done, under normal company procedure.”
“Send me in his report, would you, Miss Cooke?”
She was gone again, and the head of ManCon stared out through the plate-glass windows across the room from his desk at the midafternoon dusk settling over the City of London. The lights were coming on in the middle-level floors—they had been on all day in the lowest ones—but at skyline level there was still enough winter daylight to see by. But not to read by. Sir James Manson flicked on the reading lamp on his desk as Miss Cooke returned, laid the report he wanted on his blotter, and receded back into the wall.
The report Richard Bryant had submitted was dated six months earlier and was written in the terse style favored by the company. It recorded that, according to instructions from the head of Overseas Contracts, he had flown to Clarence, the capital of Zangaro, and there, after a frustrating week in a hotel, had secured an interview with the Minister of Natural Resources. There were three separate interviews, spaced over six days, and at length an agreement had been reached that a single representative of ManCon might enter the republic to conduct a survey for minerals in the hinterland beyond the Crystal Mountains. The area to be surveyed was deliberately left vague by the company, so that the survey team could travel more or less where it wished. After further haggling, during which it was made plain to the Minister that he could forget any idea that the company was prepared to pay the sort of fee he seemed to expect, and that there were no indications of mineral presence to work on, a sum had been agreed on between Bryant and the Minister. Inevitably, the sum on the contract was just over half the total that changed hands, the balance being paid into the Minister’s private account.
That was all. The only indication of the character of the place was in the reference to a corrupt minister. So what? thought Sir James Manson. Nowadays Bryant might have been in Washington. Only the going rate was different.
He leaned forward to the intercom again. “Tell Mr. Bryant of Overseas Contracts to come up and see me, would you, Miss Cooke?”
He lifted the switch and pressed another one. “Martin, come in a minute, please.”
It took Martin Thorpe two minutes to come from his office on the ninth floor. He did not look the part of a financial whiz kid and protégé of one of the most ruthless go-getters in a traditionally ruthless and go-getting industry. He looked more like the captain of the Rugby team from a good public school—charming, boyish, clean-cut, with dark wavy hair and deep blue eyes. The secretaries called him dishy, and the directors, who had seen stock options they were certain of whisked out from under their noses or found their companies slipping into control of a series of nominee share holders fronting for Martin Thorpe, called him something not quite so nice.
Despite the looks, Thorpe had never been either a public-school man or an athlete. He could not differentiate between a batting average and the ambient air temperature, but he could retain the hourly movement of share prices across the range of ManCon’s subsidiary companies in his head throughout the day. At twenty-nine he had ambitions and the intent to carry them out. ManCon and Sir James might provide the means, so far as he was concerned, and his loyalty depended on his exceptionally high salary, the contacts throughout the City that his job under Manson could bring him, and the knowledge that where he was constituted a good vantage point for spotting what he called “the big one.”
By the time he entered, Sir James had slipped the Zangaro report into a drawer, and the Bryant report alone lay on his blotter. He gave his protégé a friendly smile.
“Martin, I’ve got a job I need done with some discretion. I need it done in a hurry, and it may take half the night.”
It was not Sir James’s way to ask if Thorpe had any engagements that evening. Thorpe knew that; it went with the salary.
“That’s okay, Sir James. I had nothing on that a phone call can’t kill.”
“Good. Look, I’ve been going over some old reports and came across this one. Six months ago one of our men from Overseas Contracts was sent out to a place called Zangaro. I don’t know why, but I’d like to. The man secured that government’s go-ahead for a small team from here to conduct a survey for any possible mineral deposits in uncharted land beyond the mountain range called the Crystal Mountains. Now, what I want to know is this: Was it ever mentioned in advance or at the time, or since that visit six months ago, to the board?”
“To the board?”
“That’s right. Was it ever mentioned to the board of directors that we were doing any such survey? That’s what I want to know. It may not necessarily be on the agenda. You’ll have to look at the minutes. And in case it got a passing mention under ‘any other business,’ check through the documents of all board meetings over the past twelve months. Secondly, find out who authorized the visit by Bryant six months ago and why, and who sent the survey engineer down there and why. The man who did the survey is called Mulrooney. I also want to know something about him, which you can get from his file in Personnel. Got it?”
Thorpe was surprised. This was way out of his line of country.
“Yes, Sir James, but Miss Cooke could do that in half the time, or get somebody to do it—”
“Yes, she could. But I want you to do it. If you look at a file from Personnel, or boardroom documents, it will be assumed it has something to do with finance. Therefore it will remain discreet.”
The light began to dawn on Martin Thorpe. “You mean…they found something down there, Sir James?”
Manson stared out at the now inky sky and the blazing lights below him as the brokers and traders, clerks and merchants, bankers and assessors, insurers and jobbers, buyers and sellers, lawyers and, in some offices no doubt, lawbreakers, worked on through the winter afternoon toward the witching hour of five-thirty.
“Never mind,” he said gruffly to the young man behind him. “Just do it.”
Martin Thorpe was grinning as he slipped through the back entrance of the office and down the stairs to his own premises. “Cunning bastard,” he said to himself on the stairs.
“Mr. Bryant is here, Sir James.”
Manson crossed the room and switched on the main lights. Returning to his desk, he depressed the intercom button. “Send him in, Miss Cooke.”
There were three reasons why middle-level executives had occasion to be summoned to the sanctum on the tenth floor. One was to hear instructions or deliver a report that Sir James wanted to issue or hear personally, which was business. One was to be chewed into a sweat-soaked rag, which was hell. The third was that the chief executive had decided he wanted to pl
ay favorite uncle to his cherished employees, which was reassuring.
On the threshold Richard Bryant, at thirty-nine a middle-level executive who did his work competently and well but needed his job, was plainly aware that the first reason of the three could not be the one that brought him here. He suspected the second and was immensely relieved to see it had to be the third.
From the center of the office Sir James walked toward him with a smile of welcome. “Ah, come in, Bryant. Come in.”
As Bryant entered, Miss Cooke closed the door behind him and retired to her desk.