there was no speed limit on French autoroutes. Matthew kept silent about the difference between autoroutes and autobahns and snoozed in the back as the flat French countryside slipped past in the gathering dawn.
They entered Paris before rush hour and drew up outside Madison’s elegant Paris office. Matthew asked the driver to wait and dashed inside.
D’Avignon had arrived only shortly before. Mildly startled to see Matthew in person, he apologised for his empty fax machine and waved Matthew into a seat. Matthew handed over the presentation, d’Avignon called McAllister on the speaker phone, and the conference call began. Matthew led them through his work. He reckoned the discussion might last for twenty minutes all told and that he might speak for perhaps seven minutes of that. In the cab on the way across, he had run through his introduction a dozen times, until falling asleep somewhere after the turn-off to Lille.
Matthew felt confident of his conclusions. All the evidence seemed to confirm that after a few days of thinking that the end of the world had happened (or alternatively that the millennium had arrived early) the bond markets would turn their attention to something else. Matthew ran through the relevant data and summarised his conclusions. He spoke without interruption for six and a half minutes exactly. There were a couple of questions on points of detail, as McAllister and d’Avignon flipped through the charts and other material in the appendices. Neither trader challenged Matthew. After a brief discussion about how best to place the firm’s bets, d’Avignon rang off. He thanked Matthew for coming over and invited him unenthusiastically to tour the building. Matthew declined. D’Avignon looked relieved and dived off to take a call coming in from Milan. Matthew went downstairs to his waiting cab and they crept out of Paris in swelling traffic, heading north to Calais and London.
Back at his desk, Matthew came in for a bit of stick.
‘Go to Paris for breakfast but don’t even bring me back a bloody croissant,’ complained Luigi. ‘It’s a good job I tell Big Mac to fire you yesterday.’
‘Oui, but it was an expensive breakfast,’ said Jean-François. ‘I don’t think the firm pays for taxi rides outside London, so I think you pay, no, Matthieu?’
‘I don’t know if I can afford to. Big Mac still hasn’t told me if I’ve got a job.’
Matthew glanced over towards McAllister’s office to see if this was a good time to interrupt. The door was closed, and the lights were off. Luigi followed Matthew’s glance.
‘Big Mac’s away on holiday, Matteo. He only came in this morning for an hour or so. He’ll be back a week on Monday.’
Matthew had been too tired to be nervous earlier, but now that changed. Matthew stared at the empty office. It would be ten days before he got a decision. Ten days, and meantime he didn’t know if he was still in the running for his million or if he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Anxiety took its first long feed from Matthew’s stomach lining. He turned away unhappily, aimlessly. As he did so, a bagel crust flew through the air and struck him on the neck. Luigi.
‘How much longer you keep us waiting for cappuccino?’
Autumn in England, and nothing to report. Leaves are just starting to give up their greens in favour of a sickly yellow, which will soon give way to a matt and uninteresting brown. After this brief show of what is politely known as colour, the leaves will fall to make a slimy brown carpet beneath the bare trees and boys will fight for the shiniest conkers. Meanwhile, after a sodden August bank holiday, the usual parade of crying children and stationary traffic, the skies have turned an iron grey.
Bid farewell to the sun. It is 1 September 1998, and there are 1046 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.
1
‘Good morning, sir.’
The red-coated doorman held the door open. Zack walked through with a shudder. In an age of automatic doors, revolving doors, doors you could just push through, Coburg’s had to employ some ancient flunkey in a red tail coat to do the job. That said it all. Coburg’s is one of Britain’s biggest merchant banks, but its glory days are long gone. The big American banks – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Madison, Weinstein Lukes – bestride the globe, while Coburg’s, a village beauty in a world of supermodels, clings to its past and tries not to look.
Zack knew this. He knew that Coburg’s wouldn’t make his fortune. But it was a doorway into international finance, the only industry in the world where millionaires aren’t rare, they’re commonplace. Even amidst Coburg’s dilapidated glories, Zack could smell the money and he loved it.
His boss was a posh nonentity called Fabian Slater, who collected him from reception and took him on a quick tour of the bank. Zack shook hands, exchanged greetings, and avoided saying anything he felt. Slater said, ‘In my opinion, the best way to get ahead is to lie low for a couple of years, soak up as much as you can.’ Zack smiled and said nothing. He had other ideas. He shook more hands, met more people in more departments: mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, debt capital markets, credit.
There wasn’t much to see. On a trading floor, you can smell the marketplace. On a busy day, when the markets are roaring, a well-run trading floor looks and sounds like barely organised mayhem. You can hear the flood of money pouring through the room. But that’s Matthew’s world, not Zack’s.
Zack belongs to the quieter world of corporate finance. To its unremarkable offices, the world’s biggest businesses come to sort out their financial needs. Some come to raise money, in the hundreds of millions, billions even. Some come to play safe, to protect against the risks that a difficult world is full of. Others come to play fast and loose, taking dangerous bets concealed from their shareholders by a paragraph of flim-flam in an annual report. Best of all, this is where companies come when they’re in the mood for attack. Scared of your competitor? Buy him. Noticed an outfit with faster growth? Grab it. Think you could run that guy’s business better than him? Buy him up, push him out, rip up his company and flog it.
Traders think testosterone is all about how loud you can shout, and how big are the risks you take with other people’s cash. Zack knew different. The quiet world of corporate finance, where bankers and company executives talk in whispers, has its own testosterone load. It doesn’t shout. It isn’t flashy. But it’s just as greedy, just as ruthless, just as hard.
‘Just one more person you ought to meet,’ drawled Slater. ‘Girl called Sarah Havercoombe. D’you know her by any chance? You must have overlapped at Oxford, I think.’
‘Sarah? Sarah Havercoombe? Yes. I know her.’
By God, he knew her. At Oxford, he and Sarah had had a stormy on-and-off relationship for three years. She was blisteringly well-connected and rich with it. Her father was a viscount with an ancestral seat in Devon. Unlike most aristocratic families, the Havercoombes had nurtured their wealth prudently and amassed it buccaneeringly. The family stake in a Hong Kong company, Hatherleigh Pacific, made them one of the two hundred or so wealthiest families in the country.
‘Sarah,’ called Slater, as he walked up to a young woman, faced away from them, mannishly dressed in a pink cotton shirt and a plain navy skirt, ‘I think you know our latest recruit. I’ll leave you together, shall I?’
Slater
