merely an employee in the company Sir Alex headed and owned. An employee whom Sir Alex had been grooming to take his place.
‘But you did warn Harper what was in the wind.’
‘I didn’t warn him about anything,’ Saul responded in a clipped voice. ‘I simply pointed out to him what might possibly happen if he sold out.’
‘Semantics,’ Sir Alex accused. He wasn’t smiling now and his voice most certainly wasn’t kind. ‘Absolute loyalty, that’s what I demand from my employees, Saul, and most especially from you. You are my most trusted employee … I pay you extremely well.’
Under his breath Saul murmured cynically to himself, ‘Caveat emptor,’ but there was self-contempt in the words as well as cynicism.
Sir Alex was still talking and hadn’t heard him.
‘As I said, I was very disappointed. However, something more important has cropped up now. I want you to go to Cheshire. There’s a company there called Carey Chemicals. I want it.’
‘Carey Chemicals?’
‘Mm.’ Sir Alex picked some papers off his desk. ‘A small one-man-band company … or at least it was. The man in charge died fairly recently. The company is in trouble, sinking fast, and all too likely to go under. We are going to perform a rescue operation.’
‘Really? Why?’ Saul asked him sardonically.
Sir Alex looked at him and then asked acidly, ‘Before I tell you, can I take it that you don’t have a close friend or a mistress working for them?’
Saul gave him a cold close-mouthed stare, which for some reason made Sir Alex’s own gaze waver slightly.
‘All right,’ he said testily, even though Saul hadn’t said anything. ‘Carey’s is a drug-producing company; not that they have produced anything remotely profitable for the last few decades. The widow who has inherited the business is bound to want to sell out.’
‘And you want to buy.’
‘At the right price.’
‘Why?’ Saul asked him.
‘Because a little bird has told me that the government is making plans to offer very generous, and I mean very generous incentives to British-owned drug companies that are prepared to invest in drug research. In turn, if those companies succeed in producing a marketable drug they will repay the government’s generosity by providing the National Health Service with their drugs at a lower than market price.’
‘Thus wiping out the benefit to the company of the government’s financial incentives,’ Saul said drily.
‘Well, there would always be the profit from overseas sales,’ Sir Alex pointed out, ‘but, in essence, yes.’
‘So why are you interested?’ Saul asked him.
‘Because if the research does not produce a marketable drug, the government cannot claw back any of its investment.’
‘Ah, yes, I think I begin to understand,’ Saul said. ‘You buy the company, fund what on the surface looks like a genuine research department, with very generous assistance from the government, of course, but, as we know, with the complexities of modern company finance, a good accountant can quite easily lose large, if not vast sums of money by moving it from one company to the other, and, if ultimately the research fails to produce any marketable results, well …’
Sir Alex smiled at him.
‘I’m relieved to see that your recent attack of conscience and friendship hasn’t totally atrophied your brain, Saul. There are several other companies worth investigating, but none quite as perfect as Carey’s. It is a very shorn little lamb, so to speak, and I’m very much afraid that without our protection it could all too easily fall prey to the ravages of some hungry wolf.’
‘And you want me to find out as much as I can about how vulnerable this lamb is and how cheaply we can acquire it.’
‘Yes. You can be our wolf in sheep’s clothing. A role for which you’re admirably equipped.’
A wolf; was that how the other man saw him, a predator who enjoyed the terror, the mindless blind panic his appearance created in others? Saul wondered acidly.
As he took the executive lift down to the ground floor, a line from one of Byron’s poems came into his mind.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.
The words, like the visual images it conjured up, disturbed him. He had been suffering far too many of these disturbances recently, of these unfamiliar attacks of conscience.
Of conscience or of rebellion—which? The thought flitted across his mind and was quickly dismissed. He had work to do.
The receptionist watched him as he walked past her desk. She sighed faintly to herself. He was one of the sexiest men she had ever seen. All the girls who worked for the Davidson Corporation thought so, and yet he never exhibited any interest in any of them. There was an austerity about him, a remoteness, that challenged her.
He would be a good lover, too, you could see that from the way he moved. She wondered if his body hair was as thick and black as that on his head.
His eyes were the most extraordinary shade of pale blue, his face hard-boned, like his body. There was a hunger about him, an energy, an anger almost, that stirred a frisson of sexual anticipation in her body.
Saul walked out of the building into the early summer sunshine. Cheshire. His sister, Christie, lived there.
Perhaps it was time that he visited her.
He would ring her this evening. He would have to ring Karen as well. It was over five weeks since he had last seen his children. He had had to cancel his last access visit. He frowned, his body tensing. He doubted that either his daughter or his son minded not seeing him. But he minded like hell. They were his children, for God’s sake. He remembered his own father, how close they had been.
Too close, Christie had once told him. He had accused her of being jealous and she had laughed at him. Theirs had been a turbulent relationship. They were alike in so many ways and yet so very different in their outlooks on life, so very, very different.
Again he felt the shadow of the malaise which seemed to be clouding his life, confusing and disturbing him. He, who had always seen his life’s objectives so clearly. And he had achieved them, hadn’t he? He had succeeded, fulfilled his promises to his father. So why did he feel this emptiness, this fear that somehow he had omitted something, neglected something, this hesitancy about reaching out for the trophy that was now so nearly within his grasp?
In another few years Sir Alex would retire and Saul would take his place. It was what he had worked for … what he had planned for … what he had promised his father.
But was it what he wanted? He cursed under his breath. Why the hell did he have to have this attack of mid-life crisis now?
Saul strode out into the street, joining the crowds, joining them but not becoming a part of them, nor being absorbed by them.
