Requiem at Monza

136,000 words

Requiem at Monza

by Dakota Franklin

CoolMain Press

There is something about me you should know, Ludo. I try hard for what you might call sophistication, but underneath the veneer I’m a barbarian. My violent instincts have been nurtured, trained, honed to perfection by my family, my community, my government and my peers, for instant, mindless application.

Jack Armitage has been accused of murder, a charge that could bring down his auto racing empire. Joanne is the help hired from Harrington's to extricate him from the mess.

Tall, beautiful and lethal, to keep her Armitage companions alive, Joanne has to steer a deceitful, violent course through Italian legal and judicial corruption, the Mafia, crooked police, and a growing body count. Even taking a bullet for the President didn't prepare her for this!

Requiem at Monza is the second novel launched in Dakota’s great new series

RUTHLESS TO WIN

I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read.

— Joo's Book Reviews

Contents

Cover • Jacket Copy

REQUIEM AT MONZA title page

REQUIEM AT MONZA just start reading!

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Extras

RUTHLESS TO WIN the series

Dakota BIO • Dakota PHOTO • Dakota CONTACTS

LE MANS a novel by Dakota Franklin

More from CoolMain Press

IDITAROD a novel of The Greatest Race on Earth

THE MEYERSCO HELIX •

STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress

AN ELECTION OF PATRIOTS

RUTHLESS TO WIN

Series Editor: André Jute

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REQUIEM AT MONZA

Dakota Franklin

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CoolMain Press

Copyright © 2012 Dakota Franklin

The author has asserted her moral right

First published by

CoolMain Press 2012

at Smashwords

Series Editor: André Jute

Editor: Claudine van Wyk

Associate Editors: Sarah Dixon, Lisa Penington, Julie Stacey

All rights reserved.

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"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

Frank

‘Three months into my grand new job in Europe I screwed up royally,’ I told a man I was introduced to less than half an hour before, though it is true that six months ago I risked my life in his company.

Forty minutes ago Frank Harrington, chief executive and sole owner of Harrington Ltd, came into my office and said, ‘Bring your passport. Lock the door behind you. You’re on the plane to Italy.’

Don’t get the idea I’m a big deal because I have an office of my own. We at Harrington Ltd are security consultants. Even the junior-most top floor employee—me—has an office of her own, with a substantial code lock on the steel door.

Work sharing and idle chatter is not encouraged, though there is a cafeteria (that’s what my British colleagues call the canteen) which serves three excellent meals a day to encourage the staff to mix, bond, and share experiences in a more guarded way than by passing around confidential files.

I hurriedly signed the report I was rereading for the umpteenth time to be certain it was perfect. I gave the folder to Frank because it would go to him anyway for countersigning.

Frank is old-fashioned. He gives his people freedom of initiative in action—in our business he has to—but he insists on countersigning every piece of paper sent out under the firm’s letterhead. I don’t even want to think of the hours he works. We aren’t Brink’s or Securicor (the British equivalent of Brink’s) because we don’t do their sort of scut work. But there are still over three hundred employees, of whom the vast majority write detailed reports every so often.

I said, ‘That money wasn’t stolen. It’s in their bank. The shortfall was caused in their computer system somewhere. Their auditors will trace the malfunction at the end of the year. It isn’t worth our fees to do a job for which they already pay someone else.’

‘Good,’ Frank said, skimming the report while I locked every piece of paper in my office, including a blank notepad, in a hefty steel filing cabinet bolted into the concrete floor. The pad is locked up just in case my pen pressed through the page; we’re that thorough.

Frank told me on the day I started work, ‘We undertake industrial espionage for some of our clients. It would be arrogant to think that what we do to others they cannot do unto us. There is only one instant firing offense here, and that is a breach of our or our clients’ security. For everything else, if you’re alive, you get a second chance.’

Frank held the door for me. He’s like that, perfect manners. He’s a tall, dark, squarely handsome man, but he isn’t likable because his face is deliberately dead and he seems to have no personality traits except paranoia, but I would trust my life to him. In fact, I have. He doesn’t invite the staff to his house or to restaurants but he and his wife Amanda eat with us every day in the cafeteria, sitting wherever there are seats.

And a fortnight ago, at the beginning of December, Frank and Amanda came into my office and told me they appreciate my work. I didn’t expect a bonus but got a month’s pay all the same. More to the point, Frank and Amanda brought me a bottle of 75 year-old brandy in a wooden box that a wannabe wine connoisseur in my apartment block said must have cost him the better part of seven hundred British pounds, over a thousand dollars.

I stopped before the door. ‘That drain’s been going on since last year. The auditors should have caught it already. That’s not in the report. I was going to put it in a covering note to you. I thought that, depending on how high up you deal with them, you may want to put it in a covering letter or maybe just tell the big boss in person.’

‘Good,’ Frank said again. It is his highest form of praise. He didn’t tell me who he deals with at the huge retail chain whose missing millions I investigated. Frank tells you only what you need to know and that much reluctantly, as if sharing a fact causes him pain.

I wondered if he approved of my tact or of my security instinct for not telling even the boss a fact in the passage when I could do it in my office.

Twenty paces from the elegant but bare office in which Frank receives visitors, he took my arm. He let go the moment I stopped. I don’t imagine Frank’s wife works in his office to stop him fiddling with the female staff. He’s not that sort of man. He’s the sort of man who trusts only his wife, though only after she has proven herself trustworthy a hundred times.

‘Jack Armitage was my first client. In the beginning we survived only because Armitage paid their bill ahead of time. I want you to remember that.’ It is characteristic of Frank that he doesn’t specifically say loyalty is involved. He would consider that axiomatic.

‘Okay.’ I would find out soon enough. Jack Armitage is the Jack Armitage, boss of Armitage Cartwright Racing Limited. If you watch grand prix or sports car racing on television, you know who he is. The guy in the wheelchair whose cars and drivers have won so many world championships that the other teams complain he has a leasehold on the trophy.

In the interview room a man in a three-piece pinstripe suit rose when we entered.

‘This is Charlie Cartwright, Director of Operations for Armitage Cartwright,’ Frank said. ‘Joanne Bartlett.’

Charlie is handsome in an unaggressive sort of way, rising forty, slightly chubby from good living. I shook his hand with real respect. Charlie, as recently as this year, took a class victory and an overall podium place at Le Mans, and he has won the race outright three times driving his own cars. He is one of the world’s major athletes.

He is also a good man with an iron bar or a murderous maniac, depending on which side of him you stand. I know that from observation though we weren’t introduced on that occasion.

‘You’re on secondment to Armitage for the duration,’ Frank said to me. ‘You report to Charlie, and to me when I ask or when it is over.’

I didn’t ask the obvious question, For how long? I didn’t feel even a frisson of feminist resentment that Frank should dispose so cavalierly of my private life and arrangements. I have worked with men of action too long to expect such consideration.

Well, all right, I didn’t have a private life. No boyfriend, no girlfriend, not even a cat. No private arrangement and none in prospect. After nine months in London I still volunteered for extra duty whenever possible and filled the day or two in the month that I didn’t work by touring the famous places in the guidebook.

I was as happy as a six foot three inch (and a bit) female freak can be when most men think she’s six four.

Charlie headed for the door. I nodded to Frank and followed Charlie.

Then Frank stunned me.

‘Don’t let them corrupt you,’ he said to me in a voice loud enough for Charlie to hear.

Startled by this revelation that Frank isn’t a robot, I turned in the door to stare at him.

‘Go. Do good,’ Frank said. He didn’t come to the elevator with us.

All about Joanne

There were other people in the elevator from a higher floor. Charlie said not a single word. I’m so used to my Harrington’s co-workers standing silently in the elevator that we were in the parking basement before I realized this was odd. All he said to me in Frank’s office was, very British, as he shook my hand, ‘How do you do.’

In the basement he said, ‘Where’s your car?’

‘The red and white ‘53 Corvette.’

‘You drive a classic car to work?’

Charlie Cartwright undoubtedly has a garage full of cars, including a black one he drives only to funerals. He probably calls his garage ‘the motor house’. His father is a Lord and his family is so rich that if any of them sneezes, the Financial Times Top 100 Industrials Index (that’s the British Dow-Jones) drops 60 points.

‘It’s the only car I have,’ I said mildly, deciding to give him another chance. Were he parachuted in where I come from, someone would surely make fun of his homesick pretensions.

‘Is your car safe here or do you want to take it to your own garage?’

‘I park it on the street. And you can bet your ass it is safe here. Harrington Ltd handles the security of this building.’

‘Must be the only night guarding job Frank undertakes,’ he chuckled. ‘Even with London rents, how can they afford Frank? Does he do it free?’

He does but I said, ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

‘Lock it and leave it. If the occasion arises, we’ll fix you up with faster wheels.’

‘You surely know the way to a Southern girl’s heart, Mr Cartwright.’

‘Charlie. What did I say?’

‘You insult my Corvette by offering me a faster car. You insult me, a security specialist, by implying that it is possible to steal my car.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘If you can, you may keep it after you succeed in moving it as much as ten feet. When you come out of hospital.’

He looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry. That was careless, not malicious.’

‘It’s all right. I don’t want you to get the idea Frank’s operatives are obstreperous.’

‘Nah. Only Frank’s ex-SAS and Frank’s Americans.’

He led me to his car. He unlocked the passenger side door and held it for me. I ignored him while I walked around the car, admiring it: eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of his own manufacture of grand touring car, called the CAAR 2 for Cartwright Armitage Advanced Research model 2, with four seats for four tall people and space for enough luggage for an extended trans-Continental tour for all four occupants.

Even with all those zeroes after the significant digit, it is still Charlie’s second cheapest car, the road-going copies of his Le Mans winner leaving no change out of a couple of million. I saw one of those in front of the Savoy Hotel one day on my sightseeing peregrinations; the doorman told me there is a five-year waiting list.

‘Don’t hold the door for me, Charlie. I’m not a woman, I’m just doing a job.’

‘It’s not a body-guarding job so I shan’t bother with political correctness.’

Once we were in motion I asked, ‘What is it then?’

‘You’ll find out. Tell me about yourself.’

‘Didn’t Frank show you my file?’

‘Frank show anyone a file, never mind a personnel file? Are you sending me up again?’

I shook my head and tightened my seatbelt. Charlie drove smoothly but very quickly. I sure as hell hoped every idiot on the road knew he is a multiple Le Mans winner and would therefore stay clear.

I should say that London traffic anyway moves faster than in most American cities, which I still found unsettling. But in addition gaps available to no one else opened for Charlie by virtue of his reflexes, spatial judgment, and the outrageous power of the car, to the extent that a couple of times he touched sixty in passing maneuvers before slicing back into spaces hardly longer than his car. This was still in the City (London’s financial district, like Wall Street).

When I remained silent, Charlie said, ‘We threw Frank’s first suggestion back in the pool because we didn’t like him.’

Well, no job lasts forever. ‘We keep starting off on a bad footing.’

‘Sure. I’m tactless and you’re abrasive.’

‘Bullshit. I’m most agreeable if you don’t spit on the American flag. Your family motto is, ‘Never explain. Never apologize.’ So why don’t you try again.’

He cast me a glance. It froze me, not because I was intimidated but because just then he touched ninety passing a truck on some road south of the Thames. He made the glance seem extended but in reality it must have lasted a microsecond for the next moment he braked smoothly to slot into an impossible space between the truck and a car traveling at thirty, missing an oncoming truck by what to me seemed inches.

‘The job we want you to do is important to us. The monetary value of failure could be several hundred million a year. No one knows for how many years. A lot of jobs hang on it. Besides professional competence we must therefore have a meeting of minds.’

‘All right. I was born and raised in a small town in Tennessee. My father was the police department detective there. Singular, so you can guess the size of the town. Later he became, and still is, police chief. I went to state college and took the CPA exams; that’s a Chartered Accountant in Britain. I joined the police department and then—’

‘Why did you join the police?’

‘Take a good look at me, Charlie. No! Keep your eyes on the road!’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind the fines, if you were in my daddy’s police department, even if you were driving on the highway rather than in the city, he’d dock your pay for this insane speed.’

‘The great thing about being indispensable is that meetings wait for one.’ He slowed but not enough.

‘I didn’t have the confidence to go job- and man-hunting in the city. In my home-town at least they’d done their staring long ago.’

‘Why? You’re a beautiful woman. What does it matter that you’re tall?’

‘Would you marry a woman taller than yourself?’ He’s of average height, about five-eight or -nine.

‘I did. I hope to die in bed with her.’

I warmed appreciably towards him. ‘Just about then the town’s biggest factory closed. Many other businesses went down with it. Not a good time to set up as an accountant. But Daddy gave the Mayor’s only son a job in the police. Tommy Lee Lee is not too bright—’

‘Tommy Lee Lee?’

‘You have to shift the emphasis and add a rising inflection, as if you’re thinking about adding a question mark but then think better of it. Tommy Lee Lee. That’s nothing. Tommy Lee—that’s his first name, right?—his cousin in the Virginia branch of their family is called after his four grandparents.’

‘Lee Lee Lee Lee.’ He looked at me again.

I decided I would live to be at least forty because Charlie almost has, even driving that way.

‘I kid you not,’ I said in a voice that surprised me by being light and amused. ‘So Tommy Lee’s dad, his honor the Mayor, told Daddy to take me into the police department to look after Tommy Lee. He guaranteed that when Daddy retires, ten years from then, I would get the job as chief.’

‘Frank doesn’t hire small town police hicks. Nor does he fob them off on us.’

Watch your mouth, buster, or I’ll bust it. ‘You’re sadly misinformed about modern small-town policing,’ I said in my bitchiest sherry-and-intellectual-elevation voice.

At Tenn State girls who couldn’t get laid pretended to be intellectuals.

‘Eroded real-value budgets have turned us all into technological wonders. And the incompetent, who are surprisingly few, can always have their orders sent from the FBI’s computer direct to their own desktop PC. The fact is that quite a few law degrees and degrees in psychology, plus plenty of executive training by national agencies, have dragged small town policing into the twenty-first century.’ Not before time, in my daddy’s view, but I didn’t want to go into that now.

‘Let me rephrase that. So then what?’

Frank would never show Charlie the file but he certainly told him all this or I wouldn’t be here now.

‘The President made a whistle stop. A bunch of half-assed Jew-baiters and revenue-bombers too dumb to be let into the Klan attacked the presidential convoy. I was crouching behind a car, listening to my daddy tell us how he didn’t want our boys shot by the Secret Service, so keep our bloody heads down.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t have any sense. I saw a toddler, the daughter of a school friend, wander out into the street, into the firestorm. I rolled as soon as I was clear of the cars, grabbed the child and rolled over on her to keep a low profile. I was shot in the butt.’

He looked at me long enough to impress on me that he wasn’t laughing.

‘Keep your eyes on the road, Charlie. Please, eh? There was a television feeding frenzy about how I took a bullet for the President while Secret Service men dived for their lives into the armor plated Presidential limo.’

‘Television will get something right one of these days.’

‘Don’t hold your breath. Neither was true, of course. I voted for the other guy and despised that particular president wholeheartedly so I was only rescuing the child. And the Service guys were body-shielding The Man as they shoved him into the limo. But the publicity was such that the Secret Service was forced to offer me a job.’

‘Was the training tough?’

‘Where I come from girls learn to shoot and hunt just like boys. My parents begat only daughters so I enjoyed all my father’s attention. The Secret Service is full of good ole boys. They weren’t at all surprised when I was top marksman with both short and long barrels. Since I was taller and faster than any of the physical instructors I didn’t have any problem there either. Nor in class. A lot of that stuff is just legalese, same as an accountant already knows. I was made to feel right at home because I earned my place the hard way, no nonsense about political correctness or positive discrimination.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Will you tell me where you got that slight limp?’

‘Sure. When I was in the Metropolitan Police. Fraud Squad because I am a mathematician. Nothing glamorous like Special Branch or Homicide like Frank. A befuddled embezzler pointed his father’s ancient service revolver at me. He was more surprised than me when it went off. It was a Webley four-fifty-five.’

‘It could have ripped your leg right off!’

‘I thought you’d appreciate the detail. The bullet just brushed the bone but that was enough to shatter it so the leg had to be shortened.’

‘What were you doing in the Met?’ The Met has an accelerated promotion program for people with college degrees—just the desperation of that recruitment detail should tell you they don’t attract aristocrats.

‘I was mugged passing through London and decided to do something about it. Now, why did you leave the Secret Service?’

‘The Secret Service does a lot more than just guard the President. I worked in the counterfeit section. Some exceptionally good plates for printing hundred dollar bills that we confiscated from counterfeiters went missing. They turned up in Germany. Millions in counterfeit currency went into circulation via Italian markets, which are an investigator’s nightmare. My partner and I made the original bust. Those plates disappeared from a night safe I signed for.’

‘The partner did it?’

‘No proof that would stand up in court. He agreed to resign.’

‘So they knew it wasn’t you?’

‘The board of inquiry cleared me of complicity or any blame. My superiors decided to censure me anyway.’

‘Fuck you very much and goodbye.’

‘So you’d do the same thing?’

‘Of course. So, Frank.’

I decided to like Charlie. His manner is probably just the style of a British aristocrat. I mean, never explain, never apologize, with griffins rampant on a shield of arms to ram the message home to the plebs…

‘I blew my savings on a grand educational tour, polishing my Italian, just gawping at great works of art, being aimlessly idle even if not daring to be topless at St Tropez. By the time I reached London I was broke. I asked the Met if they wanted an American with an impressive CV. They must have seen me blanch when they showed me the pay scales. I was too shocked to laugh. A chief superintendent called Frank to drop my name.’

‘How much does Frank pay you?’

‘Hundred thousand a year. British pounds.’

‘We pay much better than that for executives of your caliber.’

‘I bet you do. But what I do is security. Harrington’s is the best security house in the world. After small town policing, the Treasury and the Secret Service, plus a few years with Frank, I can write my own ticket anywhere else.’

‘So what do you do for Frank?’

‘Come on, Charlie. Frank told you everything I just told you. But if I blurt out Frank’s affairs to you, how can you trust me with your business?

‘Fair enough. What I want to know is, what have you done for Frank on behalf of Armitage?’

‘As Director of Operations at Armitage you know that already.’

‘A trick question deserves a trick answer?’

‘Frank told me to take my orders from you. You’re the one trying to have a meeting of minds because whatever the task is carries so much risk that you want to know if you can trust me with more than merely money.’

‘Precisely.’

‘That’s why you declined Frank’s first choice, no doubt senior to me and wearing the same old school tie as you.’

Frank’s ex-armed forces establishment is divided equally between ex-sergeants from the SAS and the SBS (Special Air Service and Special Boat Squadron, roughly equivalent respectively to Delta Force and SEALs, all of them special force commandos) and officers from the same services who share Charlie’s accent. For that matter, Frank speaks the same way though he is an ex-policeman.

‘This isn’t about honesty, this is about commitment,’ I added when he was silent.

‘Integrity is a commitment to truth. In my mind the two are indivisible.’

I was startled enough to exclaim, ‘Really?’ Sometimes I think it fateful that height and frustration turned me intellectual at college, rather than lesbian. Other times I’m grateful. If your own mind is prepared you can win real insights into people by listening carefully to what they say.

‘We’ll discuss it sometime.’

Suddenly I decided that I wanted Charlie for a friend, and the decision had nothing to do with his skill with an iron bar.

‘Three months into my grand new job in Europe I screwed up royally,’ I told a man I was introduced to less than thirty minutes before.

A valued client

‘Frank hired me on the recommendation of the Metropolitan chief superintendent. I was given a month’s pay in advance and told to take off. As a mark of respect to a fellow professional no one told me they would use the month to investigate me thoroughly.

When I returned from this paid holiday I served in various departments, mostly junior scuttle-butting as a test of my mettle while the department heads decided who wanted me most.

I volunteered for everything that volunteers were called for. That way I did some important work too, standing in for guys on the bodyguard detail over weekends or when their wives gave birth. I met six different heads of state in six weeks. Harrington Ltd does body guarding only for sovereign governments and regular clients on retainer. That is work for which I have supreme training so the department head was happy to let me stand in and after a week asked Frank if he could have me for good.

Frank refused on the perfectly good ground that my accounting skills and investigative experience are assets that would be wasted in personal security.

It was at the end of my fortnight with the computer data security guys that I screwed up. One of our clients operates a mainframe computer to which the longhaired programmers on the floor below my office securely tie all their sensitive high-tech designs. This client also operates a number of laptops as remote field-terminals to the mainframe.

Our programmers and solder-sniffers gimmick the laptops so that when the lid is closed the sensitive information on the hard disk is totally wiped by unintelligible random rubbish written over its surface to make the real data irrecoverable by any known or forecast means.

Nor can the data be intercepted while in the international airwaves because it is encoded at the mainframe end and locally decoded by the laptop.

Afterwards I was with our code makers and code breakers for a fortnight each. They explained how a laptop receives the decoding key over the open airwaves while the same key remains utterly useless in the hands of an interceptor. This is magical but it is a long story and very technical so for the experts let me just say it is an adaptation of the PGP system for RSA. It makes the common international commercial code DES, invented by IBM, look like a kiddies’ crossword.

A totally secure system, right? The usual thorough Harrington Ltd job, utter overkill and brilliant besides.

It is important to stress that on the day I knew none of the above. Remember, I was only a tourist in the data security department.

All the ins and outs of this client’s design data security system would not be explained to me even if I joined the department, possibly ever, and only in drips and drabs as required if and when I worked on the particular client’s account. Only if I were put in charge of the account would I be filled in fully.

So. On a Sunday afternoon I returned from Heathrow to the office after a volunteer body guarding job to make the normal contact report. Since my office for the time being was in data security, that’s where I sat filling in the form.

A senior guy doing duty on the weekend and just going home came in with a carton he dropped on my desk. He put a DVD in its jewel box on top of the cardboard box.

‘A valued client, no, let me correct myself, the valued client, no less than Mr Frank Harrington’s pet boy racers, have appointed a new senior engineer to liaise between test sites and the design office. She arrives tomorrow morning. This is her computer, containing her encrypted comms, without which she cannot start work. The techies have just finished gimmicking the solderable bits. This DVD needs to be loaded onto the computer, then you run the tests one by one, then you close the laptop’s lid firmly, and lock everything in the safe.’

‘I don’t know anything about engineering computers.’ That reservation would later save me from being fired out of hand.

‘No sweat. It’s not a computer like ours, which requires a high priest in a white coat to divine the oracle. Jobs for us, eh? It’s a toy computer, an Apple Mac, complete with GUI, that’s a graphical user interface. I really don’t know why a real engineer doesn’t use a real computer.’

‘I have an iMac, so I guess I can handle it. But let me give you a tip. Jokes about the flag, mother, apple pie, the Corvette, and Apple computers go down poorly with Americans.’

He grinned. ‘The DVD is the initial security key, so make sure you lock it in your safe or Frank will pup. Once more.’ He repeated the instructions. ‘In the morning you give the computer to Amanda. The valued client has arranged to have it picked up from her. Okay?’

It took me twenty minutes or so to load the program on the DVD and make the tests, my involvement consisting of clicking on the numbered tests and waiting for the machine to report that each test succeeded.

I inspected the laptop a bit enviously. I would like a top model but that one cost seven times as much as my iMac and I really can’t justify the expense, especially since I can borrow one of the office portables (best quality PC, but never a Mac) if I need one. It looked just like the one in the stores and the advertisements. The gimmicks must be internal.

But there was something extremely odd about this Mac. It carried absolutely no software. Zilch. Just an operating system, stripped of many of the convenient bits and bobs that Apple gives away with their OS. I couldn’t even find the communications programs, yet had been specifically told there were comms programs on it.

My iMac has comms installed, straight out of the box. The big deal about the automatic set-up program is to personalize the comms to the owner. I remembered that striking me as particularly thoughtful of Apple.

I really doubted that Harrington’s would supply a computer in such a crippled state to a client. I must have done something wrong.

Worse, when I opened the computer after closing the lid, it started up but everything was gone from the screen. It was like a living brain but completely blank.

I called the nerd on the duty list at home and explained.

‘Jesus, you people on the top floor really are bubble brains,’ he said offensively. ‘You got me out of the bath for nothing. That’s the point, that the laptop is too crippled for creeps and sneaks to mess with. Also the point that it goes blank when you close the lid after setting it up. That’s how you should deliver it. The mainframe will bring it back to life once the owner physically plugs it in at a safe location. That way you and the rest of gossip zentral don’t know the owner’s encryption key. Take the rest of the evening off to dye your hair blonde.’

I called the dead phone a few choice names, ate the excellent meal served in the cafeteria even on Sunday nights, went home to sleep, and the next morning gave the box with the computer in it to Amanda and the DVD to the guy in charge of this little operation.

Another piece of scut work routinely accomplished, except for the uncalled-for tongue-lashing administered by the wet nerd.

Now you have to follow the steps to understand what went wrong next.

Only it didn’t just go wrong next. It went wrong before, retrospectively, so to speak, and then it went wrong forward into the future as well. If I did what I should have, it wouldn’t have gone any further wrong, and perhaps we could also have acted to recover the train of past losses before the affair became a disaster.

The disaster was that our valued client, the valued client, Mr Frank Harrington’s pet boy racers, who by now you have guessed are collectively Armitage Cartwright Racing Ltd, lost all their designs to a deliberate, continuing theft by their chief competitor, who then built a Chinese copy of their all-conquering Le Mans car.

And Armitage Cartwright’s so-called security consultants failed, when the opportunity offered, to spot the chink in the armor we erected around those laptops.

And the vicious consequential harm that followed the escalation of hostilities because we didn’t stop the flow of thefts when the opportunity offered... I don’t even want to think of it!

Many of these Apple laptop models look the same and of course they all work the same way, because it is their functionality which distinguishes them from all other computers. But that doesn’t mean they are all the same. They evolve over time and so do the ancillary bits built into the case.

When the original security programming was done, about the time I finished high school, there were PCMCIA slots in those laptops. Harrington’s took care of them. Then ExpressCard/34 slots replaced PCMCIA slots and our programming for the PCMCIA also took care of the ExpressCard/34 slots.

Our computer hardware specialist was on holiday when Armitage Cartwright called forward laptops for two executives. His half-trained sidekick had been told the ExpressCard/34 earlier replaced the PCMCIA card, and was secured by the same program alterations.

At the same time the SD card slot replaced the ExpressCard/34 slot, without any fanfare from Apple, a routine upgrade. The two slots appeared the same physically but were electronically radically different.

By now you can no doubt see it coming. The irony is made even more wretched by the fact that SD is the acronym for Secure Digital.

To the half-trained sidekick the SD card seemed to be a problem we had already twice before handled successfully. He fixed the two laptops according to the ExpressCard/34 instructions in his superior’s departmental operations manual.

We even had a second chance.

When the new engineer arrived, she went unexpectedly but urgently to the big job of grand prix liaison. Because of the hurry to make a laptop ready for her we never read the manual, continuing to assume that computers which look the same will work the same. After all, we had issued exactly the same model, prepared the same way, twice before, to two other executives, without any trouble.

So now there were three laptops with live, unsecured SD card slots in service among Armitage Cartwright’s top executives.

The design thieves would put a blank SD card into the laptop’s slot. The unaware owner of the laptop would call up designs in a blissful cloud of apparently invulnerable security. In order to make screen redrawing faster, the operating system would share out the incoming data to any available memory—including the SD card!

At the end of the day the owner closed the lid in the knowledge, imparted by a senior Harrington’s executive who went personally to hand over the laptop, that all sensitive data would be wiped from the hard disk. And so it was—from the hard disk.

The keepers of the laptops just left them anywhere around their offices once the lid was closed. As far as they were concerned, those laptops were totally blank.

But the SD card was not wiped because we had not told the computer to wipe a card in a slot that we knew wouldn’t work because we had removed the programming that makes it work—or so we thought.

The thieves would remove the SD card and steal all the plans called up. Over a period of months every last important part was called up so the thieves were able to build a perfect Chinese copy of a hitherto dominant car to break its run of victories.

If the guy in charge read the literature that came with the laptop we supplied to the new engineer, we would have discovered that the SD card slots were different from their predecessors. Thus we would have known that all the Apple laptops with SD card slots we supplied were compromised. We would certainly have instituted an investigation; the likelihood is that we would have discovered and stopped the theft.

If he read the literature instead of going home…

When the manure hit the spreader, our only excuse was that it was a rush job, given to us late under an impossible deadline. Frank said the senior guy should have done the job himself, that he compromised a client’s security through carelessness. He was gone.

Frank also argued that I shouldn’t have accepted a job I didn’t understand. On being told I was installing elements of a security system, I should have demanded adequate information or given the job back.

I couldn’t argue with that. My pay was docked ten thousand pounds, then over fifteen thousand dollars. Frank also made clear that, while there is only one cause of instant dismissal in his shop, a second error of judgment of that magnitude would lead to a pink slip.

Frank argued that the nerd’s abrasive manner on the phone discouraged me from asking further questions which might have led to us averting the disaster. So the nerd, who doesn’t earn nearly as much as I do, was fined the same amount, which was a much bigger hit for him than for me, and put on the same notice.

We didn’t lose the account. The client took into consideration Frank’s twenty years of faultless service. The client needed Frank anyway to spy on the competitor to discover how bad the loss was. Answer: total.

Then they needed Frank to fight back when the thief decided to play dirty.

This was where I redeemed myself.

I eat in the cafeteria most meals because the food is excellent. A meal that good costs at least thirty pounds in London if you search out the little out-of-the-way restaurants, quite a bit more if you eat in the smart, conveniently situated restaurants. The cafeteria is also free, which on three meals a day saves me, in a good stretch less than a year, as much money as Frank fined me.

Yeah, I know, some people eat nothing for breakfast and an apple for lunch. I’m taller than most NBA players and built in perfect proportion. I spend at least an hour a day in the gym and burn a lot of nervous energy in the physically dangerous part of my job. My meals must pay a lot of muscle- and stress-rent. I need three squares a day.

And there is always someone in the cafeteria to pass a little human contact.

Yeah, I know, get a life. But I have a life. It is just that I work with the sort of men who will never hassle a female co-worker even if she burns to be asked so she can jump into bed with them. Most of the guys (nerds don’t count—they’re jumped-up poor white trash everywhere) are clones of Frank.

The ones who aren’t don’t get hired or, if they wriggle their way in, are exposed by a single act of cavalier carelessness like the one who gave me the computer to program. A single act that compromises security, and they’re gone.

I guess I’m a clone of Frank too. I’m too tall to fit into the real world of little people. I could probably cut it as a rarity on the singles circuit but I’m not desperate enough for musical beds without meaning. Yo, I’m Miss Small Town America and proud of it. I’ll just work off my passion polishing my 1953 Corvette, or rig it to give electric shocks and other surprises to would-be joy riders.

On this Thursday afternoon when Frank came into the cafeteria there were only four of us sitting on after lunch. The three men were laughing and I was smiling with pleasure at the success of my joke.

‘What’s funny?’ Frank asked.

‘We were ragging Joanne about being shot in the butt for the President,’ Fawn Rowan said, ‘and she says—’ and here he interrupted himself for me to pipe up.

I knew Frank wouldn’t think my joke funny but there was no way to wriggle out. ‘Desk generals begged themselves a helicopter ride in Vietnam so they could be shot in the butt and win a Purple Heart for the wound. That way they would have at least one medal.’

Frank didn’t laugh.

‘Tell him the rest. He won’t think that funny either,’ Sergeant Llewellyn chuckled. He’s a miserable bastard who laughs only when someone falls flat on his