Praise for the Pantheon series:

“Mr. Lovegrove is one of the best writers out there... Highly, highly recommended.”

– The Fantasy Book Critic on The Age of Ra

“Lovegrove’s bluntness about the gods’ Jerry Springer-like repugnance refreshingly reflects the myths as they must appear to modern eyes.”

– Strange Horizons Magazine on The Age of Ra

“One of the UK SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.”

– Saxon Bullock, SFX on The Age of Ra

“A compulsive, breakneck read by a master of the craft, with stunning action sequences and acute character observations. This is the kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”

– Eric Brown, The Guardian on The Age of Zeus

“The action is just unbelievably good.”

– The Fantasy Book Critic on The Age of Zeus

“The reader feels as if they are right there accomplishing something along with our heroes... You definitely feel like you got your money’s worth.”

– Sci-Fi & Fantasy Review on The Age of Zeus

“I can totally see why The Age of Odin made it onto the New York Times Bestseller’s List; in terms of entertainment value alone it certainly deserves to be up there and I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw it on the big screen in a few years from now.”

– Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on The Age of Odin

“The action, along with some finely observed satire, keeps the pages turning until the end.”

– Total Sci-Fi Online on The Age of Odin

“Lovegrove is vigorously carving out a godpunk subgenre – rebellious underdog humans battling an outmoded belief system. Guns help a bit, but the real weapon is free will.”

– Pornokitsch on The Age of Odin

“5 out of 5. I finished it in less than three hours, yet have pondered the revelations found within for days afterwards and plan to reread it soon.”

– Geek Syndicate on Age of Aztec

“Higher on action and violence than Lovegrove’s previous books, the novel still manages to portray convincingly the psychology of its two antiheroes, and paint a vivid picture of Aztec lore.”

– The Guardian on Age of Aztec

“A thoroughly engrossing novel, with well-written chase sequences and some epic battle scenes. If you enjoy techno-thrillers with a twist, you’ll like this”

– SciFi Bulletin on Age of Aztec

Also by James Lovegrove

NOVELS

The Hope • Days

The Foreigners • Untied Kingdom

Worldstorm • Provender Gleed

Co-writing with Peter Crowther

Escardy Gap

THE PANTHEON SERIES

The Age Of Ra • The Age Of Zeus

The Age Of Odin • Age Of Aztec

Age Of Voodoo

THE REDLAW SERIES

Redlaw • Redlaw: Red Eye

NOVELLAS

How The Other Half Lives • Gig

Age Of Anansi • Age Of Satan

COLLECTIONS OF SHORT FICTION

Imagined Slights • Diversifications

FOR YOUNGER READERS

The Web: Computopia • Warsuit 1.0

The Black Phone

FOR RELUCTANT READERS

Wings • The House of Lazarus

Ant God • Cold Keep • Dead Brigade

Kill Swap • Free Runner

The 5 Lords Of Pain Series

The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void

The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon

The Lord Of Fire

WRITING AS JAY AMORY

The Clouded World series

The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson

Pirates Of The Relentless Desert

Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos

AGE OF GAIA

JAMES LOVEGROVE

First published 2013 by Solaris

an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

Riverside House, Osney Mead,

Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN: (epub) 978-1-84997-526-1

ISBN: (mobi) 978-1-84997-527-8

Copyright © James Lovegrove 2013

Cover Art by Pye Parr

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of he copyright owners.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

BIRD STRIKE

AS BARNABY POLLARD stepped out of the Jag, a dead seagull hit him slap bang in the face.

The bird was a large one, nearly four pounds in weight, and it collided breastbone-first with the bridge of Barnaby’s nose. He felt a sickening click, a momentary numbness, and then a crashing burst of pain. Clutching his face, he sagged back against the car, a luxury sports saloon XJ model. The seagull corpse flopped to the ground, inches from the gleaming toecaps of Barnaby’s handmade John Lobb full brogue Oxfords.

“Take that!” someone yelled from close by. “Bird killer! Planet raper!”

Jakob, Barnaby’s chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, moved swiftly. Having ascertained with a glance that his boss was not too badly injured, he swung towards the person who had thrown the dead gull.

The culprit was a young man in ripped jeans and a shabby cagoule. His hair was long and matted, somewhere between terminally unwashed and dreadlocked. His neck was swathed in the kind of Mediterranean cheesecloth scarf beloved of gap-year students and eco-activists. From his left hand an empty Waitrose carrier bag hung limply like an old man’s ball sac, the container which until a minute ago had cradled the defunct bird.

Jakob sized up the youth. The youth, in turn, took in the bodyguard’s immense bulk, the barrel chest that strained the buttons of his double-breasted Tom Ford suit jacket, the close-cropped hair, the rock-solid jaw – and blenched. All at once it occurred to him that he might have just made a terrible mistake.

Actually, no ‘might have’ about it.

Jakob Beit was a Jewish Afrikaner by origin. His racial heritage was that of both oppressor and oppressed, his personality a thin-skinned mix of superiority complex and inferiority complex. It made him doubly quick-tempered, twice as likely to take offence and lash out.

The gull flinger turned to run, but Jakob caught up with him in three strides. He grabbed him by the hood of his cagoule and spun him round.

“Please, n-no,” the youth stammered, hands raised defensively. “I didn’t mean to – It was a political statement – My mum’s a lawyer –”

Jakob’s implacable expression was the warship’s bows over which these waves of argument broke uselessly.

“Boss?” he said to Barnaby over his shoulder. “How’s your nose? Is it broken?”

“I think so,” Barnaby replied. His sinuses felt on fire. It was as though someone was boring upwards into his skull with an electric drill.

“Is that all? Nothing worse?”

“Yes.”

Jakob turned his attention back to the youth. “Just that, then, you bliksem. A nose for a nose.”

A fist smacked.

Blood spurted.

The youth shrieked.

THE SEXINESS STAKES

THE INCIDENT OCCURRED in broad daylight, during the morning rush hour, on a busy central London street, outside one of the tallest of the capital’s new skyscrapers, the GloCo Tower.

Which meant eyewitnesses, plenty of them. In particular, it meant phone cameras.

Nobody had shot footage of the assault with a dead seagull. That had come out of the blue, a complete surprise.

The retaliation was what got filmed. Between the attack on Barnaby Pollard and the punch that decked his assailant, a dozen phones came out, a dozen video apps were deployed, a dozen thumbs pressed Record.

How it looked was that the bodyguard had carried out a disproportionate act of aggression on a passerby who happened to have shouted a few derogatory comments at Barnaby. This was the story that spread virally, starting in the paddling pool of social media before graduating to the adult swim of the news networks: big business violently and bloodily curbing the common man’s right to freedom of speech.

Barnaby had his PR people disseminate the counter-story, with pictures of the dead seagull and his red, swollen nose as proof that Jakob’s retaliation was warranted and appropriate.

But his side of things didn’t receive nearly as much airtime. It wasn’t as interesting. It didn’t fit with the ongoing popular narrative. It wasn’t sexy.

He was outdone in the sexiness stakes by cagoule-wearing Tarquin Johnson, upper-middle-class dropout, self-styled green warrior.

Tarquin lived in a squat in Kilburn while his parents sat snug in a multimillion-pound mansion on Primrose Hill.

Tarquin smoked roll-ups and rode a bike and loved nature and abhorred what he regarded as the environmental sins being perpetrated by Barnaby’s corporation, GloCo.

Tarquin was good TV. He hunched on morning-show sofas and played the part of the wounded, blameless victim well.

“I just couldn’t, y’know, let it lie,” he said, peering out over a broad strip of bandage, his eyes black like a panda’s. “Knowing there’s sea birds and, like, all manner of marine life dying out there – dying in oil spills created by GloCo tankers and rigs and refineries. Pollard’s company’s sort of, y’know, toxic. Toxic to the earth. He’s killing us all. I had to do something. I found the seagull lying beside the Thames at Shoreditch. Like, dead of natural causes. It was a sign, a gift from the universe. Throwing it at Pollard – it seemed like the right thing to do. Fitting, you know what I mean? Poetic justice. I’m sorry I broke his nose. I didn’t mean to. But he didn’t have to go and have his Nazi goon break mine.”

Tarquin’s mother, a highly successful human rights lawyer, sued GloCo for damages. By rights Barnaby could have countersued, claiming unprovoked common assault and actual bodily harm, but his legal team advised against. Whatever the technicalities of the case, a jury’s sympathies would not lie with him. So instead he settled out of court. The payout was a seven-figure sum, enough to keep Tarquin in Golden Virginia and cheesecloth scarves for the rest of his life.

In fact, Tarquin moved out of the Kilburn squat immediately and used some of his windfall to buy an organic smallholding in Devon, not far from Totnes. He published a blog for a while: Diary Of An Extreme Farmer. Toiling on the land in the constant Dartmoor drizzle proved to be too much like hard work, however, so he sold up and moved to India, opening a beachside bar in Goa – a far more congenial climate and job. He died a year later when a tsunami roared in from the Arabian Sea and devastated a whole swathe of the Subcontinent’s western coastline. The oceans didn’t seem to care much about the valiant efforts Tarquin had made on their behalf, unless this inundation was their obscure way of rewarding him, clawing him into their deep, damp embrace.

RESET

BARNABY’S NOSE RECOVERED, although the same could not be said for his reputation. But then, his reputation had never been that great to begin with.

A doctor reset the nasal bones and said there was nothing further he could do. Time and ibuprofen were all that were needed.

Barnaby resumed work at GloCo, making money. The corporation was a massive entity with an annual turnover equivalent to the gross national product of a small Asian democracy. Its assets were distributed worldwide, most of them in the field of energy generation and distribution. Oil, gas and coal formed the lion’s share of its business portfolio, but GloCo owned and ran a handful of nuclear plants as well.

It almost went without saying that GloCo boasted very few green credentials. Its primary concern was making profit from fossil fuels and enriched uranium. It did not, as a corporation, consider the long-term consequences of its activities. It could not afford to. Its horizon extended no further than the next set of quarterly accounts, the next share dividend payout, the next round of end-of-year bonuses.

Barnaby perched at the vertex of a pyramid he had built, with thousands of employees below him, spread across the world. He orchestrated their symphony of industry with an unerring hand. The staff of GloCo moved in unison to do their CEO’s bidding, reaping the earth’s natural resources and transforming them into cold hard cash.

The corporation was popular with its stockholders. It was blue chip, firmly ensconced in the FTSE 100, a steady, reliable source of income and capital growth. Barnaby was a celebrity among the City fraternity. Those in the financial know feted him.

The wider world took a somewhat dimmer view of GloCo. In recent years there had been a groundswell of hostility rising against all the energy corporations. Investment banks still headed the anti-capitalists’ shit-list, but energy giants such as GloCo ran them a close second. They were icons of greed and rapaciousness, in the eyes of many. Unprincipled. Unaccountable. Crazed monolithic gods gorging on the meat and muscle of the planet. Giant assemblages of human beings who had collectively lost their humanity and their individuality, becoming no more than cells in a mindless-brute body.

So there had been a constant background hum of carping and criticism, mainly in the left-wing newspapers and academic journals; GloCo was not well thought of by the bien pensant. There had been the occasional protest rally outside one or other of its places of business, including the corporate headquarters at GloCo Tower. It was nothing, though, that the company could not shrug off, much as an elephant might shrug off the stinging of flies.

Until Tarquin Johnson threw that dead seagull.

This was a catalysing moment. An inciting incident.

What Tarquin had done was actually quite funny. It was an ironic, apposite act of vengeance against a man whose corporation had indeed, as Tarquin claimed, suffered a number of unfortunate escapes of crude oil which had resulted in large, lethal slicks. These were all accidents, of course. Tankers ran aground in foul weather. Offshore drilling platforms experienced wellhead blowouts. It happened. It couldn’t be prevented. But what people remembered most vividly about these events were the pictures of sea birds with oil-sodden feathers, wings flapping ineffectually as they struggled to free themselves from a beach that had become a black, tarry mire. The pathetic plight of a stricken guillemot or tern became indelibly etched in the public’s minds. They saw a creature that was natural, noble and free, besmirched and doomed by the clumsy, ruinous hand of man. GloCo was to blame. Tarquin’s seagull had been a neat, pithy way of making that point.

THE SEAGULL MOVEMENT

AND SO THE Seagull Movement took shape.

It began in low-key fashion. Overnight, somebody dumped a couple of dead sea birds on the doorstep outside the ground-floor lobby of the GloCo Tower.

The next night, it was ten birds.

The night after that, dozens.

Barnaby made a call to the Commissioner of the Met, who was a friend of a friend. Out-of-hours police-car patrols in the area were doubled. A number of suspects were arrested, caught acting furtively in the vicinity of GloCo HQ. They were found, most of them, to be carrying dead seagulls in their backpacks.

The subsequent phase saw a group of demonstrators turning up at the Tower during the daytime, dressed as seagulls. They prostrated themselves on the pavement and lay stock still, transformed into a representation of avian slaughter. TV stations had been alerted beforehand and reporters were there to capture the protest on camera. It made the lunchtime and evening news bulletins, and featured prominently in all the following morning’s papers.

In no time at all, it was an international phenomenon. Wherever there was a GloCo subsidiary, a GloCo plant, a GloCo holding of any sort, there was a flashmob flock of activists outside it, mostly youngsters, clad in bird costumes, playing dead. They didn’t necessarily come as seagulls. Some were canaries or eagles or ostriches or swans. The rules were loose. As long as the outfit was suitably birdlike, it was allowable.

They filmed themselves doing it. They posted clips online. They set up Facebook pages. In the space of a month the Seagull Movement went from daft stunt to worldwide meme, and an albatross around Barnaby’s neck.

GloCo became the punchline to jokes by stand-up comedians and chat show hosts. Someone at Barnaby’s squash club yelled, “Caw, caw!” across the changing room, and elicited a ripple of chuckles. In parliament, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition described the Prime Minister’s policies “lying in tatters around him like a heap of dead seagull impersonators in front of a GloCo building,” not the wittiest quip ever made, but it still brought the House down.

The net result of this campaign of sustained mockery was a small but significant drop in GloCo’s market value. The corporation had become a laughing-stock, but that was no laughing matter for anyone who held stock in it.

Something had to be done to arrest the decline. If GloCo shares continued to dip, there might be a panic, a run on the company, investors scrabbling to extract their money before the slide turned into an unstoppable avalanche.

Barnaby held an emergency meeting with his public relations department. His PR team were all bright young things, wedded to their BlackBerrys and iPad minis, Prada-neat, gym-honed, skilled in the arts of looking good and making others look good. They spoke in a pidgin of buzzwords like some futuristic cargo cult: “next-gen,” “turnkey,” “mission-critical,” “bleeding-edge,” “client-centric.” They advised Barnaby that GloCo should “repurpose its iconic best-of-breed status” and “develop a groundbreaking, feature-rich solution” to its current “cross-platform synergistic perfect storm” if it wanted to stave off the likelihood of a “never-before top-down paradigm shift without an available exit strategy.”

Barnaby translated this as: the company needed to do something urgent and radical now, or else it was up shit creek without a paddle.

“Ideas, anyone?” he asked.

The PR people had ideas. Oh, they had ideas.

Restructuring. Repositioning. Rebranding.

“Change?” said Barnaby.

“Yes,” said someone.

“Genuine change? Or the appearance of change?”

This was a moot point with the PR department, for whom “genuine” and “appearance” were synonyms.

“Whatever you feel comfortable with, Mr Pollard.”

As was so often the case with PR meetings, Barnaby found himself having to devise a strategy in spite of, rather than thanks to, the advice he was being given. He treated his PR people as a kind of Delphic oracle: they delivered vague, gnomic pronouncements which he interpreted as he saw fit, to the best of his own abilities. They helped him by raising a cloudy mirror to his thoughts, whose reflection he could then study and clarify. This was their main use to him, and the sole reason he kept them on the payroll. In every other respect they were just a gaggle of jargon-obsessed, otherwise unemployable morons.

“How about we court the eco lobby?” he said. “Woo them? Show them a different face of GloCo, a caring, friendly one?”

Nods all round. Yes, yes, that was exactly what the PR people had been driving at. Exactly. They couldn’t have phrased it better themselves. Well, possibly they could have. But yes. Exactly.

“Make nice with them,” Barnaby continued. “Let them see we’re not heartless, plundering ogres. Slicks and spills and suffering wildlife matter to us, really matter. How about that?”

From the gathered PR people there was something like a massed sigh, a mutual, near-orgiastic gasp of delight. Of course. Of course. GloCo cares. These things matter to GloCo. GloCo is good.

“Get onto it,” Barnaby instructed them. “Find me some relevant and pliant journalists – green ones in every sense. Line them up. I’ll schmooze them. The Seagull Movement started with me. It can end with me.”

Smartphones and tablets pinged into life.

The PR department set to work with a will.

LA CIGARETTE

THAT EVENING, BARNABY consoled himself with dinner and a girlfriend. Not both at once; in series rather than in parallel. He ate by himself at Nobu on Old Park Lane, starting with an appetiser of beef tenderloin tataki followed by lobster tempura with creamy wasabi, washing it all down with a 1999 Chambertin-Clos De Bèze Burgundy. Then he met the girlfriend at a rooftop bar round the corner.

She was called Zurie, Marseille-born, Paris-based, sometimes a catwalk model, mostly a woman who liked to hang out with very rich men. She smoked incessantly in order to keep her weight down. Her dependency on cigarettes seemed to sum up everything she was: slim, pale, bad for your health in large doses.

Hence Barnaby had nicknamed her La Cigarette. He nicknamed all of his girlfriends. Pigeonholing them according to quirks or character traits – The Complainer, Persistent Hair Flicking, Licks Teeth, Coke Hound – made them easier to remember. Easier to tell apart, too. Otherwise they might all meld into one amorphous whole, indistinguishable from one another.

Because Barnaby had a type. Whippet-thin. Blonde. Desperately insecure. Clingy. Neurotic. Eager to please.

Zurie, La Cigarette, was a classic example.

“You have eaten?” she asked as she sipped her cosmopolitan, which the barman had made, at her request, with sugar-free cranberry juice.

It was past 10PM. Barnaby could not realistically deny it.

“Why do you not invite me to join you?” Zurie lit her next cigarette from the stub of the last. They were outdoors on the terrace, under a pergola and a gas-fired space heater. “You are ashamed of me? Do not like to be seen with me?”

Barnaby could have told her the truth. Why would he want to dine with her? She was hardly the world’s greatest conversationalist, her talk usually revolving around fashion designers and her fellow models, every one of whom, if Zurie was to be believed, was a bitch of one kind or another. Also, she seldom touched her food. She would run her fork through it a few times, perhaps nibble a salad leaf or two, meanwhile tapping her foot agitatedly as she counted down the minutes until she could nip out and light up. It was pointless taking her to a decent restaurant. Barnaby could afford it, but there was the principle of the thing to consider. Why waste money on a perfectly good meal if it wasn’t going to be consumed and enjoyed?

That was what he could have said. But since he itched to have sex with this woman, what he actually said was, “It was a business dinner. Very boring.”

“With who?”

“What?”

“This business dinner. With who were you having it? What did you discuss?”

“An associate from Australia, Bob Shearwater of Port Kembla Collieries. We talked about exploitation rights in New South Wales.” He had had dealings recently with said man on said topic, but it had been a ten-thousand-mile videoconference exchange, not an intimate restaurant tête-à-tête.

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

THE 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

THEIR 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.”

“Is any of this relevant to the piece you’ll be writing about me, Miss Laidlaw?” Barnaby snapped.

“Lydia,” she said. “Not Miss Laidlaw.” She held out a hand. She grinned.

Barnaby was jolted off-track. The woman was being friendly? Hadn’t she just been attacking him a moment ago? Berating him over his taste in women?

Numbly, dumbly, he shook the outstretched hand. Lydia had quite a grip.

“And may I call you Barnaby?”

Barnaby nodded.

“There,” said Lydia, getting up. “Ice broken.” And, humming a little tune to herself, she returned to the rear of the plane and her fellow journalists.

Barnaby, dazed, topped up his glass of Cristal and struggled to fathom what the hell had just happened.

A FREE LUNCH

THE SHE-WOLF EMERGED tentatively from the forest of pine, spruce and cedar, sniffing the air. Her breath huffed around her in gauzy clouds. She had dark grey fur and a white muzzle and was beautiful, with a haughty set to her shoulders, imperiously pricked ears.

She seemed to sense that there were people not far away, people observing. Her gaze kept drifting towards the hide where Barnaby, the journalists, Jakob and their Inuit guide were bunkered down. The hide was downwind of her and well camouflaged, looking like a low white hummock, part of the landscape, but still she was aware that something was amiss. She took a few hesitant paces out from the shadow of the trees, into the snowfield, placing each paw with precision. She was gauging the threat level, wrestling with her instinct to turn and flee.

Nobody in the hide dared breathe. They stared through their binoculars, waiting, hopeful.

Gradually the she-wolf relaxed, judging that the threat, if one existed, was not imminent. She let out a soft, gruff bark.

Almost immediately, a half-dozen cubs tumbled out from the treeline. They yipped at one another and gambolled in the snow, rolling, fighting, cuffing.

Meanwhile their mother ventured further out into the open, towards the thing that had lured her from her den: a caribou carcass. The guide, John Kunayak, had shot the reindeer the day before and laid it out as bait that morning. The scent of blood and meat must have been unbearably intoxicating for the she-wolf. It was a wonder she hadn’t appeared earlier. But then one of the animal kingdom’s life lessons was that you should be wary of food that came too easily. There was no such thing as a free lunch.

She approached the carcass by a circuitous route, eyes constantly scanning the horizon. All at once she lunged for the caribou, seized a hindleg between her jaws and dragged the dead beast backwards. Within moments she had rejoined her brood, bringing them a banquet. The cubs set to work with relish, delving into the deer’s underside, tearing through the skin and gorging on the soft innards, while their mother gnawed on a haunch. Soon every wolf, big and small, was smeared in blood, its pelt pinkened. The caribou’s body twitched as it was devoured, as though somehow brought back to life.

Eventually all had eaten their fill, and the she-wolf hauled what was left of the carcass off into the forest. Her cubs, bellies distended, waddled after her.

The group of visitors had seen what they had been brought here to see. John Kunayak led them back to the Sno-Cat, a three-mile trek through knee-deep snow. Isaac, the eco-blogger, wheezed and struggled the entire way, demanding a rest stop every few hundred yards. He was not built for physical exertion, and the extreme cold was exacerbating his asthma. OwlHenry soon lost patience with him, calling him a fat, lazy mummy’s boy. Isaac retorted that at least he wasn’t a fucking tofu-eating scarecrow. The name-calling might have degenerated into a fistfight if Jakob hadn’t stepped in and separated the antagonists.

“Here are your options,” he told them. “You can stop squabbling like a pair of babies, or I can klap you both round the ruddy head ’til I’ve knocked some sense into you, ja? Which is it to be?”

Isaac and OwlHenry fell silent, like scolded schoolchildren.

“That’s better,” said Jakob.

It was two hours by Sno-Cat back to the oilfield, a noisy, jolting journey over rough terrain, but at least the vehicle’s cab was heated, blissfully so after the wind-chilled subzero temperatures of the Alaskan wilderness. Barnaby just so happened to be sitting next to Lydia. The seating was ungenerous, everyone squashed together all hugger-mugger. He felt her flesh pressing against his, her warmth permeating through the duck-down insulation of their Canada Goose pants and parkas. He concentrated on the landscape outside, making a show of ignoring her. On the rare occasions when he sneaked a sidelong glance at her, she was also ignoring him – yet she was smiling, too. Always smiling.

SCAPEGOATING AND VICTIMISATION

THE GLOCO DRILLING station covered twenty acres of permafrosted nowhere. Rigs and derricks hunched over one-storey cinderblock buildings, all surrounded by a chainlink fence four metres high and topped with razor wire to deter curious fauna, principally polar bears and grizzlies.

The party of visitors ate dinner that night in the mess, surrounded by grizzled, boisterous roustabouts. Country music blared from the loudspeakers, and in the adjoining bar-cum-recreation-area football fans cheered a game on the TV and personal grudges were settled noisily over the pool table.

The food was basic, hearty and none too wholesome. Every main course was meat-based and served with biscuits and gravy. OwlHenry had a hell of a time finding anything he could accept as edible, in the end resorting to a selection of the soggy, overcooked vegetable side dishes.

“So we saw some wolves today,” said Isaac in his customary world-weary drawl. “Big whoop. What’s that meant to prove?”

“The Alaskan grey wolf is an endangered species,” said Aletheia, the Goth documentarian, nibbling at her food like some eyelinered dormouse. “Humans have encroached on its habitat. We’re driving it to the brink of extinction.”

“But not here,” said John Kunayak, who was a game warden with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and also employed by GloCo as the drilling station’s designated environmental-impact assessor. “Where we were this afternoon, that was grey wolf breeding territory. The forest is where several packs are known to mate and rear their young. Have done for countless generations. It also lies directly between this site and Valdez on the Kenai Peninsula, where the refineries and tanker port are. As in, if you drew a straight line between here and Valdez, it’d go smack dab through the middle of the forest.”

“So?” said Isaac.

“So, oil pipelines tend to be laid in straight lines. Shortest, most economical route possible. They cut across country, only diverting around geographical features they can’t go over, like mountains or lakes. Most companies would have ploughed a pipeline right through those trees and not thought twice about it. The wolves would have been disturbed and would have quit the area. They’d have lost their ancestral lair. But GloCo didn’t do that. On my recommendation, they agreed to give the place a wide berth. The pipeline to Valdez runs a total of twenty-five miles out of its way, going round the forest in a big arc. It can’t even be seen by the wolves. That cost GloCo – how much was it, Mr Pollard?”

“Not sure,” said Barnaby. “Couple of extra million at least.”

“Couple of extra million it needn’t have spent – wasn’t obligated by law to spend. All for the sake of a bunch of wolves,” Kunayak concluded with an ironic grimace.

“We’re supposed to be impressed?” said Isaac.

“You have to admit it shows consideration,” Kunayak said.

“But you’re still sucking oil out of Mother Earth and pumping it across hundreds of miles,” said Dorothea to Barnaby, “all in order to feed our insatiable appetite for petrochemical products. Saving a few wolves doesn’t mitigate the damage you’re doing to the world, filling the tanks of gas-guzzling cars, heating up the atmosphere with CO2 emissions...”

“I’m not forcing people to drive their cars,” said Barnaby. “I’m not making anyone do anything. I’m just meeting market demand. If everyone stopped using oil tomorrow, I’d have no one to sell it to. I’d have to close down that arm of GloCo and try and make do with its other assets. Don’t blame me for giving people what they want.”

“We have to blame somebody,” said OwlHenry. “Might as well be you.”

“No,” said Barnaby, struggling to control his temper and keep stating his case calmly. “That’s not a rational argument, that’s just scapegoating and victimisation. You want a sea change in culture, a move away from humankind’s dependence on fossil fuels, fine. But it doesn’t start with me” – he pointed at himself – “it starts with you” – he pointed round the table – “and them” – the other diners, the roustabouts in their plaid shirts and jeans – “and everyone else. We’re all equally culpable, all seven billion of us. Singling me out as the problem achieves the opposite of what you’re after. It’s denying where the true responsibility lies. It’s placing the burden of guilt on one man’s shoulders when it should be shared universally. Besides –”

Lydia interrupted him. “Don’t.”

“Huh?”

“I bet I know what you’re going to say next, Barnaby, and I’d suggest you don’t. It’s not likely to win you any friends.”

“Oh? And what am I going to say?”

“‘If it wasn’t me digging up the oil, it would be someone else,’ or words to that effect.”

Barnaby blustered, but yes, that had been more or less the tack he had been intending to take. There was no denying it.

“It doesn’t absolve you,” Lydia said. “It’s just a little bit childish, in fact. ‘I stole those doughnuts, but only because another boy would have if I hadn’t got there first.’ Rather than having the moral courage not to steal the doughnuts at all.”

“It’s not stealing.”

“Did you pay for the oil? Was it yours to start with?”

“I paid for the land rights to drill for it. I’m the one taking the financial risk, fronting up the capital necessary to get the stuff out of the ground. That makes me its owner, doesn’t it? As much as anyone ever could be.”

“No one owns anything,” said OwlHenry. “We just borrow whatever we have, for as long as we’re alive.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, spare us the hippy bollocks!” Barnaby couldn’t rein in his irritation any longer. “Get to grips with reality, Olly the Owl or whatever your stupid made-up name is. People own things. That’s how the world works. I have what’s mine, you have what’s yours. You wouldn’t want me to grab your shirt off you, that crappy smock thing you’re wearing – not that I’d want it. What’s it made of anyway? Hemp?” OwlHenry nodded. “Thought so. Hemp dyed the colour of turd. But if I did for some bizarre reason want it for myself, you’d never let me have it. Why would you? You need it so as not to be naked. Owning stuff is what make us human. It defines us. Those wolves we saw, they don’t own anything, and that’s why we’re better than them. That’s why we’re the dominant species and they’re on the endangered list. Because we possess, we have something to live for, a purpose: acquisition. Whereas they just exist.”

He shoved back his chair and strode away from the table in high dudgeon. It was only later, when he was in his meagrely furnished room in one of the accommodation blocks, listening to the arctic wind hiss between the buildings and pepper the window with snowflakes, that his anger began to simmer down.

The bloody nerve of these people. Trying to undermine him. Him. Barnaby Pollard. One of the wealthiest, most successful men on the planet. Those ignorant, arrogant little troglodytes...

But he mustn’t let them get to him. He must be magnanimous. He was a god, and gods must always learn to tolerate lesser beings.

BORN AGAIN VIRGIN RAINFOREST

THE NEXT DAY they exchanged the bitter cold of Alaska for the swelter and humidity of the tropics. Ecuador, to be precise, where the Gulfstream touched down at Lago Agrio Airport in the east of the country.

The following morning, the group travelled upriver by motorised canoe into the western reaches of the Amazonian rainforest.

The journalists were already sullen and tetchy, thanks to a combination of jet lag and the switch from one extreme of climate to another, but now illness started to take its toll as well. OwlHenry had come down with a severe cold, which he was treating with homeopathic remedies, to little avail, while Dorothea was suffering from an upset stomach – caused, she said, by the travel inoculations she had been given prior to leaving the UK, but more likely a result of her insistence on drinking tap water with her dinner at the hotel last night rather than the bottled water everyone else opted for. “If it’s good enough for the locals,” she had declared, “it’s good enough for me.” The upshot of this noble sentiment was a case of cramps and acute diarrhoea.

Isaac and Aletheia had managed to avoid contracting any ailments, but were still tired and taciturn. Isaac had withdrawn into himself, emerging from his shell every so often to grumble or snipe. Aletheia was preoccupied with filming everything on her compact Contour+ HD camcorder, mediating the world through a lens.

Of the five of them, only Lydia remained chirpy and upbeat.

The two long canoes navigated various winding tributaries of the Amazon basin, passing Indian villages and the occasional private landing, consisting of a jetty, a deserted-looking colonial-style hacienda, and not much else.

“There was a time when gringos came,” the head guide, Rodrigo, explained when asked about these houses. “They tried to carve out land for agriculture and start up rubber plantations, sugarcane farms, that sort of thing. It never lasted. The jungle was too much for them.” He chuckled. “The ones that didn’t die went mad.”

“Mother Nature can be overwhelming,” said Lydia. “You think you can tame her, but at best you can only reach a truce with her.”

“You said it, pretty lady,” said Rodrigo, beaming. “Never a truer word spoken.” He had taken an evident shine to Lydia, and had already asked twice if she was single, to which her only answer had been an ambiguous shrug.

Barnaby’s feeling was that if Rodrigo wanted Lydia, he could have her. It puzzled him, however, that he should even care about another man’s interest in her. Were she His Type, he could understand being proprietorial about her, even jealous. But since she was not His Type, why did it require an effort to overlook someone else making a pass at her? Why couldn’t he simply be oblivious?

The canoes put in on a shallow beach at a bend in the river. Everyone waded ashore and tramped inland for a mile or so, Rodrigo and the other guides cutting a path through the undergrowth with machetes.

Eventually they arrived at a low-lying area, a shallow valley dominated by towering hardwood evergreens. The leaf canopy cut out all sunlight but for a few bright, piercing shafts. Birds warbled, a rippling chorus of competing song. Monkeys and macaques, unseen, hooted and shrieked. The air was thick with biting, stinging flies that seemed to find the insect-repellent gel everyone had slathered thickly on their skin alluring rather than offputting.

“Virgin rainforest,” said Dorothea, with something like a sigh. “Magnificent. The lungs of the world.” Then she retreated behind a mahogany tree and voided her bowels, groaning with discomfort.

“Yes, yes, all very lovely,” said Isaac tersely. He wiped sweat from his bulbous forehead. “But all said and done, it’s just a patch of rainforest.”

“Rainforests are disappearing,” Aletheia piped up from behind her camera. “An area the size of Wales every year. Logging and agriculture are eroding them away. Soon they’ll all be gone, and then where are we going to get our oxygen from?”

“From phytoplankton in the oceans,” said Barnaby. “Fully half the world’s oxygen comes from plankton photosynthesis, maybe even more. Also, your Wales statistic isn’t quite correct. Yes, rainforests are getting chopped down, but what many people don’t take into account is how quickly they can regrow. Take this spot, for instance.” Now was the moment to play his ace. “Would you believe me if I said that eight years ago there was a GloCo oil extraction plant situated right here?”

The journalists looked dubious.

“Tell them, Rodrigo.”

“It’s true. Señor Pollard isn’t lying. I used to work here. There were prefab building units, rigs, a two-track mud road all the way down to the river. We pulled tens of million of barrels out of the ground.”

“It wasn’t the most lucrative field I’ve ever exploited,” said Barnaby. “The infrastructure and transport costs ate into the profits, and then the global oil price took one of its periodic dips and we were starting to lose money, so in the end we shut up shop and pulled out because it wasn’t viable any more. We dismantled everything, loaded it onto barges and took it away, and now look.” He gestured at the rampant greenery all around. “You’d never know we’d ever been.”

“I call bullshit,” said Isaac.

“That’s your prerogative. Rodrigo? Why don’t you show them the wellhead cap?”

Rodrigo and the other guides got busy hacking away at a huge clump of lianas and vines until they had exposed a flat round concrete plug set into the ground, one foot high and six feet in diameter, like some ancient, forgotten altar. A small tarnished plaque in the centre bore the GloCo logo: the world held between two hands, superimposed over the initials GC.

“That’s all that’s left,” Barnaby said. “The only sign that this was once a GloCo site. A few more years, and even that will be gone from sight, buried beneath leaf mould and soil.”

“All this grew up in just eight years?” said OwlHenry, his consonants blunted by his blocked nose.

“The jungle comes back fast,” said Rodrigo. “Left to its own devices, it soon reclaims what was taken from it. You could say it’s a quick healer.”

“What about indigenous tribes?” said Dorothea. “I bet they weren’t happy about oil prospectors coming along and churning up their ancestral home.”

“On the contrary,” said Barnaby. “Most of the manual labourers we employed were locals. Rodrigo himself is half Indian.”

“My mother belongs to the Oriente Quichua. And my people were glad of the income. Me especially. I saved what I earned, and it paid for me to study at San Francisco de Quito University. I now have a degree and am a professional geologist.”

“So am I still the bad guy?” said Barnaby.

There was a pause, then Lydia said, “Jury’s out.”

HARMONIOUS COEXISTENCE

BACK AT THEIR hotel that evening, Lydia joined Barnaby on the verandah. Built into hillside, the place boasted views over a part of the rainforest that was preserved as a national park. Wisps of evening steam clung to the treetops. The rumpus of the daytime fauna was quietening down, but the nocturnal animals were tuning up and finding their voices.

“My colleagues are all tucked up in bed,” Lydia said. “Need their rest and recuperation, poor things.”

“How come you’ve stayed in such good health?” he asked.

“Clean living. Sturdy constitution. No neuroses. You?”

“I’m one of the ultra-rich. Haven’t you heard? We don’t get ill.”

She laughed. He was weirdly gratified that he had amused her.

“And,” he added, “I’m used to flying around the world, flitting between time zones and waking up in all sorts of odd places. Drink?”

He was working his way through a bottle of Ecuadorian Pinot Noir, astringent but palatable.

“The local rotgut? Don’t mind if I do.”

He filled a glass for her. “Be warned: it takes a few sips to get used to. They say you can’t make decent wine on the equator, because grapevines need cold winters to help produce better, hardier fruit. They’re right.”

“Well played today, by the way,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Brilliant sucker-punch move. Touché.” She clinked her glass against his. “Not that it’s done you any favours.”

“No?”

“Nobody likes to be tricked. Nobody likes to be made to feel a fool.”

“It was a salutary lesson.” He frowned. “Wasn’t it?”

“Not exactly. Remember, you’re wooing, not browbeating. Haven’t you ever had to woo anyone?”

“I don’t think anyone’s had to woo anyone since about 1930.”

“Seduce, then. How do you go about enticing your succession of blonde coat-hangers into bed? Don’t you have a technique? Some neat chat-up lines you use?”

“The only line I need is my line of credit,” he quipped.

“Gosh, that wasn’t at all glib and smarmy, much.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“Well, you go on thinking that, Barnaby, if it makes you happy. All I’m saying is, if you want to impress us, don’t treat us like we’re ignorant heathens who have to be shown the light. We’re entitled to our opinions, even if they differ from yours. Be nice. Show us some respect, not condescension.” Lydia tried her wine. Her nose wrinkled. “Ooh, good Lord. I take your point. That’s... novel.” She tried again. “But it grows on you.”

“I’m not winning?” he asked. “That’s the consensus so far?”

“Why does it have to be about winning? In your world, is it so important to always have the upper hand?”

He thought about it. “How else does one measure success?”

“By harmonious coexistence, I’d say,” was her reply. “Getting along with other people, not getting one over on them. No doubt you’d call that ‘hippy bollocks.’”

“If OwlHenry had said it, yes. But from you...”

She glanced at him. “From me... what?”

He turned away. “Nothing. Never mind.”

The sun was going down, burnishing the foothills of the Andes. Barnaby and Lydia stood side by side at the balustrade, drinking their wine and watching the day die.

Barnaby was starting to resent her. She invariably had an effective counterargument, a riposte that kicked the legs out from under him, a question that questioned his question. He hated that. He hated anyone who talked back and, worse, who could wrongfoot him.

He imagined ways he could control her, make her do his bidding, bring her to her knees. He could think of nothing more satisfying than seeing Lydia Laidlaw acquiesce to his wishes and become his thrall.

That was when he realised that he desired her.

It had stolen up on him, caught him totally unawares.

But yes, oh, God, he was actually attracted to this large, buxom woman, with her strange bicoloured eyes and aggravating smart comebacks. He actually fancied her and wanted her.

He had never, ever had a woman like her before.

But that just made it all the more of a challenge, all the more exciting.

A DAMN GOOD MERGERING

SOMEWHERE IN AN air corridor over southern China, Jakob slipped across the cabin aisle and lowered his bulk into the seat next to Barnaby’s. He said nothing. Eventually Barnaby looked up from his Fragbook.

“We’re going to have a chat, aren’t we?” he said.

“’Fraid so, boss.”

“One of your heart-to-hearts. Remind me, do I pay you to do this?”

“You pay me to take care of you.”

“My physical safety, yes.”

“I see it as extending further than that.”

“All right,” Barnaby sighed. “What’s on the agenda today?”

Jakob swivelled round. The journalists were asleep, sprawled in different postures, seats reclined. Dorothea’s snores vied with the Gulfstream’s twin Rolls-Royce BR725 engines for loudness. Only Lydia was awake, but she was listening to music on her iPod Nano, earbuds firmly wedged in place.

“Her.” He jerked a thumb. “The redhead.” He raised his voice. “Lydia Laidlaw, who can’t hear us talking about her.” Lydia didn’t stir, didn’t even glance up. He nodded in satisfaction. “Her... and you.”

“There is no ‘her and me.’ I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Come on, boss. Don’t take me for some dumb Boer hick. I’ve seen you making goo-goo eyes at her. I’ve been working for you for nearly a decade. I know the signs. You get this look about you when you see a stukkie you fancy. Same look you get when you’ve set your sights on some company that’s not doing well and you want to buy it out. Next thing, it’s hostile takeover and asset-strip. A damn good mergering.”

“Are you talking about women there, or business?”

“Both.”

“Well, in this instance I can categorically state –”

“Boss,” Jakob said, softly but firmly, “I just want to warn you. I don’t think this one’s for you. I don’t think she’s the right sort of girl.”

“Oh, and you’re such an expert on the opposite sex?” said Barnaby. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t your preferences run the other way?”

Jakob’s expression soured. “Cheap shot, Mr Pollard. Besides, my sexual orientation isn’t relevant. Relationships are relationships. The dynamics are more or less the same, whatever the gender.”

“Okay, so what’s the problem with her?” Barnaby shot a glance rearward. Lydia was nodding along to a song, gaze unfocused.

Jakob leaned confidentially closer. He wore a bold, spicy aftershave, Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. Barnaby himself preferred a subtler scent, Paco Rabanne 1 Million. “Look, I was a nightclub doorman in Jo’burg, ja? And before that I was South African Special Forces. A ‘recce,’ ja? I’ve learned how to spot a troublemaker at a hundred paces, and boss, this Lydia, she’s trouble. There’s something going on there, deep down. Something you don’t want to stir up, not if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’ve handled a few bunny boilers in my time. I’m battle-hardened on that front. Your concern is touching, but –”

“No, listen,” Jakob insisted. “You have your tastes. Your very specific tastes. They work for you, and that’s fine. Who am I to judge? Give me an all-male sauna and a glory hole any day. But there’s a level of give-and-take with what you do with your ladies. They accept how you treat them because secretly it’s what they want. They don’t have a lot of self-esteem, and you confirm that for them, and they’re grateful. That’s not going to fly with Miss Hourglass Figure back there. She’s made of sterner stuff. She’s not going to be plain sailing. She’s shark-infested waters.”

“Don’t go there, you’re saying?”

“Definitely don’t. It won’t end well for you.”

Barnaby deliberated a moment. “You realise that when somebody tells me not to do something, I usually go ahead and do it, just to spite them?”

Jakob sighed, his meaty hands dropping into his lap. “Ja, I know. But I at least had to try.”

“It’s appreciated.” Barnaby patted his bodyguard’s shoulder, which felt as solid as a side of beef. “Let me just deal with Lydia in my own way and see how things develop. Who knows? Maybe nothing will come of it.”

“Whatever happens, boss,” said Jakob, rising, “I’ve got your back. And, aside from everything, she has got a cracking pair of tiets. I’ll give her that.”

“Are you sure you’re not a closet straight, Jakob?”

He laughed. “No. But I’m still Afrikaans. We’re expected to be vulgar, eh?”

ARROWS OF PRAGMATISM,

ARMOUR OF IDEALISM

ON A BEACH a few miles south of Baku, crowds of Azerbaijanis sunned themselves, picnicked, and cavorted in the waves. It was Republic Day, a national holiday, the sky was cloudless, and there was barely a square inch of sand unoccupied.

Less than two miles offshore lay a cluster of interlocking triangular drilling platforms, connected to the mainland by a chain of pontoon bridges. They were jack-up rigs, mobile barges with three legs that could be lowered to the seabed, anchoring them in place. The excess lengths of leg rose above their superstructures like skeletal towers. Each rig bore a GloCo logo and each had a flare-stack flame at the top, flickering like a lambent orange banner.

The holidaymakers seemed unperturbed to be in such close proximity to petroleum industry activity. The breeze carried a faint whiff of burning, but the seawater was blue and pellucid, innocent of the rainbow sheen that would have indicated oil pollution.

“Why are we here, you’re no doubt asking yourselves?” said Barnaby.

“Not to admire those, that’s for sure,” said OwlHenry with a contemptuous sneer at the jack-up rigs. “Ugly monstrosities.”

“Did you bribe some government official to get permission to stick them there?” said Isaac. “Scratch the question; how much did you bribe the guy?”

“Everything about the negotiations and the deal was fully above board, I can assure you,” Barnaby said. “Not a single backhander involved. What you’re overlooking” – probably deliberately, he didn’t add – “is that Azerbaijan itself gets a decent cut of the profits we make. This drilling is good for its economy. Azerbaijan, in fact, is now one of the highest-GDP countries in the Caucasus, largely thanks to its energy sector. The standard of living here exceeds that of any of its post-Soviet rivals. Beneath the Caspian Sea, within Azerbaijani territorial waters, lies one of the last great commercially developable hydrocarbon deposits, a vast resource we’re only just starting to tap. I’m proud that GloCo is leading the way in exploring and extracting that latent wealth.”

Lydia raised a hand. “But...”

“Yes, Lydia?”

“Wasn’t it right here that GloCo had its most recent spill?”

Barnaby didn’t miss a beat. He had anticipated this query. “I’m glad you mentioned that. Last year, as I’m sure you all remember, there was a mishap. It occurred on this very coastline, a few kilometres east. One of our rigs became dislodged during unusually heavy weather. The seal on the wellhead sheared and split. A blowout preventer valve failed. Oil began to leak. That was the bad news. The good news was that we had divers down at the site within the hour. They removed the drilling riser and installed a new one, stemming the flow. The entire operation took the best part of twenty-four hours, but full credit to my employees, they worked nonstop, round the clock, until the job was done. Nearly a million gallons of crude was lost, but it could have been so much worse.”

“And then beluga sturgeon started washing up dead on the shore,” said Lydia. “Not to mention seagulls.”

Barnaby winced.

“I’m sorry, that was insensitive of me.” Lydia’s smile was less apologetic than her words. “Sore point, clearly. How is the nose, by the way? Better now?”

“It only hurts when I sneeze. The dead-fish situation was undesirable, I admit. Caviar has long been one of the staples of the Azerbaijani economy, and when the beluga sturgeon population took a hit, so did the caviar industry. I regret that.”

“Of course,” said Isaac. “Poor you. Had to find something else to put on your toast at breakfast for a while.”

“Actually, I don’t eat the stuff myself. What GloCo did, however, was compensate the local sturgeon fishermen handsomely for their loss of revenue. We also instituted a comprehensive development programme all along the coast here. You see those hotels and holiday apartment complexes?”

Blocky white buildings hunkered a short way inland, like an assortment of sugar cubes.

“Built using start-up funds donated by GloCo. This region is already turning into something of a hot tourist destination. You’ve got Russians flocking here, Iranians, Turks, Eastern Europeans... I’m not denying that what happened was a great pity, but GloCo has done its best to make amends and offer reparation. If anything, Azerbaijan is better off now than before.”

“As I recall,” said Aletheia, “wasn’t the government planning to sue you for millions of dollars?”

“The President did make noises about punitive damages and restitution. But rather than put everyone through the whole rigmarole of trials and legal wrangling that could have dragged on for years, GloCo held up its hands, said ‘mea culpa,’ and ponied up.”

“Would you have, if you hadn’t been threatened with prosecution?”

“I’d say yes. Look, nobody’s perfect. No energy company has a flawless safety track record. For want of a better phrase, shit happens. You can’t prevent accidents. It’s how you deal with them that matters. If you own up to them and do your utmost to mitigate their effects, isn’t that acceptable? Isn’t it the most anyone can hope for?”

He stared at the journalists. They stared back. He could feel every arrow of pragmatism he shot at them rebounding off their armour of idealism, unable to find a chink. It was hopeless. The week of the charm offensive was nearly at an end, and he had little to show for it. He had wasted a great deal of money and, more importantly, time. All for nothing.

If he was going to salvage anything from the whole futile exercise, it would have to be her. Lydia. She alone could make it worthwhile. So it was all the more imperative that he didn’t let her slip through his fingers.

DEPARTURES AT ARRIVALS

TOUCHDOWN AT LONDON City Airport, in the drizzly greyness of a British spring dawn. The Gulfstream coasted up to a private gate, and its seven passengers disembarked, all of them bleary-eyed, some more than others. Even Barnaby was feeling a bit stupefied after their whistle-stop globe-girdling expedition. Around the world in eight days.

The farewells in the arrivals lounge were stilted. Dorothea hurried off, saying she needed to start typing up the notes she had recorded on her Digital Dictaphone and then prepare her feature on the trip. OwlHenry wasn’t convinced his experiences were worth turning into an article – they wouldn’t teach readers of Higher Consciousness anything they didn’t already know – but he might go ahead and write one anyway. Isaac had been updating his blog en route via his BlackBerry and murmured something to the effect that the subscriber feedback so far had not been broadly sympathetic towards Barnaby. Aletheia had raw footage to assemble and edit and expected to have a mini-doc ready for upload onto YouTube within a fortnight. She hoped it would be impartial and allow viewers to make up their own minds.

“You ‘hope’?” said Barnaby. “You mean to say it’s out of your control?”

“The footage decides,” Aletheia replied. “It is its own message. I’m simply the conduit.”

That left only Lydia to say goodbye to. Jakob hung back at a discreet distance, though not so far off that Barnaby could ignore his presence.

“So,” Barnaby said.

“So.” Lydia smiled. “Well, it’s been interesting.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“The others don’t sound as though they’re going away with a better opinion of me.”

“I don’t think you’ve made many converts, it’s true.”

“Not even one?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully.

“I reckon the best that can come of this,” Lydia said, sidestepping the question, “is media coverage showing you as fallibly human. Someone who means well, who tries, but doesn’t always get what he wants.”

“Could be worse, I suppose.”

“It’ll take some of the gloss off you, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Didn’t having a seagull chucked at me already do that?”

“Not to the extent that a clumsy, half-baked propaganda tour will.”

Barnaby’s shoulders slumped. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

“Cheer up.” She patted his cheek. “You’re still a squillionaire. Money is the best form of insulation. It’s like living inside an impregnable bubble. Even if you fall, you bounce.”

“Listen, Lydia...”

Jakob coughed into his hand. “Boss. We have somewhere to be.”

“Do we?”

“That thing. You know. That meeting.”

There was no meeting scheduled. Barnaby glared at Jakob, then turned back to Lydia.

“I’m just going to come right out and say it. I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

She snorted a laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“Not the reaction I was expecting.”

Lydia spread out her arms. “Have you seen me? Do I look anything like the sort of woman Barnaby Pollard has dinner with?”

“You will do if you say yes.”

“Is this a wind-up? Has one of your rich friends dared you? Did Richard Branson ring and say he’d give you a million Virgin shares if you ask a chubster out on a date?”

“Don’t be so self-deprecating.”

“I’m not. It’s preposterous, that’s all. I’m not even blonde.”

“I like you.”

“That’s odd, because when we talk you act as though I’m driving you nuts.”

“Maybe that’s why I like you. You never say or do the predictable thing.”

“Well...” She made a pretence of studying him. “You’re not that bad-looking. You obviously keep yourself in shape. You don’t mind a drink. You don’t come across as a creep. I’m going to say... I’ll think about it.”

“That’s it? ‘Think about it’?”

She grabbed the handle of her wheel-along suitcase and turned to go. Five paces on, she halted. She looked round.

“I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

Her blue-green eyes flashed. “Go on, then. I’m free tomorrow night. Do your worst.”

THE LONG GAME

HE WENT LOW-KEY, nothing flashy: the Wolseley. He sensed that a grand gesture, a really expensive restaurant, might not be welcome at this early stage in the proceedings. Might even scare her off.

They had a good evening. Lydia wore a turquoise lambswool dress, designer unidentified, but the colour showed off her blue-green eyes.

“Is it just me,” she said, halfway through the main course, “or is everybody staring at us?”

“It’s just you. By which I mean, with someone as gorgeous as you at this table, nobody’s paying me any attention.”

“I reckon they’re scratching their heads, wondering who that fat lass is with Barnaby Pollard. They probably assume I’m your sister.”

“For God’s sake, will you stop calling yourself fat? You’re not fat.”

“Compared with your usual bulimic beanpoles, I am.”

“Then perhaps you should stop measuring yourself against them.”

She took a mouthful of her lemon sole Saint-Germain, then said, “Wait a mo. Did you just call me gorgeous?”

“I believe I did.”

“Flatterer. Anyone would think you were trying to get into my knickers.”

“I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.”

“Well, buster, for the record, I don’t drop them for just anybody.”

“Good thing I’m not just anybody, then. I’m Barnaby Pollard.”

“Oh, you smug git,” Lydia said, but she was chuckling.

The date ended with a peck on the cheek and Lydia disappearing into the night in a taxi. Barnaby hadn’t expected it would go much further than that, although he wouldn’t have minded if it had. He understood that this was going to be a long game, that victory would come after a protracted campaign rather than a single, decisive battle. He also knew that there was no way he was going to lose. It was asymmetrical warfare. He had all the firepower. He outgunned her financially and socially, in all the ways that mattered. There could only ever be one outcome: her eventual and total capitulation.

BOMBARDED

HE ARRANGED FOR flowers to be sent to her home the following morning and every morning thereafter – a dozen Burgundy velvet roses, fresh from the Netherlands.

He flew her to Rome to see a new production of Tosca at La Scala.

He obtained VIP tickets for the Rolling Stones at the O2 Arena.

He whisked her down to Epsom race course for Derby Day, where she won big with the £500 stakes he subsidised.

He arranged a private, after-hours shopping spree for her at the Hermès boutique on New Bond Street.

He took her to the premiere of the new George Clooney movie, even though she warned him there was a very strong likelihood she would throw herself at the star and gush over him like some breathless teenage fangirl, which, at the post-screening party, was exactly what she did.

“I could get used to this lifestyle,” she said as Jakob drove them away from the party venue in the Jag. She added quickly, “But I’m not sure I should.”

“Crisis of conscience?” said Barnaby.

“Tell me straight, Mr Pollard...”

“You sound awfully serious all of a sudden, Miss Laidlaw.”

“None of what’s happening – the attention, the glamorous nights out, the flowers – none of it has anything to do with me being an environmentally-conscious journo?”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“You’re not trying to defuse me in any way? Nobble me?”

“How would that work? You’re going to have to explain yourself a bit more clearly.”

“I’m feeling overwhelmed, that’s all. Bombarded. And a part of me’s asking whether there isn’t some ulterior motive behind it. Whether Barnaby Pollard isn’t simply trying to secure some favourable publicity. You struck out with the other four. I’m the one you think you can win round somehow, if you throw enough cash and trinkets at me. You can razzle-dazzle me into coming onside.”

“Do you honestly think I’m that sort of man?”

“I have no idea. This is all so outside my realm of experience. I feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Only without the whole, you know, prostitute thing. Or the teeth.” She held his gaze steadily. “I’m just saying, if you’re messing with me, if this is all some elaborate business wheeze, some cunning strategy, you need to come clean right now. Because, if it is, I won’t take it well, but if I only find out much, much later, I really won’t take it well. And I am not the sort of woman you want pissed off at you. Trust me on that.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Barnaby said. “And no, this has nothing to do with your job. It isn’t anything underhand or sinister. I’m as sincere about this – about us – as a man can be. I don’t know how else I can prove that to you, other than by saying so.”

“You could kiss me,” she said. “Properly. That might do the trick.”

So he did.

The Jaguar purred through London, zigzagging around the late-night traffic on its way towards Kensington, where Barnaby lived.

Barnaby and Lydia continued to kiss.

Tongues flickered, touched, entwined.

She tasted of showbiz wine and arousal.

He knew that she would be coming home with him tonight.

He caught a look from Jakob in the rearview mirror, a disapproving scowl.

He closed his eyes and carried on kissing.

ACROSS THE LINE

SHE STEPPED OUT from the en suite bathroom. She had changed into a white satin negligee, which she had brought with her, secreted in her handbag. It hugged the contours of her body. Its lacy hem came down to the tops of her thighs, just hiding her crotch. She had been planning this, he realised. She had decided in advance that tonight would be the night. All she had needed from him was that last little bit of reassurance to get her across the line.

He was naked under the covers. She approached the bed with slow, stately grace.

“How do I look?”

She gave him a twirl.

“Magnificent,” he said, and he meant it. There was so much of her. Her breasts were immense, mountainous, possibly larger than the breasts of all the other women he had slept with combined. They gave a delicious ripple as she moved. Her buttocks, across which the base of the negligee was stretched taut, had the ripe roundness of watermelons. Her legs were thick and powerful, and already he was imagining them scissored around his pelvis, squeezing, applying intense pressure.

He was hard as she clambered onto the bed. His groin had become a tight, pulsing knot.

He grabbed her and pulled her to him. The negligee stayed on for perhaps another five seconds.

There was such ampleness to her that he almost didn’t know where to begin. He seized and pawed and kneaded, amazed at how soft she was, how her skin seemed to sink and glide under his touch.

Lips crushed lips. His hand slithered over the mound of her belly, venturing into the dimpled fold between her legs. His palm brushed the coarse tuft of her pubic hair. His fingers found her pillowy pudenda. Her cleft was wet. A forefinger slid in. The heat and moistness of her. The gaping, eager void.

All at once his cock was inside her, and she gasped, and so did he. He thrust, and quickened, and blazed. She cried out, raking his back with her nails, while he was beyond words, beyond sounds, his mouth wide but nothing emerging except a breath, an exhalation of pure ecstasy.

Later, as they spooned together, woozy and half asleep, he marvelled at how snug her body felt next to his. He was accustomed to women who were all bones and high-strung rigidity. This... this was comfortable and pliant and welcoming. Cotton wool instead of barbed wire.

Yes, it had been perfect.

As far as it went.

A few more straight fucks like that – no problem. Plenty of pleasure to be had there.

But then would come the time when he wanted something else from her. Something more.

Once he had lulled her, once he had gained her trust sexually...

There would be other games to play.

Other avenues to explore.

Other doors to open.

THE PHWOAR! FACTOR

THE MEDIA WEREN’T slow in noticing that the founder and CEO of GloCo had a new woman – and a woman who broke the mould as far as he was concerned.

“From seagull to G-cup gal,” wrote one gossip columnist. “Maybe that bonk on the bonce from a bird’s beak has done something to bachelor Barney’s brain. Pictured here is the latest lass he’s been lording it with around town, and she’s not one of the usual Pollard Lollipops. This larger-than-life lovely is Lydia Laidlaw, 35, freelance journalist, and she’s busted our preconceptions about Big Bad Barnaby in more ways than one. As the saying goes, you don’t get many like her to the pound. Luckily, oil oligarch Barney’s got plenty of pounds!”

The paparazzi took to Lydia. She was photogenic and had the phwoar! factor. Hers was the name they shouted loudest at red-carpet events, hers the cleavage that captivated their zoom lenses.

Soon, opinion pieces were appearing in the middlebrow tabloids with headlines such as “Singing The Praises Of The Fuller-Figured Woman” and “Is Our Obsession With Skinny Finally Over?” The articles, all penned by female hacks, couldn’t decide whether it was a good thing or not that Barnaby had dumped the waifs and plumped for someone statuesque and Rubenesque instead. On the one hand, it gave hope to larger girls everywhere. They, too, might be able to bag a handsome billionaire. On the other hand, there was a distinct undertone of resentment and chagrin. It seemed that all this time women had been exercising and dieting like mad, thinking that thinness was what men found attractive, only to discover that they might as well have ditched the Zumba classes and splurged on the Chardonnay and chocolate biscuits all along.

When a bestselling chick-lit author went on Twitter and referred to Lydia as “that jammy heifer,” she was deluged with indignant comments and trollish accusations of jealousy and gender-betrayal. The truth was, though, that many of her sistren secretly agreed with her. How dare Lydia Laidlaw be so voluptuous, so comfortable with her curves, not to mention so damn lucky?

One byproduct of this minor media frenzy was that it drowned out the carping commentary on Barnaby’s round-the-world PR tour. Dorothea, OwlHenry, Isaac and Aletheia could barely get their views noticed. Lydia had stolen their thunder. She had eclipsed them all.

Then Brava! magazine came calling, requesting an interview with Lydia for its regular In The Limelight slot. The editor, Marlee Whitgift, conducted the interview herself, while a photographer snapped pictures of Lydia at home in her modest Battersea flat.

Brava! Magazine, August Issue

Interview Excerpt

Brava!: Lydia, you’ve made a career out of crusading environmental journalism. Now you’re going out with GloCo oil magnate Barnaby Pollard. How do you reconcile the two things?

Lydia Laidlaw: They’re not incompatible. I don’t see the problem. Just because Barnaby does what he does, it doesn’t mean I have to stop doing what I do. We’re both grown-ups. I’m an independent woman. I’m not going to change my worldview just to please my boyfriend.

B!: But don’t you think some people might find it a bit hypocritical, you enjoying the rewards of his industry, an industry that’s about as environmentally-unsound as it’s possible to be?

LL: The money’s there. Barnaby’s made it. If he wants to spend some of it on me, that’s his choice. It’s not as if I could stop him.

B!: How did the two of you meet, anyway?

LL: GloCo needed to raise its profile in the eco-media-sphere after a string of industrial accidents, and that whole unfortunate, but still quite amusing, seagull affair. I was one of the journos they targeted. Barnaby and I just clicked.

B!: I’d have thought, to someone like you, he’d be the Devil himself.

LL: But you can’t help who you’re attracted to, can you? And he is, let’s face it, a very attractive man. I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to like him at first. I tried not to. I gave him a pretty hard time, as a matter of fact. But Marlee, haven’t you ever fallen for a wrong ’un? Someone you know you shouldn’t fancy but you just can’t help yourself? I doubt there’s any woman who hasn’t, at some time or other.

B!: Are you hoping to tame him? Is he a challenge? A project?

LL: A handful, maybe, but tame him? Why would I want to do that?

B!: Change him, then.

LL: Again, why? He’s not broken. He doesn’t need fixing. He is what he is.

B!: But someone like you, in a position to influence his decision-making...

LL: I’m his girlfriend, not his wife.

B!: You could do so much good for the planet. You could be the Melinda Gates to his Bill, the Jane Fonda to his Ted Turner.

LL: I can do good with my writing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Marlee, but women these days can exert power directly. They don’t have to work their wiles on their menfolk in order to have influence, not any more. Like the song says, sisters are doing it for themselves. Barnaby’s a king of the world, for sure, but I’m a woman, and that means I’m in a whole different league.

B!: No argument here.

LL: Let me tell you something. There’s a lot of talk about women having an “inner goddess.” About how we’re all of us connected in some way or another to the source of things. We give birth – create life. Our menstrual cycles echo the lunar cycle. We’re natural, elemental beings. Now, some would dismiss that as mystical poppycock. Sentimental nonsense. But there’s still some truth in it. You can’t deny that, in the ways that count, in the areas of life that really matter, women are and always have been far superior to men.

B!: Again, I’m not going to dispute that for a moment.

LL: Here’s what I think. We may not individually be goddesses, but collectively, as a gender, you might describe us as a goddess, as aspects of a divinity, multiple parts of a much greater whole. Compared to a man like Barnaby Pollard, I might appear to be nothing very much, not in material terms or the effect I can have on society. But I’m linked to something larger than me, something he’s excluded from by virtue of his Y-chromosome, something no amount of money can ever buy him, and that gives me strength. Infinite strength.

B!: Mother Nature? Is that what you mean?

LL: A bit simplistic, but yes. “Mother Nature” always sounds so kindly and caring, doesn’t it? I think it’s stronger and stranger than that. Fiercer. Nature is not necessarily a cosy, cuddly thing. So there’s my counterpoint to Barnaby’s status, how I’m his equal.

B!: Much as I hate to round things off on a “cosy” note, Brava! readers I’m sure will want to know if you and Barnaby have any plans. What does the future hold for you two?

LL: Who knows? It’s still early days. Are we going to get married, you mean?

B!: He is eminently eligible, he seems serious about you, he’s in his mid-forties so he really ought to be settling down – and there’s no question you’d make a terrific wife...

LL: It depends. I haven’t got to know him properly yet. There are layers to him. Many layers. I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface so far.

PREJUDICE AND FREEFALL

SHE RODE ON top, her pendulous breasts swinging just inches from his face. She was gripping his cock tightly inside her, her vaginal muscles slowly clenching and unclenching. It was exquisite procrastination. She was holding both of them on the brink of climax, drawing the moment out as long as she could. He thrust upwards with his pelvis, urging her to go quicker, to finish things. She resisted. She pinned his shoulders to the bed with her hands, reinforcing her control. Her mouth was a full-lipped O of anticipation, her eyes squeezed shut.

He almost couldn’t bear the delay. He could feel the orgasm swelling up inside him, begging for release, ready to explode, but she kept the tension going, moving only enough to bring satisfaction that tantalisingly tiny bit closer. His cock seemed so engorged, it was a wonder she could fit it in. There was nothing separating them. He filled her.

He seized a breast in each hand. His groping fingers found the nipples, which were erect and proud, big as his own thumb tip. He pinched them experimentally, and when she gasped with approval, he pinched harder.

It had the desired effect. She started to rock faster on him. She tossed her head back. He felt tremors begin to shudder through her. Her hands clawed his shoulders. Her whole body became one massed effort of pleasure, with no function now but to take them both over the edge of the precipice and into the freefall of ecstasy.

They came as one, like a single organism, bucking and bending, bellowing.

PARADISE LOST

“BLIMEY,” SHE SAID afterwards. “I think the whole of bloody Kensington heard that.”

“Soundproofed glass in every window,” Barnaby said. “Keeps the traffic noise out.”

“And the shagging noise in.”

“Pure coincidence, I’m sure. A happy byproduct.”

She lay on her back, gazing up at the moulded ceiling. On first seeing Barnaby’s bedroom she had remarked that it was larger than her entire flat. Yet it occupied only a quarter of the second storey of the house. In a crowded city like London, Barnaby’s wealth bought him the one thing that was at a real premium: space.

“Did you read my Brava! interview?” she asked. “I sent you a link to the online version.”

“Hmm. Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“I liked it. You came over well. Smart, composed...”

“But?”

“Why does there have to be a ‘but’?”

“Because of your tone of voice.”

“Okay.” He grimaced comically, like someone about to undergo a body cavity search. “The goddess stuff. That Mother Nature bit. Really?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I just would never have expected it from you. I thought you were more grounded than that.”

“Obviously you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

“Unless you were simply giving them what you thought they wanted. Brava!’s pretty right-on and feminist, isn’t it? ‘The Magazine For The Woman Who’s Special.’”

She rolled over, leaning up on one elbow. Her breasts pooled weightily against each other. “What is it about that sort of thing that bothers you so much anyway?”

“Feminism?”

“No. Spiritual matters.”

“Nothing. It doesn’t bother me.”

“You seem dead set against anything that isn’t empirical, straightforward, factual, practical.”

“Are we having a row?”

“A genial postcoital discussion.”

Barnaby reached for the wine glass on the nightstand. They had been drinking Domaine Ramonet Montrachet Grand Cru immediately prior to tumbling into bed together.

“Right,” he said, taking a swig. “Since you broached the topic... I don’t believe in nature as this sort of entity, this sentient, holistic super-being. I don’t subscribe to that point of view. Never have. When I look at a bunch of trees or a mountain or a valley, I don’t sense some sort of spooky magical presence there, the way a lot of people do. I just can’t understand that at all. Trees, every kind of plant – they’re just organic machines. Animals and insects too. There’s nothing to them other than their basic imperatives, which are to consume and survive and procreate. And to see the hand of God – or whatever – in a landscape or a pastoral scene, that’s just absurd. It’s rocks and grass and earth. It can be pretty, yes. Dramatic, even. It can have aesthetic appeal. But to come over all misty-eyed and reverent and talk of ‘majesty’ and detect a living intelligence buried within... Well, I find that airy-fairy and foolish.”

“So the natural world is just stuff to you. No more significant than – I don’t know – this mattress we’re lying on.” She thumped the bed.

“Yes. Yes, it is. Let me tell you a story.”

“Oh, do.”

“A story from my childhood.”

Lydia sat up, wrapping the duvet around her. “You never talk about your childhood.”

“It wasn’t that interesting, frankly. It was just a pointless interlude, a period of waiting until I was finally old enough to get on with my life.”

“Jesus, you poor sod.” She rolled her eyes. “You were born an adult, weren’t you?”

“Pretty much. I used to roam a lot when I was little. Those were the days when a kid could. There weren’t so many cars. There weren’t paedophiles lurking round every corner, ready to pounce. There weren’t videogames and twenty-four-hour TV to keep you indoors the whole time. I had my own front door key, and would go out on my bike for hours on end. It was good to be away from home, where all my mother did was drink all day and bitch about my father when he wasn’t there and squabble with him when he was.”

“Only child?”

“Yes.”

“Explains a lot.”

“May I continue?”

“Please do.”

“Where I lived was a small town, countryside all around. I had this place I liked, not far out, a mile or so. Fields, a copse, a stream. My own secret spot. I’d park my Raleigh Grifter and sit and maybe smoke a fag I’d bought off one of the older boys at school. Someone once dumped a load of porn mags in a hedgerow nearby. Probably had just got himself a girlfriend, maybe a wife, and he was having a clear-out. I found them and salvaged them. Kept them safe and dry inside the trunk of a half-rotted oak.”

“Like a squirrel hoarding nuts.”

“If you like. Penthouse, Club International, Fiesta, Men Only... I’d thumb happily through those, undisturbed, in absolute peace and quiet.”

“Heaven.”

“Damn right it was. And then one day they went and built a bypass right through the middle of it.”

He mused on the memory, drinking more wine.

“First sign that something was up,” he said, “was when I spotted some blokes in council-worker donkey jackets fiddling around with measuring rods and theodolites. I didn’t know what a theodolite was; I thought it was a camera, and they were taking pictures. They did it for about a week. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, what it was all for, what they were up to. Then I overheard my dad talking to one his friends about a bypass. The friend was a shopkeeper, ran a chemist’s on the high street. He was worried about losing passing trade. He said a bypass would be the death of the town.

“Everything went quiet for a while. No more men in donkey jackets trampling all over my secret spot. Then, a couple of months later, the mechanical diggers arrived. And so did the protestors. There were standoffs. Plenty of chanting and placard-waving. ‘Save Our Town,’ et cetera. But the diggers got their way in the end. The workmen started churning up the earth with their JCBs very early one morning, before the protestors turned out. After that it was a fait accompli. The ground had been breached. No going back. No point trying to resist any more.

“I watched it over the months that followed: the farmland disappearing, the foundations of the road being raised, this whole massive undertaking, this change. They uprooted my tree, the one containing my porn stash, along with most of the others. They flattened the little hummock where I used to smoke. They bridged the stream, channelling it through a concrete tunnel. Every spare moment I had, rain or shine, I’d be down there, keeping an eye on things from a distance, marking the slow advance of the project. The waltz of the diggers and dumpers. The smell of their diesel exhaust wafting towards me on the wind...

“Finally, by the end of the year, there was this huge causeway skirting the town. This great bare earthworks. Then the tarmacking began, the finishing-off, and a long curving shoulder of earth, rock and rubble became a road.”

He paused.

Lydia said, “Were you sad? You must have been.”

He looked at her. “Sad? Why?”

“They’d destroyed your place. Your little private paradise. Ruined it for ever.”

“No,” Barnaby said with a slight chuckle. “Oh, no. I couldn’t have been happier.”

“Seriously?”

“It was wonderful. Miraculous. Out of nowhere, from nothing, there was a stretch of dual carriageway. Men had made it. Built it with their machines and their knowhow. Cars could now zoom past, lorries, coaches, motorbikes. People could go places fast, without having to meander through our little town any more. Where before I’d sit there and enjoy the silence –”

“And your porn.”

“And my porn – now I’d sit there and enjoy the noise. The hiss of approaching tyres. The thrum of engines, often many of them, in multi-part harmony. The Doppler shift as each vehicle sailed by. I loved it.”

“You’re a nutter.”

“No, but I did,” he insisted. “That bypass, you see, represented achievement. Success. Man taking his environment by the scruff of the neck and doing exactly what he wanted with it.”

“But didn’t the road kill the town, like your father’s friend said it would?”

“Not so’s you’d notice. His chemist’s didn’t go out of business. I don’t think any shops did. Passing trade – it’s overrated. If somebody wants to go to the chemist’s, or the greengrocer’s, or the newsagent’s, or the florist’s, they’ll go. Just wandering by the shopfront isn’t suddenly going to make you stop and turn and walk in. The town still got visitors from outside. What it didn’t have, now, was endless queues of traffic clogging up the high street and forming a jam around the war memorial. I’d say that was a win.”

“But at the expense of countryside.”

“A couple of square miles of it at most. Plenty more where that came from.”

“Some animals’ natural habitats.”

“If they had any sense, they’d have moved on. If they stayed and found they didn’t have a nest or a burrow any more, then it was their own damn fault.”

“You’re only saying that to wind me up.”

“Or I could mean it,” said Barnaby. “Either way, hand on heart, the construction of that bypass was a formative event in my life. A pivotal one, even. I realised then that I wanted to impose my will on the world too, the way those road builders did. I wanted to accomplish what they had – helping people to travel, making life more convenient for others, accelerating the pace of civilisation. In a nutshell, progress.”

“Progress,” said Lydia with a curl of her lip. “Such an old-fashioned, Victorian concept. Antiquated. In the circles I move in, it’s a dirty word. It always has connotations of a backwards step, not a forwards one. Something lost rather than gained – a site of natural beauty, a way of life, someone’s home, a tradition. Something we should have kept hold of, needlessly sacrificed on the altar of modernity.”

“As far as I’m concerned it means only improvement. And I knew it was my... Well, my calling. My vocation. I left school at sixteen. Didn’t want to waste any time faffing around with university. Wanted to get on with things. Joined a small London firm doing business with Burma, as it was then, for oil – Rangoon Overseas Petroleum Ventures Ltd. A rump company, all that remained of a much larger firm that had been going since colonial times. I was the office boy, making the tea and trying to get the primitive computer system to work. Within three years I was running the company, and the majority shareholder. Another three years and Rangoon Overseas Petroleum Ventures had swallowed up a dozen similar-sized companies and had been renamed GloCo, with me as sole owner. A decade on, while I was only just in my early thirties, GloCo was a FTSE One Hundred corporation and I was climbing fast up the Forbes rich list.”

“Am I supposed to be getting moist again? Are you telling me all this because you think it’ll turn me on?”

“No,” said Barnaby. “I’m telling you all this because... because I want you to know. This is me. This is who I am. I believe it’s called sharing. Women are supposed to want it from their men. But if you’re going to be like that...”

“Please don’t get all huffy. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sneered. My mistake.” The apology was sincere.

He almost said it then: I have something to show you. The words were on his lips. He had given her something of himself, a token. It was often how he proceeded to the next step with a girlfriend. Soften her up with a revelation about his past. Bait the hook with an honest confession, a glimpse into the real Barnaby Pollard, an insight into his soul. And then – bam. While she was off-guard. While he looked vulnerable.

But he held back. He sensed Lydia wasn’t ready.

Not yet.

Soon, though.

He couldn’t wait much longer.

ON A ROLL

DURING THIS PERIOD, as Barnaby and Lydia became cemented in the public’s perception as a couple, GloCo went from strength to strength. The share-price wobble brought about by the Seagull Movement protests stabilised. There were no more ructions or fluctuations, just a steady incremental rise in profits and dividends. Barnaby swooped on a number of his rivals, making bids for them using loans leveraged against his existing corporate holdings. In well over half of these attempted buyouts he was successful. He expanded further into the American and Asian markets, while leaving the Middle East more or less alone. It was an impenetrable cartel down there in the deserts, and the region as a whole was just too volatile. Much the same was true of Russia, which held the world’s largest natural gas reserves, second largest coal reserves and ninth largest crude oil reserves. It was too much of a closed shop; the discovery and extraction costs were high on account of the vastness of the country, its harsh climate and its lack of decent infrastructure; but above all, Russian businessmen were, as a breed, mad, and almost impossible to deal with in a civilised manner. Contract negotiations invariably involved drinking Herculean quantities of vodka, more than even Barnaby’s hardened liver could handle, and quite often letting off assault weapons in the wilderness as well. The hassle and hangovers weren’t worth it. As both Napoleon and Hitler had learned to their cost, Russia should be left well alone.

GloCo flourished, and so did Barnaby’s relationship with Lydia, much to Jakob’s disgust.

“You’re always bloody together,” he complained in the Jaguar one morning on the drive in to work. “Every spare minute you have, you spend with her.”

Barnaby looked up from his Financial Times. “Seriously, Jakob, is it your place to cast aspersions on my girlfriend? Let me answer that for you. It is not. You bodyguard, me employer. There are boundaries. Clear?”

“I’m not casting aspersions on her,” Jakob said. “Just on how close you and her are getting. It’s not like you to be so... smitten. It’s not normal for Barnaby Pollard.”

“I think Barnaby Pollard is the best judge on what’s normal for Barnaby Pollard.”

“It used to be one inconsequential loskind after another.” Loskind was Afrikaans for ‘woman of easy virtue,’ only not so polite. “And now you’re all serious about this one chick who seems to be taking over your life. It’s not good for you.”

“In what way not good, Jakob? Everything’s pretty rosy from where I’m standing. Have you seen GloCo’s share price lately? And look at this.”

He turned the newspaper round, pointing to a column. Jakob glanced at it in the rearview mirror.

“Print’s too small, boss. Read it out to me.”

“FT’s tipping the valuation to go even higher. Comment here says, ‘GloCo’s on a roll and shows no sign of stopping. CEO Barnaby Pollard combines acumen with aggression in a high-risk, high-reward industry. He’s an old hand, a seasoned campaigner. He knows the ropes and he’s got the track record and the assets to underwrite his adventurousness. With the per-barrel price of crude unlikely to drop in the foreseeable future, and demand for gas on the increase in the developing nations, there aren’t many safer or more lucrative places to stash your spare cash than GloCo.’”

“All well and good,” said Jakob, “but – jislaaik!” He braked hard as a black cab swerved out from the kerb right in front of the Jag. Both cars screeched to a halt. Jakob followed a volley of blares on the horn with a volley of insults out of the window: “Maafoedi! Stront vir breins! Call that driving? You drive like a wrinkled old krimpie, you dickhead!”

The cabbie responded no less colourfully, cursing Jakob and flipping him the bird.

“Ja, I’ll break that fokken finger off and shove it where the sun doesn’t fokken shine, pal. You know whose car this is you just cut up? Fellow who earns more in an hour than you do in a year.”

Barnaby didn’t catch the cabbie’s reply, but it was strongly worded enough to make Jakob unbuckle his seatbelt and open the door.

“No,” said Barnaby. “Let’s not. Remember Tarquin Johnson? Best avoid a rerun of all that, eh?”

Jakob grumbled, but stayed put, and the black cab pulled away. The Jag continued on its journey, joining the Westway eastbound.

“It’s occurred to me, Jakob,” Barnaby said, “that you may be a wee bit jealous.”

“Of Lydia Laidlaw?”

“And her relationship with me.”

Jakob gave a gruff, staccato laugh that managed to convey both amusement and scorn. “Not a chance, boss. No offence, but you’re really not the sort of man I go for. You’re about twenty years too old, for one thing. No tattoos, for another.”

“Just felt I should ask. You wouldn’t be the first employee, male or female, to fall for me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Mr Pollard. I like you as a person, but that’s all. I regard you as a friend. And I respect you also, which is why I don’t like to see you getting yourself into hot water.”

“But I’m not.”

“Have you shown her the basement yet?”

The question hung in the air between them. The Jaguar swept down from the flyover onto Marylebone Road.

“No,” said Barnaby. “Not yet.”

“Didn’t think so. But you’re planning to?”

“When the moment’s right.”

“That’s when everything’s going to change. You mark my words. And I don’t know that she’s going to be able to make the transition. It’s a big gamble with someone like her. It might all go horribly wrong. You could be setting yourself up for a fall.”

“But I can’t not do it. I can’t keep that side of me hidden from her forever.”

“Even if it spells the end for the two of you?”

“If it does, then so be it,” Barnaby said peremptorily, and he flapped the newspaper in a way that indicated the subject was closed.

Jakob took the hint and drove the rest of the way in silence.

A VERY GOOD TIME

TO BE BARNABY POLLARD

GLOCO’S RUN OF good fortune continued. It was awarded a government permit to release shale gas reservoirs in Lancashire using hydraulic fracturing. The county council was cock-a-hoop, as this would bring employment to a depressed area. Local environmentalists were not so happy, predicting that the fracking process would cause earthquakes, groundwater contamination from flowback from the pumping, and air pollution from the benzene in the shale gas.

Meanwhile, a GloCo exploratory platform up in the Arctic Circle, on the rim of the East Greenland Rift Basin, made a spectacular find: an undersea oil reserve estimated to contain half a billion barrels or more. Barnaby ordered three spar rigs to be towed to the site, and soon they were moored in position with their six-hundred-foot caissons probing down into the gelid water towards the ocean floor, ready to insert drills and suck up oil like mosquitoes siphoning blood.

A GloCo open-cast coal mine in Botswana, which was believed to be virtually exhausted, had an unexpected fresh spurt of life. A new seam appeared, almost magically, running down at a steep angle through the rock strata. The surface mining operation was converted to deep mining, a longwall shearer boring into the ground with its cutting drums and a scraper chain conveyor hauling the raw carbon booty up to be crushed into manageable chunks and carted off in trucks.

At the GloCo Tower, Barnaby sat in his penthouse office, overseeing the company’s international business via telecommunication.

Before him, the GloCo logo was inlaid into the Carrara marble floor in brass. It extended from the foot of his desk all the way to the expanse of plate-glass picture windows. The world cupped in two hands.

The earth was yielding up its riches, making him even richer than he already was.

He had a woman who seemed suited to him in nearly every way.

It was, without doubt, a very good time to be Barnaby Pollard.

EMERGENCE AND RE-SHEATHING

SHE WAS ON her knees, hands braced against the headboard of the bed. He was thrusting into her from the rear.

Each time he rammed himself into her, her entire body shook, her fleshiness quivering with the force of his entry. He could see the shockwaves running through her. Her breasts, hanging like udders, undulated. The clap of his groin against her buttocks was like insistent, rhythmic applause.

Her moans invited him to pound into her that much harder. He withdrew almost to the tip of his glans, then lunged hilt-deep, and withdrew again and lunged, over and over. It was slick and slippery and rapid, a continual emergence and re-sheathing.

He looked down. The creamy expanse of her behind was too alluring. He couldn’t help himself. He had to slap it. He raised his right hand and did.

She let out a yelp of pain. It was indignant, surprised, perplexed.

He saw his own handprint, a pink flush on the whiteness of her skin.

He slapped again, still thrusting enthusiastically.

Again she cried out.

“Does it sting?” he said through clenched teeth, panting.

“Yes.”

“Should I stop?”

He slammed himself into her once, twice, three times, before she answered.

Her voice was low and small, a little bit husky.

“No.”

He began delivering firm smacks to her buttocks, timing the impacts to his thrusts. A noise arose in the back of her throat, part groan, part scream. It crescendoed to a shuddering climax, as did she. He followed suit in swift succession, feeling himself erupt inside her as though unleashing a stream of molten silver, a torrent of pure exultant joy.

THE DOOR

“LYDIA?”

“Yes?”

Her voice was doughy. She was in a drowse, already half asleep.

“There’s something I have to do.”

“Didn’t we just do it? I’ve got a sore bum cheek as proof.”

“Something I have to show you.”

“Can’t it wait ’til morning? I’m tired.”

“No. It has to be now. Now or never.”

She rolled over, frowning at him quizzically. “What’s up?”

Instead of replying, he hopped out of bed and fetched bathrobes for both of them. “Put this on. We’re going downstairs.”

Downstairs they went, padding barefoot through the airy silence of the house. Past the dining room and Barnaby’s study lay a door, panelled and painted white like all the others, innocuous-looking. It was situated between a bookcase filled with leather-bound first editions and a pedestal on which perched a gaudy Murano glass vase, its shape reminiscent of an orchid.

“Have you ever been curious about this door?” he asked her.

“Not particularly. Seen it a couple of times. I assume it leads down to the cellar, right?”

“To the basement. It’s...” He groped for the right phrasing. He was suddenly, weirdly inarticulate. “It’s a special door.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“What I’m saying is, it’s a door that, once opened, can’t be closed.”

“Bloody stupid door, then. What, does it get stuck or something? A carpenter could fix that.”

Her obtuseness, he realised, was her way of coping with the unexpected turn of events. She was aware something out of the ordinary was happening, something odd and unprecedented. His behaviour was disturbing her. She was stalling for time while she tried to process it.

Patiently he said, “I want you to know that you are an amazing woman.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ve been together for four months now.”

“More like five.”

“I am completely yours. I never thought I could be like this with anyone. I always thought I could keep my women at a distance, compartmentalise them so that they wouldn’t intrude on other aspects of my life. You’ve overturned that for me. You’ve made me break all my own rules.”

“Barnaby, you’re actually starting to freak me out a bit here,” Lydia said. “What’s going on?” She glanced at the door. “What’s behind that? What’s down there?”

He faltered. “Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it’s still too soon, even now.”

“No, it’s not too soon,” she said firmly. “You can’t start down a road like this and not see it through to the end. Now I really bloody have to know what’s down there.” She tried the handle. The door was locked. “Open it,” she demanded.

Barnaby knew he had manoeuvred himself into an inescapable position, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not. The die was cast. There was no alternative now but to carry on, come what may.

He pulled a copy of The 120 Days Of Sodom out from the bookcase. Inside, embedded into a custom-shaped section cut out from the pages, was a key.

He inserted the key into the lock.

He turned it.

He opened the door.

Taking Lydia’s hand, he said, “Come on.”

She baulked. “If there’s the mummified corpses of your previous conquests down there, I swear...”

“No. Nothing like that.” He tugged her hand. “Come and see.”

THE BASEMENT

BARNABY FLICKED A light switch. Together, him leading, they descended a carpeted staircase. To his consternation, Barnaby found that he was trembling. Normally when he took a girlfriend down to the basement for the first time, he was perhaps a little apprehensive, but confident nonetheless that he was doing the right thing and that there would be only a positive outcome. But with Lydia, he was anxious. No, downright scared. He feared her reaction. He feared her rejection.

They reached the foot of the staircase, where a second door stood. This one was padded and silk-lined. The same key unlocked it.

He ushered Lydia in before him, at the same time reaching for another light switch.

This was it. No turning back now.

Lights came on in recessed wall sconces. Their glow of their low-wattage bulbs was soft and tinged crimson by cranberry-glass Art Deco shades.

Lydia stared around.

The basement had the dimensions of a triple garage. Indeed, ‘triple garage’ was how it had been described in the architect’s blueprint when it had been excavated out under the house, and with the addition of a set of external roller doors and a ramp leading up to the front driveway it could easily be converted into one.

At present, though, it contained no cars. Nothing but a set of very specialised equipment.

Lydia continued to stare around. Her blue-green eyes were wide, her expression unreadable.

Barnaby waited with bated breath. When was she going to speak? Was she going to say anything at all?

“What,” she said at last, “the hell,” she went on, “is this?”

“What does it look like?”

“I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like a medieval torture chamber crossed with a brothel boudoir.”

Which was more or less correct.

The basement was a sex dungeon, kitted out with an array of bondage and domination furniture, all of it handcrafted and designed to Barnaby’s own specifications. Everything was made from the very finest materials: Brazilian rosewood, Sheffield steel, top-grain calfskin leather. The walls and ceiling were flock-papered, underneath which was a layer of sound-absorbent tiles, while the floor was tight-packed parquet, smoothly varnished and easy to wipe clean.

Barnaby was inordinately proud of it. He had worked hard to get the place exactly right, and he maintained it himself, doing all the cleaning, giving it a thorough once-over with duster, vacuum and mop every month. No housekeeper had ever come down here. None of his private staff had a clue the dungeon even existed, save for Jakob.

There was a pillory with padded holes for neck and wrists. There was a spanking bench with cuffs and restraints. There was a Berkley Horse, a six-foot-tall A-frame contraption for upright flogging. There was a bondage table with a pair of shackles at either end. There was a St Andrew’s Cross frame, for spread-eagling.

There were various thick hooks screwed into the ceiling, for the purposes of suspension and strappado. There were ringbolts fitted to the walls to accommodate chains of assorted diameters.

Shelves and cubbyholes were filled with fetish paraphernalia: harnesses, gags, fetters, hoods, blindfolds, clamps, muzzles and spreader bars. These were arranged methodically according to type and size. Display cabinets contained whips, riding crops, bamboo canes, knouts and paddles. Drawers held cotton ropes of every conceivable thickness and length, plus lubricants, disposable latex gloves, and an astonishingly broad selection of dildos and vibrators.

“So?” Barnaby said.

Lydia slowly rotated her head to look at him.

“It’s...” she said. “It’s incredible.”

He felt his spirits leap. “You think? I put my heart and soul into it. I sourced the best BDSM furniture makers. Germans, mostly. They have the real expertise in this field, by general acknowledgement. I chose every item personally. I had it all tailor-made. You won’t find anything here in any shop or on any website. It’s bespoke stuff, unique, the best that money can –”

“No.” She held up a hand – which, he noted, was shaking. “No, you misunderstand. It’s incredible as in ‘I can’t fucking believe it.’ This. All along, in your house, there’s been this. Barnaby...”

Her face registered a range of emotions, none of them good. Hurt. Anger. Bafflement. Horror. Disgust. Contempt.

“This is you, isn’t it?” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ, this is what you really are. I always sensed there was something off about you, something I was missing, wasn’t getting. I put it down to you being so rich. Billionaires are never normal. Now I know what it actually is. Oh, my God. It was so obvious. So bloody obvious.”

He reached for her, placing a hand on her arm.

She snatched the arm away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said tightly. “Just... don’t.”

“Lydia...”

“You big fucking pervert!”

She wheeled round, away from him, making for the doorway.

“Lydia, please.”

“You silly sick sod!”

She scuttled up the stairs, tripping a couple of times.

Barnaby followed. He was wracked with dismay.

“Lydia, please don’t run away. I’m sorry you’re not taking it well.”

“Taking it well?” she shrieked. “How am I supposed to take it? My boyfriend’s a fucking pervo freak. He’s got a bloody sex dungeon in his house that he’s neglected to mention to me in all the five months we’ve been going out together, until one day we have a little bit of mildly rough horseplay and suddenly he thinks I’ve turned all kinky and I’m going to bend over and beg to be flogged. Jesus!”

She hurtled along the ground-floor hallway. She rushed up the stairs. Barnaby remained in pursuit, still imploring.

“Just hear me out, will you? I have certain predilections, that’s all. I’m... I’m into things that quite a few people are but most people aren’t. That doesn’t make me bad or wrong.”

“Predilections!” she echoed, framing the word in a bitter howl of laughter. She was halfway along the upstairs landing now, sailing towards the bedroom. “That’s like saying the Borgias were ‘a little bit naughty.’ I should have guessed when I saw you take that book down. That’s when the penny should have dropped. The Marquis de bloody Sade! Shit, shit, shitty shitting shit.”

“It’s part of my makeup. It’s something I just can’t help.”

“And that makes it better how exactly?” Lydia said, and she slammed the bedroom door behind her.

Barnaby stood outside, frozen in a paroxysm of anguish. “Lydia? Lydia!”

No answer.

Should he go in?

He couldn’t decide. He was no longer Barnaby Pollard, the ruthless business magnate who pursued his aims with single-minded tenacity and regarded wavering as weakness. He had been totally unmanned. He had expected anything from Lydia except this outburst of shock and vituperation.

Finally, he made up his mind and determinedly grasped the doorknob.

It turned before he could turn it, and Lydia strode out. She had dressed in a hurry. Her blouse was misbuttoned, her skirt on back to front.

She shoved past him.

He seized her elbow.

“Let go,” she said with quiet menace.

“Just hear me out.”

“Let go this instant.”

“I only want to expl –”

“You’re hurting me. I bet you enjoy that. I bet that’s what you want; hurting women. What you get off on. I don’t. So let go, or I’ll call the police. I will.”

She held up her smartphone so that he could see the screen. The numbers 999 had already been inputted. Her thumb hovered over the Call icon, less than a centimetre away from activating it.

Reluctantly Barnaby relinquished his grip on her.

“Yes,” she said. “Didn’t think you’d want that. Didn’t think you’d care for a big scene with the authorities chez Pollard. I’m leaving now, Barnaby. I’m going, and you aren’t to contact me. You aren’t to try and visit. You’re to leave me alone. Got that?”

“But Lydia...”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. Furious tears. “I loved you, you fucking idiot. We were terrific together. And now you’ve gone and... and utterly buggered it up. Why didn’t I see it earlier? Why didn’t I realise all this was too good to be true?”

She spun on her heel and stormed off. Moments later, Barnaby heard the front door open and then whump shut. He went to the window and watched Lydia cross the driveway and exit via the deliveries gate at the side. Out on the street, she raised a hand. A taxi drew up. She climbed in.

Barnaby remained at the window for half an hour, looking out at the desultory to-and-fro of summer night traffic and pedestrians. A full moon hung high above London, pale and lonely and desolate.

WHITE AND RED

HE DID AS she asked and refrained from contacting her. That wasn’t to say he didn’t keep tabs on her. He hired a private investigator to maintain discreet surveillance. At any time, on any given day, he knew where she was and what she was up to. Just by calling the investigator, he could find out what she had had for breakfast, who she had met for lunch, and where she planned on eating dinner. The man even sent him jpegs of long-lens photographs of Lydia. Here she was, glimpsed through her living-room window. Here, trotting down the street to catch the bus. Here, coming home with a bag of groceries.

Technically it was stalking. But Barnaby was able to justify it to himself on the grounds that he had revealed something about himself to Lydia which he would rather the rest of the world not know. He needed to keep a close watch on her, for his own sake and the sake of GloCo, just in case she did something impetuous. He doubted she would, but there was always the risk, and risks should be minimised.

Previous girlfriends had all understood the deal. The fabulously expensive gifts he lavished on them were the price of their silence. Most of them, besides, were into sadomasochism. If that wasn’t the case to start with, it soon proved to be, once they had undergone two or three sessions in his dungeon. They responded to the crack of the whip as though it awoke some truth in them they hadn’t hitherto been aware of. They learned that they had been born to enjoy pain and submission, and that it gave them an erotic thrill. The tighter he tied the knots that bound them, the harder he thwacked their bare flesh, the more they loved it. Barnaby would listen as their whimpers of discomfort were replaced by moans of delight, and he would be transported. He would push them to greater heights of delirious suffering, sometimes beating them until they passed out. Afterwards, they would be drained and fragile, holding themselves as delicately as though they were broken china, but the look in their eyes – gratitude and gratification – told him everything he needed to know. And they almost without exception came back for more. Whenever he rang one of them up, she would be glad to hear from him. She might take a little cajoling, a little bribing, but soon enough a contract would have been agreed for the night, a safeword established, and she would be letting him fasten her to one of the items of apparatus, quivering as she awaited the snap and smart of the first blow.

Barnaby’s own satisfaction was always deferred until he was sure he had wrung every last drop of ecstasy and humiliation he could out of his disciplinee. He would be in a state of iron-hard tumescence through the process of inflicting pain on her, but would never touch himself or allow himself to be touched before she had achieved full arousal and climax, whether through the beating alone or with the aid of a sex toy or, occasionally, intercourse. Only then, as she was coming down from her endorphin high, would he permit himself ejaculation.

It was about control. Control of himself. Control of another.

Often his semen would mingle with blood spatters on the floor, white coiling amid red. Those were the purest colours imaginable, in Barnaby’s eyes. The two most precious fluids in the human body, mutually spilled, falling onto the floor in a libation to the gods of lust.

HASN’T IT BEEN A

STRANGE SUMMER?

IT WAS THE private investigator who alerted Barnaby to the article in the Daily Mail. The investigator had been tipped off by an insider contact, a subeditor, who informed him that Lydia Laidlaw had been commissioned to write an opinion piece for the paper. Lydia’s new-found celebrity status meant that she would now command a handsome per-word rate, and that if she pitched for an article it was unlikely to be turned down. The investigator was able to obtain a preview of the text, in return for a sizeable sweetener which the poorly-paid subeditor was only too happy to accept.

He passed the file on to Barnaby via email late one evening, with a note saying, ‘Thought you might like to see this. It’s going in tomorrow’s edition, but unfortunately the presses are already rolling, so we’re too late to do anything about it if we wanted to. Doesn’t appear defamatory to me, but you may be able to read a subtext I can’t.’

The article was entitled ‘Hasn’t It Been A Strange Summer?’ and appeared in the pages of the paper’s Femail section.

You’ve probably noticed we haven’t seen much of the sun here in Britain lately.

It rained throughout May, June and July. August was mostly overcast and not particularly warm. As we edge into autumn, the mercury’s dropping but there are still no clear skies.

Has anyone on these islands managed a tan this year, without travelling abroad? Or an outdoor picnic?

And what about those poor people whose summer was blighted by flooding? Dozens of rivers burst their banks, flood protection measures could not cope, homes were inundated.

Wimbledon was a washout. The Test was played on a quagmire, not a cricket pitch.

The weather has gone haywire. That’s a fact on which we climate-obsessed Brits can all agree. There hasn’t been a summer as wet as the one just past, not in living memory, nor indeed since records began. Why?

The quick and easy answer is global warming. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise unchecked, reflecting thermal radiation back into our planet’s atmosphere. Across the board, the mean global temperature is inexorably on the rise.

In the specific case of Britain, we can look to the influence that global warming is having on the Atlantic Ocean in order to account for the increasingly erratic behaviour of our weather.

In the normal course of events, the Atlantic’s “heat transport” effect cycles warmer water up from the tropics to keep northern and western Europe more temperate than other landmasses on the same latitude.

Meltwater from the dwindling polar icecaps is interfering with that process. The waters of the Atlantic are becoming colder and denser and its “heat pump” is weakening, meaning that while the rest of the world hots up, our corner of the continent is getting cooler and the levels of precipitation here are amplified.

The science is complex, but in simple terms, the UK is starting to get the weather it ought to have, and has been protected from for centuries by the prevailing ocean currents.

But there’s more going on than just a waterlogged tennis tournament and hundreds of householders stacking sandbags outside their front doors and baling out their living rooms. More danger signs we should be aware of.

There’s the steady drop in songbird numbers. The loss of millions of honeybees to disease and pesticide. The decline in wildflowers and butterflies.

We may not notice these things, but they’re happening all around us. Small deviations from baseline don’t impinge on our everyday perception. Tiny gradual losses go unremarked.

Yet they’re part of a pattern, a wave of changes that is gathering pace and momentum.

Avalanches start off small. All it takes is a thin layer of snow to become dislodged. Suddenly, it’s an unstoppable, deadly cascade.

So many factors feed into the global-warming doomsday equation.

There’s loss of albedo from the shrinking of glaciers and sea ice, meaning less solar radiation is reflected away from the Earth.

There’s the melting of tundra permafrost, releasing methane, another greenhouse gas like CO2.

There’s yet more methane being given off by cattle as the demand for meat and dairy products intensifies in order to sate the appetites of a fast-growing world population.

These anthropogenic (human-generated) causes of global warming can be – and hopefully will be – mitigated by international laws and by changes in social behaviour.

But there is reason to believe that the worst of the damage has already been done. That it’s too late. A runaway process has begun which cannot be halted or reversed and which is liable to make life incredibly hard, if not intolerable, for future generations. Flooding, famine, disease, death on an unprecedented scale.

Mother Earth has been ravaged and despoiled and is in distress. We feel it instinctively. We know it.

For just over a century, since the advent of the combustion engine and the great industrial boom, the human race has been engaged in a hedonistic fossil-fuel orgy. We have sported around in our cars. We have turned up the thermostats in our houses without a second thought. We have plundered and squandered the planet’s resources with all the self-restraint of a gang of children let loose in a sweetshop.

Our world is an organism, an enclosed, self-regulating system. The environmentalist and futurologist James Lovelock came up with that idea. He also gave it a name: the Gaia Hypothesis.

Gaia is our Earth. And Gaia is not happy.

Gaia, of course, was the personification of the Earth in ancient Greek mythology. She was a primordial goddess, mother to Titans, Giants, and all the other gods in the Greek pantheon.

Hesiod, in his poem the Theogony, tells how Gaia’s husband, the sky god Uranus, began hiding their many monstrous children one after another as they were born. He buried them inside Gaia, causing her pain.

Her revenge was to forge an adamantine sickle, which she gave to their son Cronus, who despised his priapic father for his passions and his relentless lust.

The next time Uranus tried to have his way with Gaia, Cronus stepped in. He castrated Uranus with the sickle. From the blood which gushed out from the wound sprang the Furies and various kinds of nymph, and from Uranus’s severed testicles arose Aphrodite, goddess of love.

The lesson we can draw from this is obvious.

You do not mess with Gaia.

It’s true of all women. Down through the centuries, men have learned to their cost that no woman is to be trifled with or abused. Love us, and you will be rewarded with all that you could desire. Cross us, and you’re in for a sound thrashing.

Perhaps the men who have exploited and abused our planet, this other Gaia, for their own personal gain will take heed at the treatment dished out on Uranus and start treating her with more respect.

Because it is men – not mankind, but males – who have dug up Earth’s bounty and used it to line their own pockets.

Men who have been so reckless with our planet’s ecosphere.

Men who have sucked every last drop of goodness out of Gaia’s heart.

Men who mistakenly believe they can keep on taking from her with impunity.

And maybe it’s up to us women to persuade them to change their minds and mend their ways. Maybe we, as fecund, fearsome and feminine as Gaia herself, are the human race’s last and only hope.

It could be that the planet is past the tipping point. Any effort to pull us back from the brink is futile. Our civilisation is doomed to extinction.

But that must not prevent us from trying.

LITTLE POISON DARTS

BARNABY COULDN’T HELP but regard the Daily Mail article as a thinly veiled personal attack. He suspected that the editor who had commissioned it viewed it in much the same light. Rumours of a split between Barnaby and Lydia had been doing the rounds for days. The pair had not been seen together in public for well over a fortnight, whereas before they had seemed inseparable. The article seemed to harp on the idea of tension between masculine and feminine, a rift between the sexes, echoing Lydia’s own situation, which the editor must have been cognisant of. And Barnaby himself could hardly miss the targeted tartness in lines like “men who have exploited and abused our planet, this other Gaia, for their own personal gain” or in the use of sexually-charged phrases such as “hedonistic fossil-fuel orgy” and “relentless lust.” The entire piece was laced with little poison darts aimed straight at him.

He consulted his lawyers first thing the following morning, but their conclusion only confirmed his gut instinct. There was nothing in the article that was actionable, nothing that would warrant taking out an injunction against its being reproduced on the Mail’s website or reprinted elsewhere, nor any grounds to sue whatsoever. It was just a bit of surreptitious score-settling that he would have to take on the chin.

He fumed about Lydia all that day. The nerve of her. The ingratitude.

Jakob bore the brunt of his anger. He took it up to a point and then snapped back.

“Look, boss, I hate to say I told you so, but I did,” he said. “I warned you exactly what would happen when you showed her the basement, and you, like the big domkop you are, ignored me. Lo and behold, she’s gone, and you’re left with a whole heap of egg on your face. Better than seagull, maybe, but still.”

“Jakob...” Barnaby growled.

“No, with all due respect, boss, shut up and listen. You’ve been lucky. It could have been plenty worse. The red-tops could right now be screaming ‘Barnaby Pollard – Bondage Pervert!’ in eighty-point type headlines on the front page. She let you off mildly. Consider yourself rapped on the knuckles and move on. Plenty more fish in the sea.”

But were there?

Barnaby doubted he would ever meet someone else like Lydia. She was one of a kind.

What he wouldn’t give for a second chance with her.

What he wouldn’t pay for another glimpse of those extraordinary blue-green eyes.

Even after the article, her act of barbed retaliation, he still wanted her.

He loved her, damn it.

Only now, when it was too late to make a difference, could he admit that to himself.

He loved Lydia.

THORNS AND NETTLES

WHEN HE ARRIVED home that evening, he was astonished to find her waiting for him inside, in the living room.

“Still have my door key,” she said. “Still know the alarm disable codes.”

“Lydia,” he breathed.

She was seated on the chaise longue, hands in her lap, back straight, poised, composed.

“It’s strange,” she said. “On the way over, I had this brilliant speech mapped out. Now I’m here, I’m not sure what to say.”

He moved towards her. She stayed him, pointing a finger.

“No, sit down over there.”

He did as bidden.

“I’m not even going to ask if you read today’s Mail,” she said. “I’m kind of regretting what I wrote. Parts of it. In hindsight it seems like a cheap shot. You didn’t deserve that, me sniping at you in the public domain. I’ve come to apologise.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I suppose I –”

She interrupted. “Please, just hear me out. This is phenomenally difficult. I look at you and I think of the man I thought I knew and the man I now know you to be, and it seems incredible that the two can be the same person. I’m not a prude, Barnaby. I realise there’s a whole subculture of fetishes and kinks, people out there who like to walk on the wild side sex-wise. I’ve nothing against them or what they do. As long as it’s consensual, as long it isn’t coerced, as long as it’s adults only, then I can’t see the harm. Each to their own. I just...”

She looked at her hands, then back at him.

“I just never would have suspected you were one of them. It was a hell of a shock, I’m sure you can appreciate that. You sprang it on me out of the blue. And I... I didn’t react in a very mature fashion. It was too sudden, too big for me to make sense of. All the while, we’d been going down this path together, you and me, this sunlit road paved with gold and lined with roses, and suddenly here’s you suggesting we take a detour through the woods where it’s dark and there are thorns and nettles. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I wasn’t ready.”

She hesitated. Barnaby detected a note of trepidation in her voice, the sound of someone teetering on the verge of a momentous decision. He wanted to speak, to coax her across the threshold, but he kept silent. The wiser course was to allow her to take the final step all by herself.

He was on tenterhooks. A cherished dream was close – this close – to coming true.

Lydia took a deep breath, like a swimmer about to dive.

“I may be ready now.” She held his gaze, anxious but resolute. “If it’s what you’d like. If it’ll bring the two of us closer. If it’s the only way we can be together again. I’m prepared to make the sacrifice. I’m prepared to try, at least.”

Barnaby stood up, hearing his heartbeat loud in his ears, feeling the blood rushing through every vein.

“My God,” he said, hoarse. “Really? You have no idea what this means to me, Lydia. This is the best news I’ve ever had. I love you. Truly, I do.”

“And I love you too. Even after everything. I must be crazy, but yes, I still love you.”

“So when can we start?”

She shrugged gamely. “Now would seem as good a time as any.”

SAFEWORD

HE LAID OUT the basics, the rules. Informed consent had to be established beforehand. That was the grounding for any kind of sexual power exchange. They must be clear which of them was going to be the Top and which the Bottom, who was going to dominate and who was going to be dominated, although that should already be quite evident. He wouldn’t take her any further than she wanted to go, especially as it was their first session, and above all else they must agree on a safeword. It couldn’t simply be “no” or “don’t,” since sometimes in a bondage context those meant nothing. The safeword needed to be incongruous and easily remembered and recognised.

“How about ‘Gaia’?” Lydia said. “That’s been on my mind a lot today.”

“Mine as well. Gaia it is.” He couldn’t see a reason why not.

“And the moment I say it, you stop whatever you’re doing?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“What if you don’t? What if you just carry on? What do I do then?”

“You have to trust me. That’s the whole point. If you can’t trust me when you submit to me, then we have no business doing any of this stuff.”

“I see. So I’m placing myself entirely in your hands. I’m at your mercy.”

“You are,” Barnaby said. “But I’m no ogre, and I promise you I’ve never once lost control or gone too far. You’ve nothing to fear.”

“I must be mad. I can’t believe I’m even considering going through with this.” Lydia nodded to the sideboard, where cut-crystal decanters sat on a salver. “Any of those whisky, by any chance?”

“Will Laphroaig thirty-year-old single malt do?”

“Don’t care how fancy it is. Just pour me a snifter. A large one.”

She took the tumbler and drained the scotch at a gulp.

“Right,” she said, exhaling hard. “Shall we?”

KEEPER

DOWN IN THE basement he made her strip off all her clothes. He himself undressed to his underpants.

“Don’t you get to be naked too?” she asked.

“I’m in charge. I choose. I want you without a stitch on, so that’s how it has to be. And if I want to keep something on, I will.”

“Ooh, masterful.”

“Now be quiet.” Barnaby surveyed the various pieces of apparatus. “Where should we begin? The Berkley Horse, I think.”

He led her to the A-frame device. Her feet went into slots in the bottom. He lowered her forward on the angled, padded board, fitting her face into an oval hole. He buckled canvas straps across her legs, waist and arms, fastening her flat. She was immobilised, helpless.

He deliberated over what to beat her with. In the end he settled on a fibreglass riding crop. The thin leather tongue at the tip, known as the ‘keeper,’ was designed to lessen the force of the blow and not leave a mark. It was a good selection for a novice.

He positioned himself beside her, his target the enticing plump mounds of her buttocks.

He extended his arm, crop raised.

“Don’t tense up,” he told her. “Relax. You know you want this.”

He flicked the crop.

Keeper met skin with a glorious sharp snap.

Lydia shook from head to toe. A small gasp escaped her.

Barnaby drew the crop back and flicked it again, a fraction harder this time.

The keeper struck smartly. Lydia flinched and shuddered.

Barnaby looked down to see the front of his underpants tented outwards. The pressure of restriction down there was painful, terrible – wonderful.

He started to beat her with a regular, consistent rhythm, revelling in the impacts and the intervals between.

He kept expecting the safeword to come, but it didn’t.

Lydia took her punishment stoically. Now and then she let out a hiss or a little cry. But whenever he checked her face, Barnaby was pleased to see that she was smiling.

FIVE ON THE MERCALLI

INTENSITY SCALE

BARNABY ARRIVED AT the GloCo Tower the next morning in a spry, sprightly mood. His PA, Veronica, couldn’t remember when she had seen him cheerier. He positively breezed through the antechamber, past her desk and into his office, like a man who hadn’t a care in the world, and she hesitated before going in after him. But she had to. She had bad tidings to deliver.

“Mr Pollard, I’m sorry, but we’ve just received a flurry of emails from Japan. There’s, er, there’s been an earthquake. Nothing devastating,” she hastened to add. “A minor tremor, that’s all. Only, it was on the south coast and the epicentre was on the Atsumi Peninsula, not far from Ise Bay...”

He filled in the rest. “Which is not far from Cape Irago, which is where a GloCo nuclear power plant sits. Shit. How severe’s the damage?”

“Unclear. The site manager’s running an inspection right now. He seems to think it’s just superficial, a few cracked walls here and there. But of course he’s shut the reactor down and evacuated all non-essential personnel, as a precautionary measure.”

“No radiation leaks?”

“None detected so far.”

“Thank fuck for that.” Barnaby paused to give himself time to think. “Okay, Veronica, contact Hayashi at GloCo Japan and tell him to get his arse out of Tokyo pronto and head down to Atsumi.”

“I believe he’s already on his way, sir.”

“Good. Then put me through to his mobile, so that I can tell him I want him smiling and shaking hands with every technician at the plant, and I want photographers taking pictures of him doing it, and I want that reactor back online by close of business here in the UK.”

“Right away, sir.”

Barnaby spent much of the rest of the day on the phone, marshalling resources halfway across the world. It was evening in Japan, but GloCo employees there responded admirably, working into the small hours to establish the plant’s integrity and make sure full safety protocols had been adhered to. The plant operated a third-generation advanced pressurised water reactor, generally held to be the most efficient and securest of its kind, equipped with countless passive safety features and a plethora of active failsafe measures to contain meltdown. According to the seismology department at the nearby Aichi Prefectural University, the quake had been low on the Mercalli intensity scale, registering as a ‘Five – Rather Strong,’ a category in which the worst that could happen was slight damage to buildings. All that the Cape Irago plant suffered was the odd bit of broken plasterwork and the collapse of the Styrofoam-tile false ceiling in the staff canteen. By mid-afternoon GMT, past midnight Japan Standard Time, the reactor was up and running again, churning out its customary two thousand megawatts of power.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese were understandably paranoid about a repeat incident, but Hayashi, as GloCo’s national head of operations, did a bang-up job reassuring the media that there was nothing to worry about and never had been. Barnaby himself conducted a couple of Skype interviews with BBC World and NHK’s News Watch 9, calmly allaying any lingering fears.

All in all, a good day’s work and a well-executed exercise in crisis management and brow soothing. Barnaby went home pleased, and that night manacled Lydia to the bondage table in a prostrate position, face down, backside aloft, and whacked her with a wooden spanking paddle until her buttocks glowed red.

THE GLOCO BYZANTIUM

TWO DAYS LATER, a GloCo TI class supertanker foundered on shoals one hundred miles off the coast of California.

The GloCo Byzantium was transporting its cargo of light crude from the La Plata terminal in Argentina up to the Port of San Francisco when extreme weather, coupled with some calamitous navigational decision-making and a glitch in the automated course correction software, saw it deviate out of the shipping lanes and stray onto the Cortes Bank. It struck the Bishop Rock, the highest peak of the undersea basalt ridge, which at low tide lay only a few metres below the surface. The Byzantium’s double hull was torn open like tinfoil, and oil began gushing out. Within moments the supertanker was listing horribly and the captain had no alternative but to give the order to abandon ship. The twenty-man crew all made it safely into the life rafts, but had to endure several hours of being tossed about on heavy seas before a coastguard helicopter located them and a US Navy frigate arrived on the scene to rescue them.

Meanwhile the Byzantium, battered by hundred-mile-an-hour winds and thirty-foot waves, was dragged further across the Cortes Bank, spewing oil helplessly. Compartment after compartment ruptured into a relentless cascade. Soon the ship was semi-submerged, sinking into a brown sludge of its own making, an emulsified mix of oil and seawater which foamed over its bows and onto its decks. The keel succumbed to the strain and, back broken, the fatally wounded 450-metre-long leviathan plunged under, tumbling to the seabed, still bleeding as it descended.

With a deadweight tonnage in excess of 440,000, the Byzantium could hold three million barrels of oil at full capacity. On the trip up from Chile it had been carrying approximately two thirds of that, but two million barrels of oil was still a huge amount. Conditions at sea were too rough for it to be worthwhile sending aircraft out to spray detergent onto the slick, but luckily the prevailing wind and currents carried the oil west into the open Pacific rather than east onto the Californian shoreline. Within three days the slick had dispersed naturally and the nightmare scenario of oil-blackened beaches at Malibu and Baja did not come to pass.

Barnaby, nonetheless, had an uncomfortable time of it. The press and news media did not give GloCo an easy ride, either at home or in the States, where he was vilified by CNN and Fox News and ridiculed on The Tonight Show and The Daily Show. The Byzantium incident was agreed to have been the worst supertanker disaster since the Exxon Valdez, and vied with the Amoco Cadiz for being the worst ever. Had oil reached US soil, the cost of cleanup and compensation would have been astronomical. As it was, Lloyd’s of London fulfilled its duties as maritime accident insurer, but the premiums on the rest of GloCo’s shipping fleet immediately went through the roof, so Barnaby was still left significantly out of pocket. GloCo’s share price also took a hit.

To add to his woes, the Seagull Movement returned to plague him. People dressed as birds once again littered the concourse in front of the GloCo Tower, sprawled on the paving stones like the aftermath of some mutant avian massacre. Rather than pick his way through or around them each morning and evening, Barnaby was obliged to use the entrance in the tower’s below-ground parking garage when he arrived and left each day.

It had always been a source of great satisfaction to him that he could walk through the revolving front door of his very own skyscraper. He enjoyed seeing the building stretching above him: his palace, seat of his empire. He loved the feel of the spacious main lobby, with its marble walls and its soaring atrium that reached all the way to the hemispherical skylight at the top and which had, as its centrepiece, a giant sequoia transplanted from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. He preferred to come and go like a king, not skulk about in sublevels where the lift doors were utilitarian steel and the floor was nothing but concrete. But for the time being, the bird-costumed protestors had made it impossible for him.

CANE

“I CAN UNDERSTAND if you don’t feel like it,” Lydia said, that Friday. “If you’re not in the mood.”

“No,” Barnaby said. “I need this. I need you.”

“It’s been a bad few days for you. Nobody could blame you for wanting nothing more than to put your feet up and have a quiet night.”

“I need the release. I’ve been thinking about nothing else all week. Let’s go.”

“If you insist.”

“Oh, I most definitely do.”

In the basement, Barnaby instantly felt on top of things again. Nothing outside these four walls mattered any more. The real world could not impinge. He could forget the earth tremor and the GloCo Byzantium. There was only him and Lydia, and a range of toys to use and games to play.

He spreadeagled her on the St Andrew’s Cross frame. He spent a long time pondering his choice of beating implement, eventually settling on a plain bamboo cane.

He relished the swissshh the cane made through the air and the neat red line it left on Lydia’s pale skin with each stroke. He swung it at her until his shoulder ached. Several shrill yelps came from her, but never the safeword. Soon she was striped from shoulders to knees in an overlapping crisscross pattern that reminded Barnaby somehow of kanji script, as though he had inscribed a secret message on her flesh in a language he couldn’t read.

He chose a thick, knurled dildo to insert into her. It slid easily into place. He chose a second, smaller-calibre one and, having applied lubricant copiously, found a berth for that too.

Finally he finished himself off, exploding all over Lydia’s hips and spine.

To leave the basement after that was a heavy act, like rousing himself from a rapturous dream. Barnaby couldn’t help wondering if the world had any further shocks in store for him and GloCo – and dreaded that it might.

CAVE-IN

AT 11.36AM, INDIA Standard Time, the cave-in struck.

Seventy-three coal miners at the GloCo colliery just outside the town of Talcher in Odisha province were trapped underground, four miles from the entrance to the pit. A section of ceiling in a newly excavated tunnel that had shown no sign of instability gave way suddenly. Two miners were killed outright in the collapse.

The rescue operation began immediately. Expert volunteers went down to ascertain the precise location of the cave-in and see if it was possible to establish communications with the survivors. They quickly determined that there was no way they could dig through the rubble to free them, or even shout to them. They estimated the cave-in to be at least a hundred feet long, and the tunnel remained in a dangerously unstable condition, so precarious that even reinforcing the ceiling with additional braces or shoring it up with roof bolts might have the reverse effect, bringing more of it crashing down.

Exploratory boreholes were sunk from the surface, seeking the spot where the survivors were likely to be, two thousand feet below. One drill bit eventually returned with a scrap of cloth tied to it, the material torn from a miner’s overalls.

The borehole was painstakingly widened until it was large enough for food, water and a two-way shortwave radio to be passed down through it on cables. It also brought the trapped miners much-needed ventilation.

The seventy-three men were stuck in a chamber little bigger than two train carriages. They had been down there for almost a week when the hole was made that promised them salvation. Eleven were badly injured, and most of the rest were afflicted by respiratory ailments as well as eye trouble owing to the acrid clouds of coal dust still swirling in the air after the cave-in. They were beginning to suffer from intense claustrophobia, too, and there were several cases of dysentery arising from the cramped, unsanitary conditions. Their desperate pleas for the rescuers to hurry up were transmitted over the radio and relayed to a watching world by local broadcasters. The miners begged to be reunited with their families, asked for forgiveness from loved ones they had wronged, and prayed to the gods to be delivered from this hellhole they were in.

The only possible way to get them out was to create a two-foot-diameter escape borehole and extract them one by one in a purpose-built metal capsule, the method famously used in 2010 after the accident at the Copiapó mine in Chile. But time was pressing. It was plain that the miners were in bad shape mentally as well as physically. Some of them were starting to crack up. The escape borehole would take days to drill. The miners might not be able to hold out that long. Their foreman was one of the pair who had been killed by the cave-in. A respected and charismatic figure, he might have been able to keep his men’s spirits up, had he still been alive. As it was, a kind of grim anarchy was evolving among the survivors. They were squabbling and fighting down there in the dank, foetid dark, battling over how the food was portioned out, turning on one another like animals over perceived or actual slights.

Barnaby arrived on the scene three days after the initial disaster, and stayed for the next fortnight. Ostensibly he was supervising, but in truth there was nothing practical he could do. The rescuers and the drillers all knew their jobs and didn’t need some expensively-suited CEO on hand to give them instructions. Mostly he just hung around the site, giving interviews to journalists and speaking to the miners’ families, repeatedly expressing his great concern for the men’s wellbeing and his hopes for a successful resolution to a terrible predicament. He dismissed accusations that the colliery was notorious for its lax safety record and higher-than-average level of injuries and deaths. He pointed out that coal mining in India was a vast industry, meeting the energy demands of a billion-strong – and fast-growing – population. Some of the largest reserves of coal in the world were to be found on the subcontinent, and India used more of the stuff per capita than any other nation save for China. Naturally, then, there were likely to be more mining accidents here than elsewhere, thanks to the sheer scale of the business and the numbers of people involved. It was pure statistics.

Then a reporter from an Odisha province newspaper asked Barnaby if he was aware that children as young as fourteen worked at this particular mine. Barnaby pooh-poohed the idea – “Absurd!” – until he was brought face-to-face with proof: a couple of colliery employees who were clearly adolescents and ought to have been in school. He was then informed that one of the seventy-three trapped men was in his teens. It was quite common for minors to be miners here, he was told. Kids were shorter and skinnier than adults, and therefore able to worm into narrow crevices inaccessible to their grown counterparts. India’s labour laws prohibited anyone under eighteen from working in a mine, but under-eighteens routinely applied for jobs, lying about their age, and colliery managers routinely ignored the obvious falseness of their claims and hired them.

Barnaby was ill for the next few days. He confined himself to his hotel suite, and for much of the time he genuinely was unwell – the inevitable digestive complaints brought on by the local cuisine – but he was sick at heart, too, sick to the soul. There was a teenager underground, in peril of his life. A boy. How had GloCo’s own CEO not known what was going on at the colliery? How could one of his companies do such a thing?

He re-emerged from confinement just as the borehole was due to break through to the tunnel. Once that happened, the capsule would be readied and would begin shuttling back and forth within the next twenty-four hours. The miners’ ordeal was near its end.

Jakob was with him as the truck-mounted Schramm T130XD air core drilling rig augered down through the last few feet of unconsolidated regolith. Already the ground had ruined three tungsten-bladed drill bits, and the fourth was growing blunt but looked likely to last out the task. Compressed air, blasted down the hollow rods, brought the pulverised cuttings spewing back up and out.

The sense of hope and expectation was immense. A crowd of fellow miners and relatives of the trapped men looked on, beneath a ferocious, beating midday sun and a sky like a magnesium flare.

GloCo was bankrolling the rescue effort, and Barnaby had no idea exactly how much it was costing – it had to be nudging eight figures – but he honestly didn’t care. All he wanted was a positive outcome, every single one of the miners hauled to the surface alive and well.

A deep rumble underfoot was the first hint that all was not as it should be. The Schramm T130XD shuddered. The drill accelerated to a tremendous pitch, over-revving shriekingly like a car suddenly thrown out of gear. Then the entire rig jerked downwards, canting the front of the truck into the air. People screamed in alarm. Circuit breakers kicked in, the drill motor cut out, and an unearthly hush fell. Then came further subterranean rumbling, as though some gigantic, terrible gate was being rolled shut. Another hush followed, this one interspersed with frantic sobs and gasps from the crowd. Everyone sensed that something had gone horribly wrong. No one was quite sure what or how.

In fact, it was simple. The drill, on the point of penetrating the roof of the tunnel, had hit the same geological flaw that had been responsible for the original cave-in: a jagged air pocket between two strata. In attempting to save the miners, it had instead finished them off, triggering a second cave-in. Their meagre, sordid refuge had become a tomb.

Radio silence from underground confirmed the awful truth. Several of the rescuers sank to their knees, overwhelmed with shock and dismay. Others took off their safety helmets as a mark of respect, tears rolling down their cheeks.

Barnaby, numb, decided to approach the crowd and offer condolences. Barely had he begun to speak, however, when a woman in a saffron sari shouted, “Murderer!” The rest of the crowd joined in, calling him all the worst words they could think of in English, and countless more in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and the regional language Oriya. Then rocks and stones were thrown: a few at first, but swiftly becoming dozens.

Jakob hustled Barnaby away, shielding his boss from the rain of projectiles with his own broad back. The crowd gave chase, a mob howling in grief and outrage. A few frontrunners caught up with the fleeing plutocrat and his bodyguard, but Jakob despatched them easily with backhand blows.

The bulk of the crowd gained on them; they were mere metres away as they reached their hired Tata Safari VX. Jakob bundled Barnaby into the passenger seat, then vaulted over the bonnet and dived into the driving seat, locking the doors. As he gunned the engine, people swarmed around the 4x4 and began hammering their fists on the windows and bodywork. Jakob floored the accelerator, powering through the throng. Bodies scattered. Anyone who didn’t leap out of the way was knocked aside. The Tata veered away from the mine, fishtailing on the gravelled approach road. The crowd receded behind it, still pursuing, a wall of waving arms and fury-etched faces.

Jakob didn’t bother stopping at the hotel in Talcher to pick up their belongings. He headed straight for Biju Patnaik Airport near Bhubaneswar, ninety miles away. Their luggage and other paraphernalia could be sent on later. Jakob’s priority was getting Barnaby onto the Gulfstream and in the air. He phoned ahead as he drove, and by the time the Tata pulled up on the tarmac beside the runway, the pilot had the turbofan engines cycling and had obtained clearance for immediate takeoff.

BENDER

THE CROWD AT the colliery couldn’t follow Barnaby, but the shame did, all the way back to the UK. Opprobrium was heaped on GloCo from all quarters. Newspaper editorials castigated him. TV pundits berated him. He became a public whipping boy as never before.

It was as though he had somehow deliberately caused the cave-in, as though he were personally responsible.

He started to drink, harder and more intently than he ever had. He holed up in his house and went on a week-long bender. Whenever he felt himself sobering up, he would reach for another bottle. He had plentiful supplies, a whole cellar full of wines and spirits. He could have stayed in the house and drunk for twelve months straight before he ran out of booze.

He woke up on the sofa late one afternoon to find Lydia standing over him. Her nose was wrinkled. She was looking down at him as she might have at a pig wallowing in its own filth.

“The state of you,” she clucked. “Have you no self-respect?”

“Think I pissed it away this morning. Along with half a kidney.” He groped for the bottle of Mersault Premier Cru that stood on the coffee table, uncorked and half empty.

Lydia slid it out of his reach. “That isn’t the answer.”

“It is,” he said. “Especially if the question is, ‘Did a teenage boy just die down one of your mines? Quite aside from the seventy-two grown men?’”

“Alcohol won’t solve your problems.”

“No, but it does mean I don’t have to think about them. Everyone hates me, Lydia.”

“Since when has that bothered you?”

“Since I started hating myself too.”

She grabbed him by the shoulders, hauling him upright. “You go and have a shower – a long one – and shave. When you come back, I’ll be downstairs. All the way downstairs.” She nodded towards the basement.

“You want to...?”

“Don’t you?”

He was drunk, but not that drunk. “Yes. God, yes, I do. I just assumed you wouldn’t, given... how I am, at the moment.”

“If you keep on talking, I might change my mind.”

He stood. He swayed. He made for the door. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

WORLDS IN HER EYES

SHE WAS NAKED except for a PVC corset that strained around her, as though trying to withhold a flesh explosion. Barnaby hadn’t seen her wearing it before. She was, he thought, really getting into this.

“I don’t trust you to tie a knot or fasten a shackle properly right now,” Lydia said. “I’ll just bend over that sawhorse there, okay? I won’t move, I promise. I’ll stay put. I give you my word. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Then do what you have to.”

She draped herself over the sawhorse provocatively, offering him her rump. Barnaby grabbed a whip and began flailing. He wasn’t as accurate as normal, but made up for that with enthusiasm. The whip’s cracks were deafening in the enclosed space of the basement. Bright scarlet weals appeared across Lydia’s buttocks and thighs. She flinched, but didn’t cry out. Blood beaded from the wounds. Barnaby kept going. He thrashed and thrashed, breaking into a sweat. No safeword – none that he heard, at any rate. The whip lashed out. He was panting hard. He wasn’t aroused at all. That wasn’t what this was about. He just wanted to hit and hit, hurt and hurt. He hated the world. The world hated him. Why wouldn’t everyone go away? Just fuck off and leave him alone? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was simply making money, same as everyone did. He hadn’t forced those miners to go down into that pit. They had gone of their own volition. They got paid. They knew the risks. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his... It wasn’t...

He collapsed to the floor, lungs heaving. The room spun around him. The pattern of the flock wallpaper became swirling mandalas. The cranberry-glass lights pulsed like hearts.

Lydia crouched over him. Her legs were streaked with blood. He looked into her eyes. The blue, the green...

Good God, they were the world. How come he had never realised that before? There were patterns in the irises. The blue, the oceans. The green, the continents.

“Barnaby,” she said. “It’s time. Time for you to take your turn.”

He slurred out some words. “What are you talking about?” Something to that effect.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? Hurting me hurts you. And I am everything. What you do to me, I give back to you. It’s nature’s way.”

Was she even speaking? Her lips were moving, but they didn’t seem to synchronise with what she was saying. The voice didn’t sound quite like hers, either.

“It’s no coincidence, Barnaby. You started beating me, accidents started happening to GloCo. There’s no act without consequences, especially where a woman like me is concerned. I’m not one of those emaciated nothings you used to use and abuse. Those girls. I’m more, so much more. I’m trying to teach you a lesson here. Hoping you’ll understand. Hoping you’ll learn.”

She took his hand, helped him up, led him across the room.

“The Berkley Horse, I think,” she said. “As good a place as any to start.”

He should have protested, could have resisted. Too drunk still, perhaps. Too exhausted. But also... It felt right. As though it was meant to be.

People could switch. People could change.

“You think you’re at your lowest ebb,” Lydia said as she fastened the straps around him. “But it could get worse. Equally, it could get better. Depends on what you’re prepared to do, the sacrifices you’re prepared to make.”

“I want it to get better,” he murmured.

“Then it will. But it won’t be easy. You continue to fuck the planet. Get ready for the planet to fuck you back.”

He was pressed tight to the Berkley Horse, his back, buttocks and legs exposed. He couldn’t have writhed even if he wanted to. He was held fast.

He had thought that to be immobilised like this would be unpleasant, constraining, inhibiting. But, strangely, it was the opposite. Liberating, almost.

Lydia fetched the riding crop, the same one he had used on her, their first time. He glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye. She ought to be walking stiffly on account of the weals, but she seemed unhampered by them. It was as though she was not fully present, her mind elsewhere, transported out of her body, beyond sensation.

She flexed the crop, testing it.

Barnaby waited for the pain, and when it came it was tortuous, bewildering, dizzying, deserved, and wondrous.

TOP TO BOTTOM

BARNABY ON ALL fours, his ankles parted by spreader bars.

Barnaby, ball-gag in mouth, suspended from manacles.

Barnaby bent double, a rope around his testicles, tightening.

Barnaby with Lydia squatting on his face, smothering.

Barnaby in the pillory, Lydia behind him, thrusting.

Barnaby on his back, feeling a jet of hot urine hit his belly and trickle off the sides.

Barnaby and the cold, searing bite of the nipple clamps.

Barnaby never once saying, “Gaia.”

A CHANGED MAN

GLOCO’S FORTUNES BEGAN to pick up.

For a time its prospects had looked dicey. Its CEO was AWOL, nowhere to be seen. Its shares were nosediving. The Talcher mine tragedy had turned it into a toxic brand. There was talk in the City of a shareholders’ revolt, hostile takeovers by any number of rivals, even nationalisation by the government, GloCo being one of those British companies that was ‘too big to fail.’

GloCo was a captainless ship, sailing on under its own relentless momentum, but who knew where? What reefs or maelstroms lay ahead of it, with no one at the helm to steer it safely past?

Then Barnaby Pollard reappeared.

He was not the same Barnaby Pollard who had vanished into self-imposed isolation a month earlier, after the events in Talcher. Anyone could see that. He was thinner, gaunt almost, no longer exuding the sleek, glossy confidence of the billionaire businessman. His hair was discernibly greyer. Occasionally he would walk with a very slight limp, as though his hip or lower back was sore.

But he was Barnaby Pollard nonetheless, visible once again, taking his seat at the summit of GloCo Tower, making calls, doling out commands.

GloCo was under control. Stockbrokers, bankers and financiers breathed a collective sigh of relief. All was right with the world again.

He was a changed man, though. Easier to deal with. Less ruthless. The deaths of those miners had done something to him, clearly. Brought humility. Chastened him.

One person who was more acutely aware of the alteration in Barnaby than anyone was Jakob. The boss whom Jakob ferried to and from work and escorted through all public appearances had become a shadow of his former self. They didn’t banter in the car any more. Barnaby was subdued in the back seat, seldom engaging in conversation, never rising to the bait when Jakob made some mildly insulting quip.

“Boss,” Jakob said to him one evening as they dawdled through unusually stodgy rush-hour traffic, “where are you? What the hell’s happened to you? I barely recognise you. It’s like I’m bodyguarding a ghost these days.”

He got nothing in reply, just a look in the rearview mirror from eyes that were sunken and grey-rimmed, set in a face that was weary and haggard.

“I’m worried,” Jakob went on. “Seriously I am. I think you’re sickening for something. You should go see a doc. Get a check-up. Have the old prostate looked at. That’s a silent killer, you know, prostate cancer. Slowly sucks the life out of a man, then blam, he’s gone.”

Barnaby gave him a bleak smile and shifted in his seat. “I’m fine on that front. Getting plenty of that sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing?”

“You know. Examination, kind of.”

Jakob’s forehead creased into a set of thick, meaty ridges. “I don’t get.”

Barnaby dismissed the topic with a flap of the hand. “Never mind.”

Jakob had to help him up the front steps of the house. His boss was almost hobbling.

“You sure you’re all right?” he asked.

“Never better,” Barnaby told him. “I’m how I’m supposed to be. It’s all great. Stop fussing, you old woman.”

Jakob paused, then turned away to go back to the car.

FIGHTING THE TIDE

LYDIA WAS HOME. She had more or less moved in with Barnaby. One of his walk-in wardrobes was now hers. The fridge was filled with the sort of food she liked to eat. One of the bathrooms was a riot of scented candles, essential oils, makeup remover and ethically-sourced, bleach-free tampons.

She was already kitted out in readiness for the evening’s shenanigans. Her boots were thigh-high. Her corset was leather, laced under great strain. Her dog collar was festooned with short, sharp spikes.

Barnaby meekly let himself be taken downstairs. He knew this was what he had to do. What must be.

You continue to fuck the planet. Get ready for the planet to fuck you back.

It was a penance, of sorts. A price to be paid. An offering to the goddess.

He loved Lydia. Lydia was his world. He had to take everything she dished out. That way, balance was restored, happiness ensured.

He submitted to the restraints. He surrendered to the humiliation.

After she had flogged him for a while, tenderising him, she buckled a strap-on dildo into place. Through the muzzle gag that enclosed his head like a horse’s bridle, Barnaby groaned, half in eagerness, half in dread.

“Brace yourself,” Lydia said, positioning herself behind him. “Don’t clench.”

Then the basement door opened.

“Fok me! I knew it!”

Jakob’s near-rectangular bulk filled the doorway.

“I knew something was up,” he said. “Boss. What’s this bitch been doing to you?”

“Nothing,” Barnaby replied. “Go away.” But the words were so muffled by the muzzle as to be all but incomprehensible.

“Oh, my fokken God, she’s got you completely turned around and back to front. This isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s meant to be at all.”

“It is,” said Lydia. “What’s happening here is none of your business, Jakob. Leave.”

“I will do no such thing,” Jakob said. “Untie him. That’s Barnaby Pollard. He’s not like that. He’s the one who hands it out, not the one who receives. Bloody hell, this explains everything. She’s destroying you, boss, inch by inch.”

“I said leave!” Lydia barked, with deep menace in her voice.

Jakob advanced into the room. “You,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “are not my employer. I do not take orders from you, you doos. You may be all got up like a dominatrix, but you’re not dominating me, got that?”

Lydia took two steps towards him. Her bearing was imperious, for all that she had an eight-inch rubber penis bobbing between her legs. “You have no idea what you’re messing with, little man. Lay one finger on me, and you’ll regret it.”

“You’re mad,” Jakob scoffed, laughing.

“Try me.”

“Jakob, no!” Barnaby yelled through the muzzle. He hoped his tone would carry, even if the words didn’t. It wasn’t an order he was giving, it was a warning.

The Afrikaner moved closer to Lydia, hands spread. “I’ve never liked you. You know that? I’ve always said you’re dangerous.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’ll drag you out of the room by your hair. I’ll throw you out into the street, where you belong.”

“You can’t fight me,” Lydia said, “any more than you can fight the tide.”

Jakob dwarfed her. She gazed up at him wholly without fear.

Barnaby knew there was something inside Lydia Laidlaw that you mustn’t resist. It filled her to the brim. She was only outwardly a woman. Within her lay a terrible power. If roused, it could ruin.

But his hands were tied, literally. He couldn’t intercede. He could only make noises, imploring Jakob to back off. But his pleading grunts fell on deaf ears. Jakob was too loyal. He loved his boss too much. He believed what he was doing was right.

He made a grab for Lydia.

She ducked, kneeing him in the groin.

As he slumped to the floor in agony, she snatched a chain from the wall and wrapped it round his neck. She placed her foot in the small of his back and pulled. Jakob struggled, pawing at the improvised garrotte. His face purpled. He tried hitting backwards at Lydia, but she leaned away out of range, hauling on the chain with far greater strength than she ought to have possessed. Her eyes were huge and ferociously, intimidatingly blue-green.

She let Jakob go when he was half strangled. He keeled forwards onto his face, twitching and retching.

She found the hugest, fattest vibrator in the room, and clubbed Jakob on the head with it.

Savagely.

Viciously.

Repeatedly.

Until the thudding impacts turned crunchy and wet.

Barnaby could only look on in abject horror.

When Lydia was done, she sat back, chest heaving. The bloodstained vibrator had been switched on by accident during the bludgeoning. It buzzed like some monstrous mosquito, glutted on the juices of its prey.

Lydia looked across at Barnaby.

“We’re in this together now,” she said. “All the way. You understand that, don’t you, Barnaby? There’s no getting around what we’ve just done here. No getting away from it. I can dispose of the body. I can find a way. I’m a familiar sight at various landfills around the country. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Black plastic bags. A piece here, a piece there. But you’re implicated, my love. You’re as guilty as I am. This isn’t going to end at all well for you if you try to wriggle out of it. Think of the scandal. Think of the disgrace. There wouldn’t be a GloCo left, if this got out. The only hope you have is if you go along with me. Do as I say. From now on. In everything.”

She rose, dropping the vibrator with a splat onto what was left of Jakob’s skull.

“We need a new contract, you and me,” she said, dressed as a sinner, smiling like a saint. “One that’ll apply everywhere, not just within these four walls. A new, very simple agreement. One without a safeword. You do what I tell you, or else.”

She stroked Barnaby’s hair.

“What do you say to that, my love?” she crooned. “Well, nothing, of course. You can’t. But you can nod, can’t you? So nod.”

With tears spilling from his eyes, Barnaby lowered his head.

“Is that a yes?” said Lydia. “I’ll take it as one. Oh, this is going to be so good for us, Barnaby. So good for everyone. Such an opportunity! You’ll see.”

SWITCH

WHEN GLOCO ANNOUNCED that it was diversifying its portfolio, the general assumption was this meant branching into other consumables, perhaps upping its investment in nuclear power and fracking.

Nobody could have foreseen that the company would commit to a regime of renewable energy production. Wind farms, hydroelectric dams, tidal barrages, massive photovoltaic panel arrays – GloCo sank billions into them all, selling off its existing assets piecemeal in order to fund the purchases.

Most people called it madness. Some called it glorious madness. Many said it was commercial suicide. Everybody predicted that GloCo would be bankrupt and in receivership within the year. ‘GloCo Goes Loco,’ ran the headline in the Wall Street Journal, adding, ‘Putting All Its Greenbacks In One Green Basket?’

CEO Barnaby Pollard oversaw the fraught process of restructuring his company with a mixture of regret and resolve. It was not a dismantling, he told himself. It was just change. Radical but doable.

Always Lydia was by his side, administering to him, offering instruction.

His mistress.

His guide.

His Gaia.

EXCLUSIVE TO EBOOK - AN ALL-NEW NOVELLA

Dion Yeboah leads an orderly, disciplined life... until the day the spider appears. What looks like an ordinary arachnid turns out to be Anansi, the trickster god of African legend, and its arrival throws Dion’s existence into chaos.

Dion develops strange new abilities. He becomes quicker, both in mind and body. He is able to move and deceive like never before. He has become Anansi’s avatar on earth.

Then he discovers the price he has to pay for his newfound skills. He must travel to America and take part in a contest between the avatars of all the trickster gods. It’s a life-or-death battle of wits, , andt the end, only one person will be left standing.

“The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”

The Guardian on The Age of Zeus

www.solarisbooks.com

1968. Guy Lucas, son a murdered British diplomat, is sent to an old-fashioned boarding school, where he is bullied and abused. A fellow student persuades him to perform a black mass and plead with Satan to intervene, with horrific consequences.

For the next ten years, the shadow of Satan is cast across his life; he flees, across the sea and into obscurity, but tragedy follows him.

Eventually, he must confront the Devil, and learn the truth about himself...

“The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”

The Guardian on The Age of Zeus

www.solarisbooks.com

Lex Dove thought he was done with the killing game. A retired British wetwork specialist, he’s living the quiet life in the Caribbean, minding his own business. Then a call comes, with one last mission: to lead an American black ops team into a disused Cold War bunker on a remote island near his adopted home. The money’s good, which means the risks are high.

Dove doesn’t discover just how high until he and his team are a hundred feet below ground, facing the horrific fruits of an experiment blending science and voodoo witchcraft.

As if barely human monsters weren’t bad enough, a clock is ticking. Deep in the bowels of the earth, a god is waiting. And His anger, if roused, will be fearsome indeed.

‘A full-blown thriller, high on action and violence.’

Eric Brown, The Guardian on Age of Aztec

‘One of the SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.’

Saxon Bullock, SFX Magazine on The Age of Ra

‘Lovegrove is vigorously carving out a godpunk subgenre – rebellious underdog humans battling an outmoded belief system. Guns help a bit, but the real weapon is free will.’

Pornokitsch on The Age of Odin

‘5 out of 5. I found myself unable to put it down, and plan to reread it soon.’

Geek Syndicate on Age of Aztec

www.solarisbooks.com

Table of Contents

Praise for the 'Pantheon' Series

Also by James Lovegrove

Title

Indicia

Bird Strike

The Sexiness Stakes

Reset

The Seagull Movement

La Cigarette

A Spree Across the World

Lydia Laidlaw

A Free Lunch

Scapegoating and Victimisation

A Born-Again Virgin Rainforest

Harmonious Coexistence

A Damn Good Mergering

Arrows of Pragmatism

Departures at Arrivals

The Long Game

Bombarded

Across the Line

The Phwoar Factor

Brava! Magazine

Prejudice and Freefall

Paradise Lost

On A Roll

A Very Good Time To Be Barnaby Pollard

Emergence and Re-Sheathing

The Door

The Basement

White and Red

Hasn't it Been a Strange Summer?

Little Poison Darts

Thorns and Nettles

Safe Word

Keeper

Five on the Mercalli Scale

The GloCo Byzantium

Cane

Cave-In

Bender

Worlds in her Eyes

Top to Bottom

A Changed Man

Fighting the Tide

Switch

'Age of Anansi' by James Lovegrove

'Age of Satan' by James Lovegrove

'Age of Voodoo' by James Lovegrove