Capital

perfect deputy. He worked hard, never made a mistake, was not too obvious about wanting Roger ’s job, and if you left aside the question of his non-stop fidgeting, never seemed flustered. There was a slight sense that he kept things too tightly under control, and he was the kind of person who might turn out to have a secret vice: if he turned out to be a paedo or bondage freak or to have a chopped-up body under his floorboards or something, Roger would be surprised, but he wouldn’t be all that surprised. He would have been very surprised indeed if he had known what Mark really thought of him, and also what a close and personal interest his deputy took in his boss’s life – in where Roger lived and where he’d gone to school, in his children’s names and birthdays, in his wife’s spending habits and in the way he spent his free time. Roger would have been completely freaked out by that, but he didn’t know anything about it, so that wasn’t why Mark made Roger uneasy.
    Roger’s discomfort with Mark was based on the fact that he, Roger, had come to work at Pinker Lloyd in the time when the City was more about relationships and less about maths. He had prospered, thrived, in the intervening decades but it was no longer true that he had kept up entirely with the changes in the underlying nature of the work. Foreign exchange trading was based on the manipulation of immensely complicated mathematical formulae, which allowed the bank to take subtle, lucrative positions that amounted to betting on both sides of the trade at the same time. As long as anything not too wildly untoward happened – anything outside the parameters and predictions built into your bets – and as long as your algorithms were correct, you were guaranteed to make money. It was a law of the business that you could not make money without taking some risk, but it was also true, thanks to the wonders of modern financial instruments, that you could manage the risk almost out of existence. And of course the bank did every little thing it could to help itself. Some of the trading was algorithmic, done on a purely mathematical basis to benefit from the way prices had momentum: when they moved in any direction, they were more likely than not to move in the same direction the next day. So they had traders using software to profit from that. Some of the trading was ‘flash’ trading, done to profit from the split seconds between an order being placed in the markets and the order being executed. Some of the trading drew on databases of what customers had paid in the past, and used that to predict what they would pay in the present, in real time, so that the bank could quote a price that the customer would accept, but which would also lock in a guaranteed profit for Pinker Lloyd. That was all fine, and the broad principles were well understood by Roger – but it was not the same thing as understanding the maths itself. That was by now well beyond him. Mark, on the other hand, did understand it; he had abandoned a Maths PhD to come and work at Pinker Lloyd. Roger did not love the fact that his footing was no longer entirely secure, and that he could no longer explain, right the way down to the finest grain of detail, exactly what was going on in the trading his department supervised. But then, hardly anyone else could either. That was just the nature of the work that went on in the City these days.
    ‘OK to bring up one more issue?’ asked Mark, putting down the first set of figures he’d brought, and picking up another file. ‘I’ve got the next run at that software thing. I thought you might like to have a look?’
    Mark here was using upspeak, ending on an upward inclination , making what he said nearly a question but not quite. He held the file aloft in a way which invited the third man in the room to take a look at it if he wanted to. That man was Roger’s ultimate boss, Lothar Billinghoffer. Lothar was a forty-five-year-old German who had been headhunted from Euro Paribas a couple of years ago. Companies have styles in personal comportment; the style at Pinker Lloyd was calm and level, and no one embodied that better than the German Chief Executive Officer. He looked super-fit and uncannily healthy for a man who worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, though when you got close up he seemed older than he did at a distance. Lothar was a fanatic about outdoor sport, and spent his weekends walking up mountains or skiing down them or hanging