say, he should have been doing his job properly. I mean, seriously, where does responsibility end? He knew what he was taking on when he joined for his mega salary. You should have seen the house he lived in; I did, when he invited me over for drinks one time. Not dinner with him and his family, just drinks, me and him, on the patio overlooking their vast lawn. Don’t get me wrong, I am well paid for what I do (though I should really be putting that in the past tense, shouldn’t I), but this was a different level entirely. I spent some of the evening trying to probe into why – as in, why was he richer than me – but with no joy. It was one of those typical mevenings (or man evenings, as Sylvia used to put it) – dicks out on the table, we may as well have had our bank statements spray painted on the sides of our Ferraris. I don’t own a Ferrari, never have done, but of course Jared did – two in fact, he told me, and I wondered if he had caught our CEO sleeping with the prime minister. (By our CEO, I mean X, to be clear). That wasn’t it, of course – no one would sleep with him, the fat, ugly bastard, but I sat there all night doing the sums and trying to figure it out and I really couldn’t. I mean, this guy was a security guard, basically. Jumped up, yes; in a serious position, yes; working for the government, yes – nevertheless, it made no sense, and I resolved there and then to ask for a very, very significant pay rise. Seeing your dick disappear into its own meagreness against this takes a big ego to overcome, and mine was clearly not up to the task. I know, it’s easy to judge me, of course, the relentless pursuit of material things and everything that goes with it, the subjugation of morality to wealth; but I will say to you again, why me? Why should I carry the responsibility? For centuries, our only goal has been to amass as much money as we possibly can, as a substitute for what? Who knows and who cares. Money is the only thing that gives us choices, and if Jared’s choice was to spend it on material things that he would never have a chance to use, then who was I to judge. I mean, really, who needs two Ferraris. Who needs a house that is so big you have probably never been in some rooms, and land so vast that you may have indigenous tribes living in some part of it and you would never realise, but to question that is to miss the point.
Now - to wonder what choices he made in order to get it, that is a good question. Because, of course, if Jared was able to make five, maybe ten times as much as me by protecting the thing that I spent hours, days, weeks, inventing, burning the oil of my mind, then who’s the more intelligent one? Yes, of course. And given everything, the fact that I am here now, and you are there now, well, who made the best choices? I digress. Again. Jared may have owned two Ferraris but that wasn’t going to stop them from putting a bullet in his back, and I was the one who had the VDE in a hidden cupboard in my apartment. Ah, you’re right I guess, it did make me feel good. Especially when they gave him one more chance - find out who did it and get it back within twenty-four hours – very Mission Impossible. Ha fucking ha. I’m not sure why they put the time limit on it; to be dramatic, I expect. Surely it would have been more important to retrieve it, even if it took longer. But no, twenty-four hours, that’s how much time our CEO (or X, or actually Andy Smith, which is his real name) gave Jared, and watched him sweat out that time as he built plan, then counter plan, then counter counter plan, as he roped in everyone to do everything to cover every conceivable angle about who could possibly have taken it.
We were all suspected, of course; he was very apologetic to me about having to search my apartment, and he did it with such reluctance that it was far easier than I expected to hide the thing. I could have saved myself thousands. They would never have found it, anyway; he assembled such a rag bag team of people to perform the search it was a wonder the found anything. Correct that. They didn’t find anything. I think the general consensus was that it was the Russians, and it was a small leap from there to the assumption that someone working in our department was a Russian spy, and it was a small leap from there to what became known as the Purges (very dramatic, of course, consistent with X); but then of course, I’m sure you will have heard about them. I wonder whether Jared ever felt guilty about that.
It wasn’t Beryl. It was never going to be Beryl, she was far too smart, though no one realised that; in fact, everyone knew it wasn’t Beryl because they thought she was far too stupid. They all knew it, didn’t they, but he had nothing else and so he had to lay the blame on someone, and who was easier than that. (And at this point, I would like to interject, for the record, that I do have a shred of decency. I was called into a meeting by our CEO, along with everyone else who was either important or had something to do with the VDE. I liked to think both applied to me, wrongly, I expect. X went around the table with the suggestion of Beryl, just to gauge the reaction, just in case, I guess, there was any pushback. Everyone just nodded – Beryl, well there’s a surprise, you never know with people, do you. Maybe you were there, too, who knows. The point being that I was the only one to say anything, to say it was ridiculous and didn’t we feel ashamed of ourselves. I’m still surprised I did it to be honest, and I think X was too - but I liked Beryl, she got on with things, she never made any trouble, and she always smiled at me. More than most.)
Jared made a mistake there, though, didn’t he - always be careful who you underestimate. Beryl the cleaner, easiest target in the world. Spoke with a slight accent, it was easy to make an inference there that she was somehow from the East, probably Iron Curtain (for those of us who remember such a thing), probably working for the Russians. She was big as well, and quiet, and so it was easy to make the assumption, wasn’t it, that because no one knew her, no one liked her. And then what happened to poor Beryl – suspended, convicted, sentenced, sent down, or at least that’s what we all thought at the time, wasn’t it. Turns out that Beryl did have some friends after all, friends who weren’t averse to staging a jail break, or, more accurately, breaking her out before she actually ended up in jail. And that left poor Jared a little stuck – on one side he had us, quite keen on ensuring his silence, and on the other side he had a vengeful cleaner called Beryl who, as it turned out, was pretty useful with a semi-automatic. The rumour goes that she tracked him down to a tenement in Buenos Aires, where he lived alone in a tiny flat with no running water. Give the man credit, he had provided for his family, had set them up in an, admittedly small, safe house, with an (admittedly small) monthly income and an (again small) car. The one flaw in this was that Jared’s interpretation of the needs of a safe house were in line with his concept of security – fabulous and yet fundamentally flawed. And thus, despite the clearly well intentioned plans that he had had to keep his family safe, tracking them down was not really a problem. Beryl and her friends were quick, and Jared’s wife was not very resilient, preferring, understandably, to keep her and her children’s bodies intact, in exchange for everything she knew about her soon to be ex-husband’s whereabouts.
Maybe I could mention here that if there is a moral to this small story, it’s that if you are in security, don’t have a family. Or if you do, keep your safe houses very safe, even from them. Jared’s main flaw was that he was a proud man (obvious of course as soon as you met him). He was prone, as I think I’ve mentioned, to showing off at every possible opportunity, and he allowed that to run to his family, boasting of his safe houses (or as he liked to refer to them, at least to his wife Ella, his sabbatical retreats) and thereby giving her enough information to point the vengeful Beryl in the correct, very specific direction. The biggest issue that they had had, Ella told me later, was getting the language right; Beryl, or more precisely her friend Carl, became very agitated when he thought Ella was taking the piss (excuse my French); meanwhile, Ella, who is herself somewhat of a force to be reckoned with, was also getting frustrated that these people didn’t seem to grasp what she was saying. It was quite simple. They wanted to know if he had any places he would go, so she described the five sabbatical retreats – Buenos Aires, Paris, Cape Town, Stockholm and Tokyo. Carl, visibly shaking, said he didn’t want to know how many f***ing holiday homes he had,
they knew he was a rich f***er, until it eventually became clear that Ella had never visited them and that they appeared to be anything but holiday homes, at which point everything became much more cordial. Beryl and Carl stayed for a cup of coffee and then headed out to the airport.
They tossed a coin about where to go first, picked Stockholm, then decided against it as it would be too cold and Beryl needed a break, and so headed to Buenos Aires because they had never been, both liked steak and wanted to take advantage of the weather. That Jared was there was also a bonus, which they discovered on their third day there, after a suitable amount of time partying and taking in the sights. The small, dingy flat that had become his home was on the 32nd floor of a tower block in one of the city’s southern slums, overlooking miles and miles of built up area. Why he had chosen somewhere like that was anybody’s guess. To melt into the background of a large city by keeping as low a profile as possible makes sense only if you don’t tell everyone