Kevin was not much given to self-doubt, but after they had put him back down in the cellar, he began to wonder if he had done the right thing. Once he had realised that they weren’t going to kill him after all, he had experienced an amazing feeling of euphoria. It reminded him of the buzz he got after a big deal went through, only much, much stronger. He had peered into the abyss, but he had survived. In fact, his brush with death had made him feel almost invulnerable. But what if he had misjudged the situation? What if they were up there now planning how to torture and execute him?
He’d never had much contact with people like this before. The closest he had come was on the various May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in the City. He remembered returning after a boozy post-deal lunch one year and spending a happy afternoon with a couple of colleagues photocopying a fifty pound note. Once they had found a window which they could actually open (no mean feat in the Bank’s sealed, air-conditioned tower), they had launched the copies out of the fifth storey so that they floated down onto the demonstration below. All the protesters could do in response was jeer at them – which sounded rather feeble by the time the noise reached the fifth floor (especially once they had shut the double-glazed window again).
The demonstration as a whole had been utterly ineffectual – there had been very little disruption and the next day the City was back to business as usual. He couldn’t understand the protesters at all. Hadn’t they heard of the fall of Communism and the abject failure of the planned economy? Didn’t they realise that capitalism had won, that there was no longer any alternative? At the time, he had written them off as the last desperate remnants of a species which – like communism and anti-capitalist ideology the world over – would soon be extinct.
But the banking crisis had given them a whole new lease of life. Oh look, they said, we were right all along, even though they had no viable alternative. And they couldn’t let go of this idea that they were owed an apology. Why couldn’t they see that there was no point crying over spilt milk? You just had to move on. There was no doubt that the Bank and economy were in a bad way. But how would apologising help to put it right? Dwelling on the past was just a distraction when there was urgent work to be done in the present. Besides, if you apologised, you were admitting you’d got it wrong – and after that, why should anyone listen to a word you had to say? An apology would mean throwing away any chance of being able to use your authority to get things back on track.
But the more he thought about it, the stronger his conviction grew that they would not kill him. After all, if you were a ruthless Bolshevik fanatic, you didn’t ask the capitalist pigs to apologise – you just shot them in the back of the head in the name of the revolution. His captors, on the other hand, were not revolutionary fanatics. They liked to think of themselves as reasonable, civilised people. That was why they expected him to say sorry. And that was also their weakness.