A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [47]
‘So this has something to do with them?’
He does not respond.
‘Or MI5? Are they the “alternative” you were talking about on the phone yesterday?’
Without answering, Hawkes breathes deeply and looks to the sky, but a satisfied expression on his face seems to confirm the truth of this. Then he simply puts his arm across my back, the right hand squeezing my shoulder, and says:
‘Later, Alec. Later.’
PART TWO
1996
‘Making millions on sheer gall. American Dream.’
John Updike, Rabbit Redux
11
Caspian
The offices of Abnex Oil occupy five central storeys in an eyesore Broadgate high-rise about six minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station.
The company was founded in 1989 by a City financier named Clive Hargreaves, who was just thirty-five years old at the time. Hargreaves had no A-levels and no formal higher education, just a keen business sense and an instinctive, immediate grasp of the market opportunities presented by the gradual collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc and, later, the former Soviet Union. With private investment attached to a chunk of money he’d made in the City during the Thatcher-Lawson boom, Hargreaves expanded Abnex from a small outfit employing fewer than one hundred people into what is now the third largest oil exploration company in the UK. At the start of the decade Abnex had minor contracts in Brazil, the North Sea, Sakhalin and the Gulf, but Hargreaves’ masterstroke was to realize the potential of the Caspian Sea before many of his competitors had done so. Between 1992 and early 1994, he negotiated Well Workover Agreements with the nascent governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and sent down teams of geologists, contractors and lawyers to Baku with a view to identifying the most promising well-sites in the region. The Caspian is now awash with international oil companies, many of them acting as joint ventures, and all competing for their chunk of what are proven oil reserves. But Abnex is better placed than many of them to reap the benefits when the region goes online.
On New Year’s Day 1995, Hargreaves was killed riding pillion on a motorcycle in northern Thailand. The driver, his best friend, wasn’t drunk or high; he was just going too fast and missed a bend in the road. Hargreaves, who was single, left the bulk of his estate to his sister, who immediately sold her controlling stake in Abnex to a former Cabinet Minister in the Thatcher government. This is where Hawkes came in. A new chairman, David Caccia, had been appointed by the board of directors. Caccia was also ex-Foreign Office, though not SIS: the two men had been posted to the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1970s and become close friends. Caccia, knowing that Hawkes was approaching retirement, offered him a job.
I work as a business development analyst in a seven-man team specializing in emerging markets, specifically the Caspian Sea. On my first day, just four or five hours in, the personnel manager asked me to sign this:
Code of Conduct
To be complied with at all times by employees and associates of Abnex Oil
The Company expects all of its business to be conducted in a spirit of honesty, free from fraudulence and deception. Employees - and those acting on behalf of Abnex Oil - shall use their best endeavours to promote and develop the business of the Company and its standing both in the UK and abroad.
All business relationships - with government representatives, clients and suppliers - must be conducted ethically and within the bounds of the law. On no account should inducements or other extra-contractual payments be made or accepted by employees or associates of Abnex Oil. Gifts of any nature must be registered with the Company at the first opportunity.
Employees and associates are forbidden to publish or otherwise disclose to any unauthorized person trading details of Abnex Oil or its clients, including - but not limited to - confidential or secret information relating to the business, finances, computer