A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [48]
Any breach of the above regulations will be construed by the Company as circumstances amounting to gross misconduct which may result in summary dismissal and legal prosecution.
August 1995
All of the guys on my team are university graduates in their mid-to-late twenties who came here within six months of leaving university. With one exception, they are earning upwards of thirty-five thousand pounds a year. The exception, owing to the circumstances in which I took the job, is myself. I am over halfway through the trial period imposed by the senior management. If, at the end of it, I am considered to have performed well, my salary will be bumped up from its present level - which is sub-twelve thousand after tax - to something nearer thirty, and I will be offered a long-term contract, health cover and a company car. But if Alan Murray, my immediate boss, feels that I have not contributed effectively to the team, I’m out the door.
This probationary period, which ends on 1 December, was a condition of my accepting the job imposed by Murray. Hawkes and Caccia knew that they had brought me in over the heads of several other more highly qualified candidates - one of whom had been shadowing the team, unpaid, for over three months - and they were happy to oblige. From my point of view it’s a small price to pay. Like most employers nowadays, Abnex know that they can get away with asking young people to work excessively long hours, six or seven days a week, without any form of contractual security or equivalent remuneration. At any one time there might be fifteen or twenty graduates in the building doing unpaid work experience, all of them holding out for a position that in all likelihood does not exist.
So, no complaints. Things have swung around for me since last year and I have Hawkes to thank for that. The downside is that I now work harder, and for longer hours, than I have ever worked in my life. I am up every morning at six, sometimes quarter past, and take a cramped tube to Liverpool Street just after seven. There’s no time for a slow, contemplative breakfast, those gradual awakenings of my early twenties: the team are expected to be at their desks by eight o’clock. There is a small, aggressively managed coffee bar near the Abnex building where I sometimes buy an espresso and a sandwich at around nine a.m. But often there is so much work to do that there isn’t even time to leave the office.
The pressure comes mainly from the senior management, beginning with Murray and working its way steadily upwards towards Caccia. They make constant demands on the team for reliable and accurate information about geological surveys, environmental research, pipeline and refining deals, currency fluctuations and - perhaps most important of all - any anticipated political developments in the region which may have long- or short-term consequences for Abnex. A change of government personnel, for example, can dramatically affect existing and apparently legally binding exploration agreements signed with the previous incumbent. Corruption is at an epidemic level in the Caspian region and the danger of being outmanoeuvred, either by a competitor or by venal officials, is constant.
A typical day will be taken up speaking on the telephone to clients, administrators and other officials in London, Moscow, Kiev and Baku, often in Russian or, worse, with someone who has too much belief in their ability to speak English. In that respect, little has changed since CEBDO. But in every other way my life has taken on a dimension of intellectual effort that was entirely absent when working for Nik. I look back on my first six months at Abnex as a blur of learning: files, textbooks, seminars and exams on every conceivable aspect of the