Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [90]
He actually seemed to be asking her. So Sarah nodded.
‘Right,’ Morgan went on. ‘Thing is, we haven’t been able to get the terms out of him yet. We don’t know how much hardware Guest’s got to offer, or how much Alan’s put us down for. Or how many others are in on the deal, even. So, you know, you’ll have to bear with me. I don’t know how deep your people are into this.’
Aha. Then Morgan thought she knew more about the deal than he did. Handy. ‘Let’s just say we’ve got an interest in some of the material,’ Sarah told him, keeping things as vague as she felt she could. ‘So, what else did Mr Llewis tell you?’
The office, when they reached it, was smaller than Sarah had expected, but otherwise depressingly familiar. There were a handful of desks, most of them unoccupied, covered in empty pizza boxes and sheets of fax paper. A Pirelli calendar hung on one wall, the date given as May 1995, so presumably the men who worked here just liked the picture. Wet daylight dribbled in through the windows, highlighting the patches where cigarette ash had been trodden into the carpet.
Morgan oozed into the space behind his desk, and indicated the seat opposite him. Sarah folded herself into a sitting position, as primly as she could.
‘Guest’s already got the merchandise into the country,’ Morgan began.
‘In a warehouse,’ Sarah told him. ‘Near Newbury.’
‘Right. Right. We’ve got our legal people working on this, trying to figure out whether it’s safe to have the stuff on the mainland without anyone asking questions. There’s no legislation on it, but you know what the Home Office is like. We want our backs covered. They’re still kicking up a stink about Hiatt’s selling shackles to the Saudis, and that’s all meant to be above board. They’ve been giving us grief ever since the boys started coming back from the Gulf. Nobody gave a toss what the Saudis got up to in their prisons before. Right?’
Sarah gave him her most polite smile. ‘You know what it is Guest’s selling?’
Morgan put his arms behind his head, revealing hideous patches of sweat under the arms of his shirt. A wave of air conditioning and aftershave washed across the table, so Sarah was forced to wrinkle her nose. ‘What, Cold? Alan gave us a couple of hints on the phone. Sounded a bit put out when he read us the brochure. You’d have thought someone was standing behind him with a gun in his back.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. First time Guest got in touch with us, he was just talking about surveillance gear. Sent us a couple of samples. Quality stuff, no rubbish. We’re moving into that kind of field, now the heavy‐duty market’s crashed in South Africa.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Sarah.
‘It’s the politics, yeah? Private security’s the big market now. And maybe the foreign militia groups, but that’s pretty much a nonstarter, unless you’re one of the big boys. Let’s face it, the Home Office people aren’t going to start giving us licences to handle Cobra missiles. Not unless we can get half the national output of Colombia up their noses as a freebie.’
Sarah guessed that was supposed to be a joke. So she made a little ‘ha ha’ noise at the back of her throat, and hoped that’d cover it. ‘And what… Alan… told you about the Cold. It doesn’t surprise you?’
Morgan shrugged. ‘Everybody’s always overselling, aren’t they? Alan gets carried away by the hype, he’s like that. You know back in the eighties, when there was all that stuff about… “z‐bombs”, was that what the Americans were calling ’em? There was all that hype in the papers about how one bomb was going to crack the world open and everything. And Alan believed every word of it. Every bloody word. We were with BAe at the time, and he spent most of ’86 hiding under his desk. I mean, he’s a good guy, he’s got the right attitude, but… wouldn’t want him around in a crisis, you know?’ He slapped himself on the stomach. ‘Would’ve gone down to COPEX myself, if the guts hadn’t been playing up. Bad curry on Friday night. You know what it’s like.’
‘The hardware,’ Sarah insisted, still smiling over the cracks in her voice. ‘The samples Guest