Conflict of Interest

‘Carter would go ballistic. I don’t even know if he’s told Tilyard about Starwear.’

‘It’s such a huge story, he should have. And if he hasn’t, you’d be doing your career no harm by going direct,’ he mused for a moment, ‘unless you took it back to The Guardian?

Judith nodded. ‘I’d thought of that. They’d love to have it, but if I did that no one I worked for in the future would ever trust me again.’

Their conversation was interrupted by an air hostess offering drinks. They both ordered Cokes, before Judith continued, ‘What I’d really like to do is get the story out to all the media. Maximum exposure.’

The phrase triggered a memory for Chris. The last time he’d seen it had been in a Starwear traffic meeting note. ‘Something like GlobeWatch,’ he mused.

Judith frowned. She’d heard of the organisation before, but right now couldn’t place it. ‘What’s that?’

He pulled a wry expression. ‘Starwear’s in line to win a whole lot of awards from them. I know North’s making sure all the media are there.’

As he was talking, Judith was following him intently.

‘Some kind of think-tank on global industrial relations. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’re just a set-up—’

‘But it would horrify Ellen Kennedy.’ She’d worked it out now.

Chris’s expression was puzzled. ‘Dr Kennedy from St John’s?’

She was nodding.

‘What’s she—’

‘1 phoned her three weeks ago. She’s big on the child labour issue. I checked her out as a lead. Said she was involved with GlobeWatch. In fact, she’s handing out the awards.’

In that instant, the same possibility occurred to them both. They searched each other’s eyes with excitement. ‘Imagine if she turned up at the awards ceremony with the real story.’ Chris spoke quickly. ‘When are the awards?’

‘The eleventh. What’s today?’

‘We arrive in Frankfurt on the seventh. Cutting it fine.’ His tone was urgent. ‘We’d still have to get to Oxford.’

Judith met his look of doubt with a sudden determination. ‘It’s too big an opportunity to miss. I just hope to God my photos come out, and we get to her in time.’

‘I hope she plays ball.’

‘She will.’ Judith was certain. ‘How can you argue with photographic evidence?’

The Great Room of the Grosvenor House Hotel is one of the largest and most opulent salons in London, long established as the capital’s preeminent venue for gala banquets and awards ceremonies. The evening of the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony saw the hotel’s banqueting staff swing into well-oiled routine, to ensure that each one of the four hundred invited luminaries was made to feel important. A red carpet swept across the pavement to receive men in black ties and women in elegant evening wear as they stepped from the backs of chauffeur-driven Bentleys, Jaguars and London cabs.

Once in the hotel, gathering on a balcony that overlooked the Great Room, guests were offered sparkling flutes of Moet et Chandon and tray-loads of exotic canapes by circulating staff. Glittering beneath them were fifty candlelit tables, covered with immaculately starched white tablecloths, and laid with silver and crystal and sumptuous floral centrepieces. Seven-thirty for eight p.m., the invitations had instructed, and the balcony was filling all the time, the buzz of excited conversation and laughter growing rapidly, so that by ten minutes before the hour, the pre-dinner drinks party was roaring.

Tonight’s gathering was certainly of the turbo-powered variety, with more heavyweight businessmen gathered here than at a UN economic summit. Lombard had exerted its considerable corporate influence to ensure that the Chief Executive Officers and Managing Directors of the world’s largest global businesses were assembled here in one room. Industry leaders and the money men who bankrolled them, high-profile entrepreneurs and business gurus, all the major brokerage houses and merchant banks were represented – the atmosphere positively reeked with corporate testosterone. They’d flown in from New York and Chicago, from Tokyo and Sydney, from Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Milan.

And the power wasn’t purely economic. There were senior politicians too: Tory grandees and Labour peers, three former Prime Ministers and two former US Presidents, cabinet ministers from around the world. To a room heaving with gravitas had been added a sprinkling of celebrities to add glitz to the occasion: blue-blooded English aristocrats and exiled European monarchs, golf stars and supermodels and several private Gulfstream-loads of Hollywood power-brokers.

They were all here for a night at the top. Because Lombard had persuaded them, or their advisers, that the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony was the place to be seen. It represented the very essence of the new millennium’s business values – global corporate citizenship and enlightened self-interest – values that all of those attending wished to be associated with. It presented an opportunity to bask in reflected glory, if not to capture it for themselves. For Lombard had also exercised the full might of its media influence to ensure that anyone who was anyone in the business media had been coaxed or cajoled into attendance. Here tonight were the City Editors of every national British newspaper and major press agency, as well as the Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune from America, the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung from Germany, France’s Le Soir, Italy’s II Mondo and a raft of reporters from China and south-east Asia. Television cameramen from the BBC, ITV, BSkyB, CNN, Bloombergs and CNBC had set up on a special TV platform, able to get footage right around the room. The effect had been carefully choreographed so that no one arriving could fail to be impressed by the company in which they found themselves – and, by association, impressed by themselves, for being among the elite corps of global power-brokers and tycoons whose money made the world go round.

At the centre of one of the most star-studded groups in the room stood Jacob Strauss and his wife Amy, both resplendent in their evening finery. Flash-cubes had been going off all around them from the moment they stepped from the back of their Bentley. And one thing they both knew was how to play the media – a smile here and a handshake there, saying the right word in the right ear, and standing by the right people for group photo calls. Standing back a few feet from the Strausses, apparently unnoticed but orchestrating much of what Jacob and Amy Strauss were doing, stood Elliott North. He was cool and svelte in his dinner jacket, his face freshly shaven and cologned, and moustache neatly trimmed. Behind those flashing lenses, he didn’t miss a thing. There were a number of people he needed Jay to circulate among, and he had only a limited time to work the room, in accordance with the plan already worked out by Mike Cullen.

Because tonight was all about Jacob Strauss. Under the auspices of GlobeWatch and the ethics of the new millennium, the reality was that this was Jacob Strauss’s coming-out party; his first major public occasion as CEO of Starwear. It was a bit like a debutante’s ball – and everything was in place so that a more spectacular endorsement of his corporate vision, leadership and values would be impossible to imagine.

As North guided Jay and his wife first in this direction, and then that, he took special satisfaction from his role, feeling like the gambler who’d already bought off the croupier. Little did any of these guests realise that it was Jacob Strauss who would be setting off for the stage four times during the course of the evening to collect a GlobeWatch award. Jacob Strauss would make the trip the final time for the greatest prize of all – GlobeWatch’s Company of the Year. It was Jacob Strauss who would come out of it all as the golden boy of corporate America who had conquered the world.

All of which suited North fine. The higher Jay flew, North reckoned, the further he had to fall – and the less inclined he’d be to take the trip. He had already decided this would be his last official engagement as Jacob Strauss’s PR adviser. For, despite tonight’s impeccably organised ambiance of bonhomie, Strauss’s demands were becoming more reckless than ever. And, along with his increasing demands, it was becoming harder and harder to cover up for him. Treiger and Laing had been put out of action, thank Christ, but there would be others. You couldn’t hide the truth for ever. When Jacob Strauss was basking in the glow of tomorrow’s headlines, he’d decided, he was going to ask for his share of the success. Ten million dollars.