Chapter 12

This is all from Naz's POV - but alternating between flashback and realtime. God knows why I thought this was a good idea.

It was kind of weird to be on the boat, at last, what with everything that had happened over the last few days ... not to mention the stuff that Seffi had told me on the train. Then again, it felt pretty good, too– hey, I wasn't really used to this business travel stuff, the expense account, all that shit. So we did first class on the train– another first– and now we were in a Captain's class cabin on the night ferry. OK, so it was a naff name, but ... room with a view and all that– even if it was a night sailing but, hey, all you'd see was bloody sea even in daylight, so ... More to the point, it had an actual double bed.

On which I plonked myself down, watching Seff as she paced the space, getting herself together before we went to get something to eat. I think she maybe caught my reflective mood, turning to me as she was pulling on her stripey 'Denis the Menace' jumper.

"Well," she said, "We're on our way at last ... and who'd have thought it, eh?"

Monday morning both Seff and I were in the office really early. I think Dave calling me at home over the weekend had hit some sort of nerve, or maybe I was nervous about what would happen with the turbine blade designs I'd come up with– a work of genius even if I did say it myself. So I'd spent a fair amount of Sunday working on some animations to convince Dave of the benefits ... and been surprised when Seff had really got into helping. Turned out that her degree– in computing– had included a load of stuff on 3D modelling. Strange the way that we knew each other so intimately in some ways and hardly at all in so many others.

Well, whatever. All that would work out in time ... or so Seff said, and, well, she was a bit more experienced with this sort of stuff than me, you know?

Anyway. Niusha came in pretty soon after we did, looking really happy and sitting down at Deb's desk like she owned it. So, OK, I knew we needed her here– especially if Seff and I were actually going to get the Bremen stuff sorted– but something really rankled, anyway. I mean, Deb was ... you know ... well, the reason why Seff and I were here in the first place, amongst a lot of other things.

So I was maybe a bit reserved, even as Seff went into full welcome mode, abandoning her Monday morning trawl through the e-mails to make sure Niusha was fine, making the coffees, settling things for the team.

In fact, Niusha was smiling enigmatically, politely but obviously failing to answer Seff's questions about her weekend, when Dave walked in. And, frankly, he looked shit. OK, he was as friendly as ever, giving us all a smile, accepting a coffee from Seffi, but ... well, he didn't normally lurch to his desk, nor drop into the chair with such a thud. I swapped a glance with Seff, saw she'd picked up on it, too, so I started to ask him if he was, like, OK.

Dave cut me off– speaking in a slightly tight voice but with the calm authority I'd come to respect in the guy. Shit, Dave didn't know what the fuck was going on, he told you. Else, he told you what was. Guy didn't look well, to my eyes– not a mega-hangover or anything, he seemed to be in pain - but, hey, he was the boss, so we all listened.

And it was good news– very good news, from my point of view– Debs was coming back to work– in London, I mean– within a few days, he was going with the wind power idea ... meaning I'd need to find someone to manufacture the damn things, maybe think about patenting the design, all that ... and Niusha and the CareSpan people had apparently come up with a new way of working with CastList, which Dave would be working on for the immediate future. And, best of all, really, Seff and I were finally free to get off to Bremen. Seff was booking the tickets while Dave was still speaking.

Afterwards I realised that he'd not mentioned PCW and the 'troubles' at all but, then, we never got to ask him anything– Colin the architect came in, asked for some time with Dave and got it ... even if Dave did not look keen on climbing the stairs...

We did get out to eat, had a few drinks and a bit of a smoke on the observation deck, and got back to that cabin while the ship was still in sight of land. So we enjoyed the view for a while ... or maybe Seff did. Given that she stripped off to just her bra and pants as soon as we got through the door, though, I was mostly taken up with enjoying that view, whatever the charms of the Essex coast. Then again, I don't think Seff was exactly concentrating on the landscape, either, given the way she was rubbing herself against me...

Next morning, we got a series of trains, the local shuttle from the Hoek then InterCity trains to Amersfoort, Osnabruck and finally Bremen. It was all incredible smooth– maybe not quite as quick as Eurostar, but the ferry had been relaxing and anyway we still arrived at just gone 13:00, so time to find the hotel and then head off to do some work– or at least meet up with Beate and Rainer.

By the end of Monday it was pretty clear that Dave really wasn't well. Like, really not well. I mean, he was keeping it together, work-wise, but movement was clearly a problem. While he was upstairs talking about the new building, Seff had phoned Deb, and the news was good, there, too. She'd already been to see the planning people, given them copies of Colin's initial drawings and got a verbal understanding, as she put it, that formal permission would not be a problem. Which meant that we could begin the tendering process as soon as Colin had finalised the drawings– which is what he was doing with Dave even as Seff was making the call. Anyway, Debbie felt that she could leave the local side of the work– actually inviting the bids from local firms– to the mysterious Rosie who both she and Dave had been so taken with, which meant she'd be back in London either on Tuesday or Wednesday. They didn't talk about Dave at all.

In fact it was Niusha who finally did raise the subject, asking him what was going on more or less as soon as he came back into the office. Didn't get a particularly fulsome response– something about abdominal pain, starting some time the day before– but she did at least get an agreement that he'd get an early appointment with his GP, get stuff checked. Except that, later, things took a turn for the worse– I mean, Dave went into a spasm or something, however briefly– and Niusha took some sort of decision. Which is to say, she got Seff to call a taxi, bundled Dave into it and promptly took him off to the local walk-in treatment centre.

Which left Seff and me in the office ... and that's when PCW decided to call.

I'd seen Seff's university pictures so I knew something of what to expect ... but was still taken aback by the reality. Beate, for a start, was an almost cliched Nordic blonde, actually taller than me– so she completely dwarfed Seffi– and, well, put her in a breast plate and a helmet and she could have been picking up the heroic departed from any battle saga you could imagine. Luckily, though, her character didn't seem to confirm to the Valkyrie image, as she greeted us both warmly, hugging each of us in turn and jabbering away in German for just as long as it took her to realise that I didn't speak a word of the language– and switch to an almost equally fluent English.

Rainer, on the other hand was– at least at first– a much more reserved figure, nothing like as effusive, in fact quite shy, with rimless glasses, very neatly cut hair and the sort of suit– very pale grey, oddly Edwardian in cut– that would have got him stared at on the tube in London but was apparently the height of fashion here. I think if I'd had to sum him up in one word, on that first meeting, it could only have been serious. Then again, he'd managed to marry Beate and someone had decided that we should meet up in this particular bar ... which was not the sort of hi-tech hi-fashion venue that his image would have suggested. And, somehow, I knew that it would be Rainer who took the decisions in this particular relationship, so...

So we relaxed, for a while, none of us having a pressing need to plunge into work ... and all of us realising that this could not just be a business only deal– if the sort of dispersed development structure we were proposing were to work, we'd actually have to get on with each other. Which, of course, should not be a problem, given that most of the relationships were already in place ... except that that put quite a lot of stress on me, as the outsider to their trio. I kind of wished I had a spliff to calm the nerves, not quite sure how to avoid lapsing into an uncomfortable diffidence that I can get into when I'm meeting new people, caring and worrying how I'm coming across to them.

Not that it was actually a problem, Seff carrying our end of the conversation quite adequately, and including me mainly by draping herself over me in a very possessive type of way ... which I didn't mind at all.

I did wish I knew what some of Beate's apparently hilarious German asides meant, though...

Tuesday morning, we'd had a little crisis management meeting in Hertford Square– or, rather, at the cafe, Romano's– the three of us trying to work out what to do for the best. Dave was in hospital– peritonitis, apparently, needing surgery, probably keep him in for a few days, even now– Debbie on her way back– probably– from the Lakes. And PCW were being very unfriendly indeed.

In fact, they'd more or less pulled the plug on the whole thing, their phone call and subsequent e-mail– oh and the impressively complex looking documents they'd couriered over to us a short while later– basically withdrawing any further funding at least until we'd met with them and someone from Carla's mob, a someone who was supposedly flying over early the next week. Which meant that Dave should at least be out of hospital, by then, though none of us knew whether he'd actually be fit to take on something like that. And Debbie was– well, we'd left her some urgent voice mails, but hadn't heard from her. Which was a bit worrying in itself ... I mean, she was often out of mobile signal, out there in the sticks, but she'd always got back to us pretty quickly before. But then, I thought, maybe she'd just chosen the wrong moment to relax, what with having wrapped up all the stuff she'd been up there to do. And being sure that Dave was on hand to deal with stuff around here...

As it was, Gareth was looking at the documentation from a legal point of view, we were all drinking coffee, smoking and, basically, worrying. It didn't help that no-one knew what had provoked this particular crisis– I wasn't completely sure that there had to be a reason, given my own experience as an employee of the bastards, but that didn't stop the endless circular speculation. Eventually, I came up with a rare burst of assertiveness, called a halt, suggested that we got ourselves back to the office and did something ... if only to take our various minds off the whole situation.

Later on we went on to eat at some restaurant down by the cathedral, still not talking much about work– although Rainer and I did get some odd asides in about code and coders we'd known, including a while discussing genetic algorithms in which, I discovered, he had a particular interest. Mostly, though, we talked about their University days and, for a while, about just how Seffi and I had finally got it together after all those years working in the same office. Of course, Seff was only too willing to go into the gory details of the latter– look, I never claimed to be a consummate Lothario, and things could maybe have progressed a little more smoothly than they did, but ... hey, its the result that counts, yes? What I found more interesting, for the moment, was that none of them were being equally open about everything that had gone on between them. I mean, sure there were loads of stories about drunken nights and out-of-hand parties, some references to embarrassing faux pas on the part of themselves or others, but ... there were things that weren't being said, too.

Still, it was a pleasant evening with a fair amount of wine ... and I was a bit surprised when I discovered that it had gone midnight, the restaurant was closing up around us ... and Rainer and Beate were offering to see us back to the hotel.

In fact, once we were back in Hertford Square, things got quite focused, quite quickly. Sadly, given that we were supposedly a pretty non hierarchical type of organisation, it took a little bit of Management Intervention to kick start things– such as Debbie finally getting a mobile signal, picking up the messages and getting back to us pronto. Didn't even sound all that surprised when Seffi told her the news– but then, she'd been a reasonably high flier in PCW only a few months ago, so she really did know what they were capable of– but she didn't, Seff told us, sound all that worried either. It seemed more like she was slightly apologetic, apparently– there was something about her having spent the previous evening with some friends she'd made up in Cumbria, having too much of a good time to check for in-coming, but, anyway, she seemed to feel that her delay in getting back to us was a bit more important than the news about PCW ... or even about Dave. Well, maybe she'd had her fill of hospitals, recently, I thought, or maybe she was just being realistic, given that Dave's prognosis was pretty bloody good. Anyway, once they'd got the polite stuff out of the way, she was all business.

And so I found myself working some more on the wind generator idea– patenting the design was a definite according to Debs, so I began to research the process, first off, simultaneously looking for people who could do complex curve machining. In the background, Niusha and Seffi started to work in detail on the New Idea– something about resource distribution in the real world. Didn't take a huge amount of notice, at first– what I did hear was all a bit theoretical for me– but soon enough I got dragged into the discussion, given that Dave had suggested re-jigging some of the CastList code and, as he wasn't here ... I got into it, after a while, began to see that this actually could be a more socially beneficial use of the concept than anything we'd been working on to date.

Wouldn't make us anything like as much money, of course, but...

I think I began to realise that Germany was ... well ... another country ... when we all got back to the hotel. Or maybe just that Germans did things differently ... or maybe, in retrospect, just that Beate and Rainer did things differently ... Whatever. While I admit that I'd thought the place was pretty bloody flash– and Seffi did not seem to have had any complaints when we'd checked in earlier, either– we were now informed in no uncertain terms that it was completely inadequate, that we could not possibly stay there for more than one night. I was quite pleased by that concession, actually– I was kind of knackered and the very large double bed in our room looked extremely attractive– but before I was going to be allowed to get some sleep (or something a bit more fun) I had a quarter hour or so of guttural German discussion to listen to. Largely between Beate and Seffi– though she increasingly became Josepha, I noticed, as the conversation became more and more agitated– with Rainer sitting back on one of the chairs toying with a table lamp and smiling slightly to himself. I wondered, vaguely, what was going on, but frankly I'd got to the point where I just wanted them both to go away and let us get on with being alone together. Which eventually, they did, Beate looking strangely triumphant as she hugged me to say good night ... hugged me very, very closely, to my embarrassment, given that Seff was– well, Seff was being hugged similarly by Rainer...

Not that I got any hint of what was going on ... or any explanation, anyway. In fact, Seff seemed quite reluctant to talk, or least to be rather keener on getting me into bed, so no problems there...

Next morning, though, I began to think that something was up when Seff leapt straight out of bed and started packing stuff up before she'd even got dressed, pausing only to collect breakfast from the room service guy– she did grab a towel for that– and then sitting on the bed beside me while we ate, conspicuously shoving bread, cheese or whatever into my mouth every time I tried to ask what the hell was going on. After which, she dragged me into the shower, this time shoving me into her mouth, which, once again, worked quite well in keeping secrets secret. And then we were dressed and out the door, leaving bags and stuff to be picked up later– I still really thought we'd be moving to a new hotel– and went off to see Rainer and Beate at their place of work.

Deb got back to London Tuesday afternoon. She went in to see Dave before coming to see us, of course, which I thought was nice– if not particularly productive, given that he'd just been given his pre meds and so wasn't exactly compus mentis. Whatever. Dave would be OK, everyone was sure, and Deb herself looked superb. The fresh air had obviously agreed with her, I thought, she'd given up wearing the subtle make up that used to be so professionally part of her, her hair was loose and quite a lot a lot longer than it had been, she just seemed looser and more relaxed, more vibrant than she'd been before. And, she was pleased with us, what we'd achieved while she'd been away ... and somehow I knew she meant it, was genuinely happy with the changes she saw, with the new code, even with the bloody wind generator ideas. Which made me childishly happy, the more so when I saw Seff was reacting in exactly the same way– she looked a bit like a kitten being stroked behind the ears– and even Niusha was clearly instantly under the spell.

It wasn't even that much of a shock when she abruptly shifted into work mode, huddling in a corner with Seff, going through all the contacts we'd had with PCW, FreiBank, Carla's lot, coming up for air now and then to get my opinion on stuff– I was flattered, even as I realised that it was my job, for god's sake. And, gradually, as I watched, covertly, from where I was pretending to be concentrating on Niusha's Big Idea– Niusha was doing exactly the same thing, of course– I saw a tight smile form on her lips. Not that she gave any hint of what she was thinking, but, clearly, a plan was being formed. And we would find out about it in good time.

Rainer and Beate's workplace turned out to be a new build office on a business park in the Neustadt, near the Applied Sciences University, the latter turning out to be a major partner in some of the work they were doing around practical applications of number theory to decision making systems– Rainer tried to explain that, later, but it went over my head a bit: Pure maths was never really my thing, though at least it did explain his interest in CastList and why he/they had contacted Dave in the first place. First impressions, though, was that the place was cool– sort of laid back corporate, lots of big plants around, individual workstations quite widely spaced around a single big room, a lot of high technology on display. Also quite a few high technologists, all seemingly hard at work despite the early hour, all dressed in the standard anything-but-smart casual of their trade even if Rainer, the boss, was wearing a suit that was even snappier– or maybe just weirder– than the day before. I began to feel that I should have invested in a new pair of jeans, or something, wondered if that was why Seff had so quickly chosen an unusual-for-the-office little black dress to wear, not to mention the matching black underwear ... But Rainer was doing the introductions, showing off his team, and I did my best to concentrate, remember names, specialities, all that sort of stuff. I was more or less succeeding, too, until Beate entered the room, wearing a very short white dress of what could even be latex, god help us all, and smiling warmly at Seff and myself. A very short dress– on her, I mean, it would have done as an evening gown for Seff– and with a distinct display of cleavage on show to boot. None of the nerds batted an eyelid, though, so maybe this was normal– or maybe they were just nerds. I went back to concentrating on Rainer and his spiel.

Which continued when we went on through to their meeting room which, I wasn't at all surprised to see, actually had a higher concentration of computers than the work space outside, giving a subtle hint about the sort of meetings these guys probably had. And, indeed, the sort of meeting we proceeded to have. In fact, Rainer had a copy of CastList up and running even before we'd all got ourselves sat down, even before one of the placement students came in and distributed very strong coffee and pastries to all of us. And then he was off, giving me a run down on his ideas for improving the system, how to take it forward to the 'next generation' as he called it. Most of which were good ideas, I felt, but I'd have to admit that that might be because most of them I'd thought of and implemented already. So I loaded up the latest version, yet to be released into the world because Dave had wanted to launch the windows version simultaneously and after that we got properly started. Some time during our discussion Seff and Beate must have gracefully retired because after a while– Rainer was scribbling manically on an interactive whiteboard, trying to explain his ideas on number theory and how they should be instantly applicable to Seff's idea of using psychometric data to engage with the corporates, an idea I'd told him about maybe half an hour before– they came back in. And told us it was time for lunch. In a place by the campus but quite unlike any university cafe I'd ever come across. Well, almost as informal but the food was in a different league. And both Seff and Beate were quite assiduous in swatting either of us– and not lightly, either– if we showed signs of lapsing into tech speak.

In the afternoon, talk turned more towards to the business end of things– we clearly already had ideas we could collaborate on– and that involved the four of us more equitably. At least, until Rainer dropped into the conversation the news that a couple of the bigger research groups at the university itself had expressed a concrete interest in using CastList to refine and focus their team activities ... and suddenly he and Seff were haring away across campus, heading for what he seemed to think would be an easy to arrange impromptu meeting with a bunch of senior academics. Which left Beate and me in the meeting room.

Actually, we still had a lot we could usefully discuss– I'd gathered that B, like Seffi, was more on the marketing side of the operation, though she clearly knew one end of a data bus from another– but somehow she didn't seem quite so focused now that we were alone. Instead, she started talking a lot more about me, how I'd got to be involved in this scenario, what I'd done at college, my outside interests, that sort of thing. Which was all very pleasant, and we did have time to sort the business side of things out later, did need to get to know each other a lot better if we were going to work together. Still, I had this nagging feeling that there were things going on of which I was unaware, some covert agenda that was being played out, one that somehow involved me but which no-one was planning on explaining any time soon. But it was pleasant, and I found myself liking Beate more and more ... she was witty, charming ... and very, very beautiful, even if she was the polar opposite of Seffi, the love of my life...