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Harvey White has been found barely conscious in a trashy warehouse while his wife tries desperately to explain a situation she clearly knows little about.

“This him?” asked Gabriel, whose life had been a lot less than sheltered, but who was shocked nevertheless.

“That’s him. He’s a multimillionaire, you know.”

“Poor bastard.”

Hearing their voices had livened White up enough to be aware of them. He looked at David.

“YOU…….,” he choked.

The ambulance guys said White was lucky not to be dead of tetanus from the rat bites, exposure, and the various injuries that the warehouse had donated to him as part of its user awareness program. He’d broken a leg, and that was also just on the verge of turning septic. The police said that anyone going anywhere near the place was obviously no criminal, just an idiot. One reason the gangs avoided the place was it was just too dangerous. They took David’s word for it that White wasn’t some vagrant.

Mrs. White was in the same hospital, under sedation. She’d gone into shock while in the office, and Hannah had needed to call for some help. Despite the virtual encyclopedia of reasons for thinking otherwise, Hannah had established that Mrs. White was as innocent as she seemed. She thought Harvey was just a businessman, everything he appeared to be. That bit of information later made everyone who heard it shudder. Only really efficient criminals can do that to their own families.

They can also clean out their partners very effectively. It was soon discovered that Harvey White was now as broke as his leg. White’s bank and a lot of other people were looking for him. A hundred and twenty million or so had got up and left in various directions at about the same time he was on the plane to New York. Other things turned up, too. Tony Fazzina was found in a shelter. He’d been with White, but had panicked when they saw the warehouse. They’d had an argument, and Fazzina had run away when White had grabbed him and tried to make him go inside with him. Fazzina had been cleaned out, too. That was a few extra thousand to someone.

The money was in theory findable, but in practice nobody was under any illusions. David found himself paying for the surgery for White and Mrs. White’s rest. Hannah had insisted. “If we go as low as them, we’re as bad as them,” she’d said. David couldn’t argue. She’d also threatened to pay for it herself. It crossed his mind that was why he’d never wondered why he married her.

He had however thought that if White was prepared to give some information, it might be cheap at the price. White didn’t know very much, about anything, including his own business, it seemed. He’d gone to New York because the “shipping company” had sent him a bounced cheque. A lot of his clients had suddenly begun vanishing, and this one had really worried him because it was one of the best he had.

It took David all his tact and patience to get White off the subject of the “shipping company” and down to a bit of the recent history of Stone Gold White, like how he got involved with the agency to start with. Keeping very much in character, White managed to jumble the sequence of events. David began to feel like a hypnotist asking his subject to go further back.

White, naturally, began in the middle of the story. He knew that someone had been very keen for him to get into partnership with Stone Gold, and that the bank had been very helpful when he’d been trying to raise the money. Accounts had been provided, loans agreed, and work done. He’d been legitimate as far as that was concerned. The only underhanded stuff he’d really done was actually rather minor. He hadn’t asked where the money came from, or why he was anonymously getting some rather healthy deposits in his various business and personal accounts. His lack of curiosity made some sense, though. If someone throws you a few million, do you ask where it comes from?

Then, eventually, the start of the story emerged. It took a while to get it out of him, but his real name was Harvey Weirman, and he was originally a bus driver. He’d been an art student, and done some basic commercial writing courses. A friend had offered to set him up in business, feeding him some simple stuff to work with and finding him a supply of customers. Harvey Weirman had a prior conviction for an insurance fraud, so Harvey White was born. The friend had introduced him to a lot of people over those four years, all businessmen, all well off and prosperous enough to give White an appetite for some luxuries for himself.

The friend had also introduced him to Mick Featherman. Featherman had showed White how to invest, how to minimize taxes, and put up some of the money and references when he’d asked the bank for the money to buy into Stone Gold. Featherman was everything White wasn’t. He was confident in the presence of big money, and sharp with his ideas. He also knew a truly incredible number of people. He overawed White.

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Sorry for the delay in this post. Busy. This was written in the days before everything had to be encrypted. Prophecy, eh?

Simon gave them enough decoders for the business and their own homes, and one for Dorothy to check out, and they went on their way with a cheque from him to thank them for saving his business. That was another quarter million for the afternoon, and Simon assured them it was cheap at the price, and deductible, and he’d be back to them when he was ready to advertise.

“How many times have we done this, Al, been paid for not doing any actual advertising?” asked Bill, whose philosophical instincts were itching.

“A few, but that’s also part of the job. The web is really one big advertising medium, with the advantage of people being able to choose what they look at. It’s one of the biggest misconceptions on the net at the moment, trying to make it a form of television and hitting people with ads whether they like it or not. Nobody buys anything because someone just tells them they need a new yacht or whatever. Impulse buying has its limits. In Simon’s case the one thing he does not need is anything that distracts people from his products. Never mind the glitz and the grubby little gabfests. He really is dependent on his products’ performance.”

“So we get an extra quarter million for being nice?”

“No, we get it for being useful, and he’s right, it’s deductible. He could have wasted a lot more on a campaign that wouldn’t really have penetrated anywhere but the computer sales hacks. He could have done a big thing to Ma and Pa Kettle about how it would make their computer safe for baby, and it would have been largely ignored, if it were a commercial.

How you tell someone something is as important as what you tell them. If they get a very basic bit of information in the local rag, they can follow up if they’re interested. There’s a section of the public who are convinced that they can’t understand computers in any shape or form, and who don’t yet know that what they’re using is something only slightly removed from their light switch or calculator. “New gizmo” means “Don’t get it, whatever it is,” to these people, and though they have a computer, you can bet they know next to nothing about it. It really does have to be spelled out, and they do have to want to listen. That’s why commercials are a turn off. Even the patronizing, “So you’re a computer ignoramus” approach frightens them away, if you do it right.

What Simon’s really done is create a sort of failsafe, so that any sort of code, however idiotic, overdone, or just plain silly, can be made operable. The main drag of the public know that some things don’t run well, and a few know why, but wouldn’t recognize that it costs them money every time something doesn’t work. Most people don’t know that about 5% of all data entered is incorrect, even when entered by experts. A lot of it does have to be repaired. The same applies to software; if you’re not fussy, a lot of running problems happen. Games don’t play properly, spreadsheets do strange things. Some finance and accountancy network software doesn’t work at all…..”

“Yeah, we had a big name package for our accounts that never ran. We had to keep the old system as a backup, and our IT guys went nuts trying to get it running, and operate the old stuff. Some of them resigned.”

“Anyway, you see what I’m getting at; what that decoder actually does is great, but if you start selling something as the greatest thing since Yves St. Laurent got interested in clothes, you just aren’t going to be believed. Hype kills sales. Everyone “knows” that computer systems have problems. It’s like telling them that “If you buy a car, you’ll never need a mechanic”. Nobody can afford to believe that. You’d murder the product. Add to that a whole series of useful but unheard-of things that it can do for security, and you’ve finally reached a point where nothing you say, however true, is going to be credible.”

“So the world needs us, to tell it when to shut up?”

“Yeah.”

The agency is trying to help with a new decoder, but it’s a fussy market and it’s demanding. This is product placement but people need to know what the product is, what it does, and what its values are.

“You mentioned the legals. What about jurisdictions? There are laws, everywhere, for everything, and I don’t really believe we can make a One Size Fits All disclaimer.”

“You don’t need to. Nor should you. You’re marketing to an industry which hates crappy merchandise. You just include in your ads that you’ll replace or credit anything which is found to be unsatisfactory. Cheaper than lawsuits, and it helps your market image as a responsible, trustworthy, supplier. You’d have to do it anyway, and you do need to know if any of your stuff is faulty. With your unit cost, you don’t really have a problem. It’s one thing people never seem to understand; complaints are the best sort of quality control you can have. If the shipping goes haywire, you’re covered. If the delivery screws up, it’s covered. Nobody can say that you didn’t respond, and your own people will know that they have to do it.”

“Er, Al, what about if the decoder doesn’t decode, for whatever reason?” asked Bill, whose instincts were inclined to believe that Murphy’s Law was likely to intrude on this idyllic vision.

Simon looked puzzled, then intrigued.

“Interesting point. The decoder can operate with any version of any known computer language. That said, there’s a lot of custom code which is only for special users. It’s not supposed to be read by anyone else. We tried synthesizing an unreadable code, a thing that uses symbols with variable random values to operate hardware and software, meaning that the same line of code doesn’t mean the same thing twice, but the code still runs. We made sure it wouldn’t run on any normal computer or even on mainframes with special software to read codes. The old decoder read it, gave us an analysis of how it worked, and wrote a new bit of code for itself to read it in future. The new model decoder did that and then went in and rewrote the synthetic code, eliminating about half of our original design and getting it to run six times faster….

In theory, you can write a code that can’t be decoded unless you can establish values for enough of the elements to read it. You could only write a code that was really unbreakable if you were unable to read it yourself. Most computer code is really a numerical interaction, like a calculator, just expressed as code. To make a code like that, you’d need hardware which could handle a different configuration of data, into something like sign language. Even then you’d still have to create a code that didn’t use the same sort of operating systems, and used a fundamentally different sort of processing.

You might not even use conductors, at all. Semiconductors are just that. One of the reasons computers work the way they do is because they have to deal with data and code through the conductors, which are only so efficient. It’d be more efficient to use much bigger loads than they can currently handle. To do which, you’d have to send it whole, direct to the processors. Actually, that’s not such a bad idea. If you can’t conduct enough data……. Transmit it.”

This digression had started Al thinking, hard.

“So for your decoder not to work, someone would have to retool virtually the whole of a computer’s operating systems, and the hardware, and the code?”

“Yeah, although the decoder can understand electrical impulses as a pattern, as well as something it reads directly. It can act like a system diagnostic, even for an electrician. It doesn’t matter how you say ABCDE. You show my decoder A and D, and it can figure out what and where the other letters are supposed to be, all the way to Z.”

“I actually meant faulty goods, but I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. I thought all you computer guys were about was saying how good your systems are?” asked Bill.

“Quite the opposite. We’re screaming for bigger and better data handling, because we’re getting bigger data loads and it’s getting harder to handle. The only thing going for us at the moment is that the processors can handle the current codes, because people don’t write gigantic codes….yet. The tasks don’t yet need anyone to write a hundred million lines of code. Like building the pyramids, one grain of sand at a time.”

“Sorry to interrupt, Simon; you said a minute ago that your decoder can “sense” impulses…… how, and why?” asked Al, a bit more intensely than he’d intended.

“Initially it was the wireless systems. We decided to experiment with remote coding and decoding, and it developed into something quite else. Some of our security work means that we can’t openly start tinkering with systems. We needed a remote reader, and so we built in this thing like a sort of microwave targeting system, but with a much wider range. It can read things as the processors handle them, and it can do the same job without being physically present in the building. Same decoder, but with a bit extra.”

“You mean you could read our computer here from across the street?”

“Anywhere within about two miles, as long as it’s reading enough code. At least in theory it could read, copy and run your software and anything on your computer faster than you could.”

“Hacker’s dream?”

“Not really. The remote decoder’s got a series of locks on it, security protocols, and we keep track of users. It’d be a tough thing to copy, too. To make one you need a particular series of metals, and it has a range of characteristics that would stick out a mile if used in any system, if you knew what to look for. Anyone using one of the decoders would also leave quite a trail of evidence. The use of a decoder, even a copy, would be enough to give away an unauthorized user, and find him. Decoders can sense and identify other decoders, so hacking would be like leaving your name and address with the police…… you’ve got to be a bit perverse to do good computer security. The decoder works like an anonymizer in reverse, to other decoders, if you know how to configure them to do that….. I’ll spare you the details, but there isn’t much about the decoder that could be misused by anyone without us knowing about it.”

Simon was thinking at this point that he could spend a month telling them about how much work had gone into the unique bit of hardware he’d invented to make sure it couldn’t be misused. There was even recovery software in case the decoder was burnt or destroyed by someone, molecular technology that would virtually recreate the memory using specially tagged materials. Al and Bill were so receptive to his ideas that it might be worth doing that. He now admitted to himself that he had no idea how to market his own product, at its higher levels.

“It’s strange, this. Those are all good selling points, and you couldn’t use any of them, because it would give away the game about the security. Tell me, do you have, like, a help desk, or something, for your customers?” asked Bill.

“Yeah, of course. My wife and I do most of it, apart from our technical guy, Jim, the old guy you met downstairs……. So how do we use that stuff, anyway, if we can’t advertise?”

“Am I right to say that you call setting up the decoder “configuring” it? Because, if you do, you can be as non-specific as you like about it when you advertise. All the extras could be introduced as you get to know the what the customer wants. You’re going to wind up with two types of customer; the basic user who just wants to make sure everything runs properly, and the security freak who wants to be able to monitor everything. So you have to market to both, but keep the distinction…..

Another detail is the Trade Practices Act. You don’t want to advertise a service which is so ambiguous that it can be misinterpreted. “Configuring” more or less covers it, particularly if you don’t get too expansive on what you do with it. “Configuring to your own system’s needs,” would about do it. The thing is that however good your decoder can be, it has to be doing what you say it will do in your advertising.

“That’s……so different. I spoke to someone last week who wanted to do a national campaign and really spell out everything the decoder does. She said we needed the coverage, every home should have one, the whole smoke detector thing.”

“Overkill on the overkill. Not necessarily the best bet for your security features, either. I think your best bet is something where word of mouth gets a hearing. Big campaigns work for consumer durables, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and some forms of deodorant, but you are really stuck with how people see your product being used. They care about what happens on their computers, because they’re dependent on them. Like a car; a reputation can destroy a car faster than the roads will. Your decoder does things that need doing, where they need doing. That’s a bit of a change of culture in the computer industry, where you keep getting add-ons to add to your add-ons. Waste of money. Do a few articles in the daily press, or better still, press releases, and some of the computer zines, and you just don’t need to do much else.”

Al re-entered the conversation,

“Comes to that, Alan might want one of those, and since we had that visit from Featherman I’m starting to think we need to watch our stuff, too. Can we have a couple?”

Susie Dent’s Death Writ Large is a new dimension in the Clarendon saga. This is a direct follow-up to Guilty by Definition, set a couple of years after that book.

I reviewed Guilty by Definition on Digital Journal.com about this time in 2024. This was her first fiction novel, and she has some exceptional skills in this field that she may not have known she had. It’s an interesting and complex book, way ahead of mainstream whodunits for depth and quality.

I was a bit surprised that she’d found a publisher for such a demanding storyline. Generally, publishers tend to do the “For Dummies” stuff rather than anything worth reading.

Typical mainstream publishers would have said that the plot was too difficult. Zaffre, thank god, didn’t. They helped. The new book is a sort of vindication for Susie and Zaffre for a good idea.

Death Writ Large is Guilty by Definition on steroids. It’s 400 pages of solid storyline. There’s a very strong plot and a lot of people evolving in their own roles.

A necessary comment or so:

This book couldn’t be more English if it came with a Brigade of Guards band and a cup of good tea.

This is modern English culture; confrontational, awkward, intrusive, opaque, and decidedly difficult.

Susie does a much better job of describing her beloved Oxford than most videos. I took a Google street walk around some of the locations, and it really is fascinating.

Susie isn’t turning Oxford into a sort of Cotswaldian Midsomer. Quite the opposite; the story of Death Writ Large is highly intrusive on the setting and the people who’ve already had one severe shock in Guilty by Definition.

Martha Thornhill, who Susie says is her, arrives at the scene of a fatality to see the runes of fantasy writer John Naylor emblazoned nearby. She’d recently given a talk on fantasy writers including Naylor and could translate the runes.

She informs the police, in the form of her local detective Oliver Caldwell, or the meaning of the runes. It turns out that Naylor is something of a cult figure, and that a “cabal” of fans is well-known and much disliked by fellow Oxford alumni for their superior pretensions and arrogance.

The senior police think it’s a suicide, but Caldwell isn’t so sure. Nor are the Clarendon team, who’ve had time to process the information and lack of information.

This is where the story starts, and it gets far more complex and downright nasty soon enough. There are clashing personalities, old grievances, and some difficult logic to deal with. The motive isn’t clear. Nobody knows what all this is trying to achieve.

Making things considerably more difficult is that whoever’s posting these large runes all over the place is tricky. The incidents are well planned. Clues are non-existent.

A new dimension in characters, particularly Martha’s emerges from the storm of problems created by the runes. Some very interesting writing and very competent character development is built into the storyline.

Susie is a much better and far more agile writer than she seems to think. In the acknowledgements, she credits everyone but herself for the book’s existence. This is no trivial gluing together of words. It’s much deeper.

She also manages to fit in some “in-quips” which will be instantly recognizable to Countdown/Catsdown fans. In a couple of paragraphs with not a blink of missing a beat. The dry wit is very welcome as the story reaches its terrifying climax.

I almost forgot to mention there’s some good lexi-stuff too, like Old English in the chapter headings, one of which means “patience weary”. You have to wonder what the Old English were up to.

Review status: 5 stars. If you read Guilty by Definition, you’ll like it. If you’re a Susie Dent fan, you’ll be glad to know that our rampaging lexi-deity is having fun writing.

While Mick Featherman lowers the tone of global white-collar crime, business continues.

Advertising has embraced the internet with the zeal of a pauper cashing in first prize in a state lottery. The amount of money and exposure is unprecedented, and the resultant involvement of anything on two, four or six legs predictable. Al and Bill had been trying to avoid the added weight of net advertising and the need to look knowledgeable about the subject. This had turned out to be impossible.

One of their prospective clients had picked up a global contract for his new decoder. This was an elegant little piece of hardware about the size of a dice which was designed to reconfigure any software to any operating system. He had a lot of contacts in the industry, which he’d made during the development phase, and they wanted it at any price. The thing was so useful that it was truly indispensable. Manufacturers, universities, IT colleges, government researchers, just about everyone he’d ever spoken to about it, and they’d all been talking to everyone they knew about it. He’d started with a ready made market. The orders had hit the multi-million dollar range in the first week, and patent value had hit some astronomical figure literally overnight. He was both overloaded and looking to expand. The guy himself, a young and taciturn man called Simon, had just explained to them that the net was an unavoidable venue for his advertising.

Normally, inventors will license out their product to big players for manufacture, but the decoder was so easy and cheap to make that he’d made several hundred thousand in his own little workshop. That had paid off very well, and as an added bonus, he’d had to invent a new plug in. The decoder could be either attached or built in to any computer and just become another gadget, or it could be taken to a source to upload software, reconfigure and transfer it to any other system. It was so useful that when attached it could even make older computers able to handle new operating systems that they were never designed to run.

Nothing else on the market could do that. One of the more interesting side effects was that it made existing software run better, by eliminating vague codes and substituting a code which it tested on the system and installed if it worked to specifications and ran programs more efficiently than the old version. It worked at any processor speed, even the raging 1000Ghz, which operates far beyond any normal system. The offshoot of this design quirk was that a lot of major league software developers bought large numbers of decoders for quality control and gave them to their code writers to help them make sure their code ran properly.

So Simon was sitting on the equivalent of a monopoly. He was being hailed by the industry as a saint, for freeing it of the neurotic idiosyncrasies of code languages and syntax peculiarities. Even the big name, brand-specific-everything manufacturers had welcomed the decoder when sales of most of their own products tripled. Apparently their sales resistance had been because word of mouth and too many irritating experiences had annoyed customers. Not everything is covered by warranty, and out of warranty everything can be expensive if it tries. A situation where everything could run on anything had made users a lot happier about buying new software and new computers.

Network managers no longer had to spend laborious years with the problem children of code writers with too many pizzas and too many deadlines. A new version of the decoder could de-crash not only computers but servers. You just plugged it in and turned on the power. A report was compiled while it de-crashed, and you could see what went wrong, because it could read and rewrite the entire mess, and make sure it didn’t happen again. It used an idea called Continuum Associated Programming, which ran simulations of code and identified running and application bugs before they happened. A useful test, too, because it ran programs in the operating environment in which they were intended to function, and removed conflicts. It was a big step up for software, and a great relief to the antidepressant industry’s supply problems.

One of the entirely unexpected features of the decoder was that it cleaned out viruses, worms, encryptions, Trojans, spy ware and other vermin. It read them as superfluous code, even in graphics, and eliminated them. Simon said that it was probably in the nature of the decoder that it couldn’t be fooled by crud that simply wasn’t in context with the working code.

The new product was a development of that ability, an active anti bug and net security version, which was installed within the decoder. It was the world’s first artificial cynic. It ran concurrent with all functions on the computer. If it found a cracker trying to enter, it could recognize it as a cracker, and would simply refuse entry. If instructed, it would allow the cracker to spend years trying to enter, and just compile a report to verify the attempted entry.

If a virus entered, the first thing it met was the decoder. It had its reproductive code disabled, was analyzed, quarantined, and reported to the Internet Service Provider and to the user. Spy ware and Trojans were similarly treated, but in these cases the spy ware could be traced, even allowing for anonymizers, because the decoder could easily follow it to any destination, and continue tracking even if the information was originally downloaded onto a remote unit with an innocent party as the owner. It just waited until the spy accessed the information and followed. This also produced some rather large but interesting reports to the afflicted operators and police. Later it also destroyed some internet child porn rings. A useful gadget.

So useful Simon had to market online, where his customers were. He naturally wasn’t worried about anyone trying to trash his web site, but he was concerned that his knowledge of marketing was so poor, and his knowledge of advertising law primitive. When marketing in hundreds of different legal jurisdictions it’s advisable to have some idea what you’re doing.

Al was able to point Simon to a lawyer friend in the US, a lady called Carol, whose hard earned expertise in net law was highly respected by her peers. Judges asked her what the issues were. The broader issue of global marketing per se was pretty straightforward: Don’t give promises you can’t keep, and make sure that your customers’ rights aren’t being violated. “They get what they ordered and it works and does the job you said it does”, about summed that up. The other great business maxim is “Don’t louse up the orders”. Fortunately Simon was the sort that knows that customer complaints do mean something, even when the customer doesn’t quite understand the ramifications of the complaint. The raw business end was under control.

Doing business on the net, however, also involves secure payments, time frames, shipping, handling, things getting lost, mis-ordering, billing, and so forth. If you get into that, you have to be able to deal with it, and Al was concerned that given the volumes he was already handling, Simon was going to get a greatly amplified version, with all the above possibilities. One of the reasons Simon had come to see them was that the agency now had a reputation for doing a lot more than just taking your money and producing a few bits of advertising material. The advice was as valuable as the work, in some cases.

Al now proceeded to prove this. He’d seen plenty of big name products get very bad reps as a result of lousy customer service. The kind of business Simon was doing didn’t need any horror stories. The computer industry is unforgiving to things that create problems, with good reason. Marketing anything on the net, the biggest gossip system of all time, can be like a license to run down a product. Simon needed to have a foolproof, reliable marketing system in place before he started.

“We can’t move until you’ve got the shipping and ordering organized, so we can do the spiel and the reputation-building. What you need is a very simple, straightforward, no ifs and buts, sales routine. You’re getting into a very different league here. I don’t want to put you off, but the best product and the best advertising in the world won’t help you if you wind up with a lot of ugly delivery or service problems, even if they aren’t your fault, or even related to your product. In any market, if you develop a high profile and things go wrong, your advertising can count against you, reminding people of anything negative they’ve ever heard. That sort of thing can be fixed, but it should never happen. You have to be utterly sure of your ability to deliver on any product or service you commit yourself to supplying. My suggestion at this point is that you check out your delivery capacity and stay away from any time frame which pressures your production and shipping. Most of the big mail order houses and internet majors have that as a priority part of their operations. Then you can market with some peace of mind.”

“Hm… I was just going to sell to orders only….”

“Keep it that simple. Everything straightforward. Never mind the legalistic crap; they order, they get what they paid for, no exceptions. The customer is usually only occasionally right, but it’s their money. They pay, therefore they have rights. Just keep that in mind and everything else will work out.”

Harvey White was an interesting character to write. He’s one of those people with so little substance that you have to project images onto him to see him.

It occurred to Mick Featherman that Harvey White was arguably the least interesting person he’d ever met. Featherman was on his way to visit White as part of a ritual which they’d established as a cover for their real partnership. Nominally, they were partners in an investment syndicate. White, decided Featherman, was just a mediocrity trying to be a nobody and make money while he was at it. The thought of the flabby face and its look of porcine cunning actually made Featherman sick, now that he thought of it.

Why am I working with this jerk, anyway? A paid canary could do this. The thoughts got a lot less complimentary as the Rolls Royce slank into the drive of White’s slightly Lookame! residence. Featherman’s experience in Australia and the rest of the world had put him in touch with a lot of white collar criminals, and he’d yet to see a working brain cell in any of them. Every one of them thought Featherman was working for them. It was all a bit too easy.

White was a bit different in that he was an equal in name. White had the sort of self image which was able to include himself in anything, as long as it made him look clever. A perfect pawn, as far as Featherman was concerned. Today White was going to get an explanation of the situation in Australia, an update to the whole 5% of the operation that White actually knew about. Getting rid of Nigel had been a cheap fix, but a good one.

Nigel knew even less than White about the business, and the other guy, Morgan, who’d passed the cosmetics on to him, was going to be out of the picture soon enough. In practice, Morgan couldn’t tell anyone about anything. A small timer out of his league, his introduction to the world of white-collar scams was going to be terminal. Featherman had introduced Morgan to Nigel as a way of incriminating both of them. There never was an overseas supplier, or market, or network. Several idiots had been persuaded to move a few boxes of cosmetics around Sydney over a period of nearly a year. Morgan had managed to convince himself that he knew what he was doing, and Nigel had been drunk enough and one-of-the-boys-ish enough to suddenly become a mover of hot goods. To listen to them talk you’d think they’d invented organized crime. Then, all he’d had to do was set them up.

Nigel was a nuisance because he’d had something to do with setting up the scam, even if he didn’t know himself what he’d done. Morgan was a nuisance because he was one of the few people with enough contacts to figure out what Featherman was doing. Morgan was one of the facilitators of a lot of movement of goods and money, and he had to go. Featherman didn’t want his business, just the people he knew.

Now White and that moron Fazzina had to be removed. They were now surplus to requirements. Featherman had already arranged the falling out they were going to have in three months time about splitting the profits from their investment syndicate. This meeting was actually about creating the new equity arrangements. White had been a good contact, if a jerk, and it was surprising how long it had taken for Featherman to meet all White’s associates, legitimate and otherwise. Fazzina, Featherman liked even less than Al did. The guy was one of the few people he’d ever set eyes on who really made the whole idea of humanity look like a bad idea. No loss whatsoever.

One of the interesting things about crime is that the more complex something is, the more likely people are to think it’s “clever”. Nigel, for example, thought that he was helping set up an automatic phone and computer link to a casino operated by an Asian crime gang in Hong Kong, routing the calls through a network of dummy numbers. Morgan, whose career had begun from the back of a truck, thought that he was pulling a major scam and creating a stockpile of materials for his retirement. He’d forgotten that it was one of his trucks that had been used to do a little rewiring in the Rocks area. The guy who’d done the actual rewiring thought he was setting up a phone tap for a blackmail scam. He was now in jail, busted with a few kilos of grass he didn’t know he had. Morgan hadn’t been betrayed by Nigel, but the paper work in Morgan’s office now contained some intriguing information about his business which would either keep him in court or jail for years. That had been childishly easy.

White’s bland face emerged from his office like a potato chip. After the exchange of mutual insincerities, they moved on to business.

“Nah, they have no idea. I went there, to see Mr. Hickey, and mentioned your name, and was duly given my leave. Nigel was there as my driver, just in case they weren’t already suspicious enough. After that little episode, I doubt if they could possibly take me seriously as anything but an inept, money grubbing criminal with an idiot for a business partner,” said Featherman, grinning in a way he knew White disliked and slightly feared.

“Goldstein’s getting a bit messy. He’s talking about a lawsuit for lost earnings from the partnership.”

“So what’s he gonna use against you? An external partnership would make you a lot of money, on the same grounds. If he tries to become a full partner, you pull out and you make the money anyway. They can’t do anything. I suggest you just stand on your dignity, and make them buy you out. Easier and less legal work, and your backers get their profit. You’d make something like about 20 million on book value.”

That figure hadn’t quite come out of a hat, but almost. As expected, the mention of money had the desired effect; White lost track of everything else.

Harvey White was no genius. He did, however, know how to do what he did pretty efficiently. Featherman, he considered, was easily the most untrustworthy person he’d ever encountered, and he’d been dealing with just about everyone in America who was making more than a million a year from white collar scams, for two decades. Maybe, he considered, he just didn’t know how to read Australians. He’d previously thought they were poor cousins of Americans, hicks, mainly, but Featherman left his other associates for dead. The guy came up with angles that he’d never have even begun to think about for himself, and they were making a lot of money. These meetings were always awkward, though, Featherman talking to him as though he expected him to understand a full blown scam from inception. This meant that White had to keep looking like he was fully aware of the ideas, and that he usually had to do a lot of research afterwards to really understand them.

Featherman had also tidied up the few remaining loose ends at the agency. It was rather a pity that Goldstein was so hard to fool, and that the entire issue at Stone Gold and White had needed to be created, just to get him out of the way. Then Hickey had thrown a large spanner in, although that didn’t really affect the operation. Goldstein was too competent, and Hickey was nearly as bad. Maybe worse. Neither of them had any idea what was really happening, but they were smart enough to figure it out, if the English idiot started talking. Featherman had confused Nigel totally. Any information he had was wrong, and now he was set up with a bogus scam that neither he nor his “partner” Morgan really understood, which had been created just to get rid of both of them and destroy them as witnesses.

The real problem at the moment was that Goldstein was getting very suspicious, and that Stone and Gold would listen to him, even if he had nothing to go on. (Neither Featherman nor White knew anything about Alan’s investigations, or that Fazzina had been quite as unconvincing as he had, and that nobody at that end was buying any of it. This is what happens when you employ people who think they’re geniuses, and let them loose with a few million.) White decided that he’d leave Featherman to figure out for himself what was happening at the US end, and start making arrangements for a clean exit for himself if the need arose.

Wow, I enjoyed writing this book. It’s been 20 years, but I still love it. Solomon gets to work.

The introductions were worth the effort. He’d slept on the plane, so was reasonably fresh, and adrenalin-assisted by the new environment. He hadn’t been outside the States before, and it was all interesting, which obviously helped.

Sol’s accent was a good excuse for taking a few pot shots at Al.

“See,” explained Carla , “this is a real American accent. To think we’ve been getting this-this forgery!”

“Be you a-sayin’ that us Midwesterners don’t done talk proper nohow, missy?”

“Yair. Yer don’t been had ter talk per-culiar like that.”

“This is a New York accent. It can open tins of tuna and do accountancy, and cause epidemics,” explained Solomon.

“Sort of a Swiss Army accent,” said Joe.

“I thought Aussie all talked like Mel Gibson,” said Sol, not at all subtly.

“Well, most of us are taller,” said Bill.

“Real Aussie is more fluent, like, “G’dayairgundidyerseethatfingonSaddy?,” said Felicity. “Meaning, “Good day, how are you going did you see that thing on Saturday?”

“It can also mean “Is your duck celibate?” or “How is the cow’s acting class?” depending on whom you happen to be talking to,” added Joe.

“Conversation not limited by mere context,” said Solomon.

“Major social issue, in Australia, the terrible possibility that people might one day find out what they’re talking about. We’ve been working for 200 years to ensure that it never happens.”

“They even imported me,” said Al, benevolently.

“Things were tough,” explained Bill.

It was decided that since Solomon’s specialty at the moment was copy, he’d work with Felicity, and he could follow his stuff about as it went down the production line. He’d brought some of his material, and it was read with interest by all concerned. Somehow it had turned into a job interview, if a very friendly one, Al noted, apparently because Solomon wanted to be accepted on his merits, not his family relationships. Joe had obviously picked up that angle himself, and was looking approvingly at something which he passed to Al:

“Why spend the day setting fire to your leftover clients when they die of starvation trying to contact you and leave a smelly heap in the reception area?

We do a range of customer service initiatives which will allow you, and them, to do business and be alive at the same time. No more messy answering services and idiotic jingles. No more long distance séances with someone on a help desk in another country, however plausibly sane. Nobody gets paid to wait for things. We’re Wildcard Services, and we do mean business.”

“I think Sol’s going to fit in nicely,” said Bill.

It turned out later that Wildcard Services were livid that Solomon wasn’t going to be writing their copy and went elsewhere…..to David.

Solomon’s first challenge was also the first government work the agency had ever handled, a road safety campaign. Al, whose experience with US government agencies had varied from operatic levels of production to mass media based yodelings of pure ineptitude, was wary until convinced by the others that this was different. They explained that road safety was an area that the most hopeless of bureaucratic budgerigars could at least understand.

The government rep, Susan, was obviously not one of the terminally despairing variety of administrators that goes to work hoping one day to see something done properly. She was glued to her subject, and managed to get through the entire briefing without once descending to the banal. The problem was the fact that drivers aged under 25 were the main demographic for fatalities on Australian roads.

They had some mock ups, slogans, and some basic scripts. As advertising they were OK, but toothless. One, Grow Up! was sharp, but patronizing, and another, It’s Your Future, looked like a committee effort, and was too nondescript; it could have been about anything. The visual material was graphic, pictures of cars, shocked survivors, grim, really, but also within the band of forgettable. Al had seen a lot of stuff like this, and he did know what he thought. Susan looked at him hopefully. This wasn’t likely to be easy, but it had to be said.

“Ah, Susan, this stuff is OK, but it won’t work. I know it’s what’s called acceptable levels of shock value, but it’s like an action movie; see enough of it and you get case-hardened, you can’t find any more novelty in it after a while.”

He looked at her carefully, looking for the surefire, selfish, defensive, reaction that meant he was talking to a definite idiot. No; she was listening. Greatly relieved, he continued:

“I have an idea which we’ll get together for you at no cost to your agency, to show you what I mean. We can do the other stuff for you, any time, but my instincts are against it. This’ll only take a couple of days to put together, you wanna wait and see it?”

To a government rep, this question meant, “Do you have the final decision about this, and are you prepared to listen to options?”, which is like for proof of identity. Susan, to her credit, instantly agreed.

“Yeah…no cost, nobody’s going to bitch about that…..we do have time, and I agree that there is a sort of “seen this before” element to this material. We’ve done a few of these campaigns, and the results haven’t been encouraging. The teenagers in particular aren’t at all impressed.”

Bill commented, “They don’t like being treated like idiots. Never fails with any kid, talk down to them and you’ve lost them. This sort of thing really needs them talking to them.”

“Telling them not to do something is like giving them a written request to do it,” said Felicity.

Solomon emerged from wherever he was under that expression of intense interest.

“In the States you don’t try that sort of parental guidance routine, because it’s just too uncool. The market demands macho. You can’t be a pseudo gangster and a defensive driver. You’d have no sex life at all…..”

“So you have sex with roadkills?” asked Felicity.

“If they were in that demographic, yeah,” explained Solomon.

“Ah.”

They paused for Susan to stop laughing, which took a couple of minutes. As she left, Al handed Felicity and Solomon a handwritten sketch for what he wanted done. Joe received a storyline for graphics, and Bill a note.

Scene 1 : (Silent) A living room, a couple of male teenagers walk through, as parents and guests talk. Father throws car keys at one of them. They walk out into the front yard where a little girl is playing basketball with a ball about the same size as she is. One of the boys grabs the ball and plays keepings off for a few seconds, making the little girl laugh. They drive off.

Scene 2 : (Silent) Two police arrive at the door. (Pan to father’s face, bleak, empty). (Pan to mother’s face, horrified, distraught). One of the police notices the little girl, standing still with her ball looking at them as they leave, and winces.

Scene 3 : (Sound) Hospital ward, some young people are visiting one of the boys. All are quiet but:

One asks, “How yer going, John?”

John: “Been better, mate. (Grimaces) Jim didn’t make it.”

(Pans to picture of John, leg missing, eye covered, both arms in plaster, bandages on head).

YELLOW CAPTION (silent) IT’S NOT DYING YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT.

Scene 4 : (Silent) The little girl stands alone in her front yard.

Scene 4 was Solomon’s idea.

We have now finally got back to the main plot line. WordPress has just sent me on a hide-and-seek exercise for a sans-serif font, and it’s not accepting changes. What’s wrong with you morons? Nobody’s got the time for this crap.

The silence from the US end had become unnatural. For a verbose business, even David with all eight ears to the ground, couldn’t find out a thing. Stone Gold White were acting like a normal workplace. Everything was being done, it was like nothing had ever happened, which led prophets to say that something was inevitably going to happen. Keith and Harvey were now speaking to each other, which was worrying enough, because the normal undertone of abuse was missing.

Therefore when Saul rang Al it was natural that Al thought it was something big. It turned out to be one of the least usual conversations they’d ever had. Saul was a very nice, friendly, guy, always ready to have a laugh with Al and David, and if not the world’s leading extrovert, was a pretty easy-to-talk-to person, on any level. The tone of his voice, which sounded tense, alarmed Al more than a few small wars would have.

“Al? Sorry to bother you, but I need you to do me a favor.”

“Uh…sure, Saul, name it.”

“This is personal business, Al, and I want to say first off that I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I thought unnecessary.”

Getting better by the second, thought Al.

“You remember my daughter, Janet? Her son Solomon, you’ve met once or twice, at least, is trying to get some experience in the business, and I needn’t say that any sort of nepotism here would be in pretty poor taste, particularly now. He’s a pretty good copywriter, with a decent bit of taste, for a Manhattanite, but……”

“… But he needs to do the basics and it might be a little less painful if he wasn’t tripping all over everything in the family name in the process, and maybe dropping any major clangers would be better done elsewhere?”

“Yeah. Added to which, I hate to say this, my daughter is protective to a degree I think is lethal. The kid’s suffocating. She treats him like a five year old, and he’s twenty four. I want to turn him into a biped, now. I thought of David as a sort of adman-godfather, but his current stuff is too advanced. Actually, David knows Sol pretty well, they’re almost neighbors, and they buy the same sort of bagels….”

“This sinister bagel-brotherhood thing is starting to spook me, Saul. What do they do, go to cult meetings, or something?”

“They wear robes….it’s pageantry, you know…and the choir…”

The conversation stayed there for a while, with a few suspicions of David’s likely ability to turn a bagel society into a world dominating power. Al meanwhile was thinking about Solomon, who he knew slightly better than that. He’d met him at David’s and they’d had a fairly broad talk which had shown Al that Sol could talk but was personally a bit awkward. Sol was actually a friend of David’s, and the natural move would have been for him to help Sol find his way, but David had for the time being morphed into a very high ranging technical production consultant/specialist, and his stuff was just too complex for a beginner.

Saul had said precisely nothing about the current state of play and Al wasn’t about to ask. So the next line opened up a few lines of thought.

“…Of course it would also be a bit undiplomatic of me to start introducing family members into the equation, too….”

“Undiplomatic? Since when are you a diplomat?” The use of the word “equation” had only one context.

A gargle of laughter.

“Since it became practical to be one. This isn’t just any old pantomime we’ve got happening here. This is full opera, about which I hope to be able to enlighten you soon.”

“H’m….Gilbert and Sullivan, Gold and Stone….. I see it all now.”

“You always were brighter than most, Al. I can take it we’re OK to wheel Sol over to you?”

“I would think so. The others are all full partners now, but I don’t think anyone would mind, we’re really busy and we could use a few extra hands, anyway. Er… we pay him basic scale, of course?”

“If you think he’s worth paying, yeah, otherwise you’re doing him a favor, which is what he’ll be told.”

“OK, barring major cosmic events, we’re on.”

The conversation only ended after Al had told Saul how the business had evolved, with the supply of anecdotes using up an hour or so, and they rang off. Al emailed everyone with the news, and asked if anyone could see anything wrong with the idea as it stood, to which all Bill, Joe, Carla, and Felicity all promptly and independently replied that if there were any other family members they better send them too, because they were snowed in.

David, inevitably, was the other person to talk to, and was informative.

“Al, he’s actually a very talented guy, and Saul is perfectly right, Janet’s killing the kid with cotton wool. He reminds me of a sort of nice version of me….(Al interrupted to ask if David could really remember that far back, to which David said no) ……but more of a humanitarian. He doesn’t set fire to people, or feed them to his goldfish, or glue them to interstate trucks…..”

“Then what’s he doing in advertising?”

“He’s a fairly normal New Yorker; media is part of being alive. He likes the glitz, provided it’s paying him, and it’s fun. Outside of the Janet-event-horizon he’s trying to find his feet. I won’t trash her efforts in other areas, though. He’s been so well brought up that it’s scary. Seriously, the guy has manners that the etiquette books haven’t heard of yet. Even worse, he’s actually intelligent, and you know what a liability that can be.”

“Yeah, I heard about that on the news. Terrible. So no kid gloves?”

“Kid gloves where he really can’t handle it. He’s a bit shy, which is odd, because his work’s good enough to crow about. He’s better than most at basic copy, which is probably a better indication of being able to grasp the ideas. He may just be a decent person.”

“Egad! Decent! Warm up the monastery! I’s a-comin!”

So it was that one fresh Australian summer day there was shoveled off the plane one American, in overcoat, not actually wearing ski clothes but looking as if he was. Felicity and Carla went to pick him up and walked him through Customs, and drove him to the flat that Al had found for him in the city, then to the office. Sol’s thick New York accent wasn’t Bronx or Queens, but it was Noo Yok, sort of an Americanized purr, and it varied from rapid to vague accordingly. Fortunately he made a crack about having subtitles installed, which was enough for Carla to hear David in the background, and Felicity to stop thinking about Seinfeld re-runs.

I’d forgotten about this one. It’s about the market image of politicians. Fun, though. I have no idea why this has a Serif font.

“He’s a politician,” admitted Bill.

“What do we need with a politician?” asked Carla.

“Nothing at all, but this one’s a bit of a specimen. He’s an ex-Labor, ex-Liberal, ex-National, and now, strangely, an independent. It seems his minders are looking for someone in advertising who can work with him, and they heard about us doing cheaper work. He’s still a sitting Member of Parliament, but the party gravy trains aren’t running and he’s stuck on his allowances.”

“This isn’t Steve Cleary, is it, or Steer Cleary, as he’s known?” asked Joe.

“That same mess himself. He might not be much of a catch, but it’s interesting that we’re getting any sort of profile in the political arena, since we’re probably the only agency on Earth that doesn’t do something in politics.”

“What is he, politically?” asked Al, with an idea of where this was heading. Bill’s instincts were good, and election years are like the salmon spawning season in the industry. It might well be worth finding out who had taken an interest in them.

“Used to be a very conspicuous extremist, like most of them, then he became a highly publicized moderate, then a conservative, then a middle-of-the-roader. Then he was a rural icon, for about five minutes, then himself, as he is now, famous for his ambiguous position on everything.”

“A politician is a person who makes a career of being able to agree with anything, and being responsible for nothing,” commented Carla.

“In which case, Steer Cleary is highly overqualified,” said Dorothy.

“Who’s his minder?” from Joe.

“Bloke called Parrot Smith, called Parrots Myth by his friend, singular, and a lot of very unprintable things by Canberra lobbyists. He’s a poll-fornicator, incredibly verbose, and about as exciting as a blow by blow description of a fly with diarrhea to talk to, on any identifiable subject which has a noun attached to it.”

“How did we get involved with this invaluable reference to insect regularity?”

“We’re in the phone book. Actually, the way Parrots talks, you’d think that he’d been to a séance at some criminal reunion, and the medium had discovered us through the spirit world. The guy talks like everything’s a secret. If he told you he was going to the bathroom, you’d board up the windows and have a gun ready. He did say we’d been mentioned by someone. I don’t know who. After five minutes of Parrots, the idea of total incomprehension becomes irresistible.”

“More or less the industry norm, then. Yeah, might be fun. We don’t have anyone to throw rocks at this Friday.”

That look of entirely unconvincing insincerity should have a patent, thought Dorothy, as Steer Cleary and Parrots arrived, the former looking like a fat politician and about as interesting, the latter like a bookie with constipation. Joe, she noticed, was trying not to stare. There was a reason for that. Graphic artists, when they work for long enough drawing people’s faces, start to see everyone as a portrait. That’s very hard to live with if the people are that ugly. Carla watched her husband’s face hammering itself into a neutral shape as he greeted them and admitted with a well hidden wince that yes, he was Ian’s son, etc., and flicked the two pariahs over to Bill, explaining that he’d join them later. How much later was understood by Bill from Joe’s quick flicker of expression to be shortly after the Great Pyramid of Cheops learned to tap dance and figure skate.

As they entered the conference room, Carla lovingly stuck some blue tack in her husband’s hair. Attached to this blue tack were some feathers and pencils and biros and erasers and just about anything else that it could hold. Joe smiled.

“What’s the occasion?”

“It’s 14 months to the day since I first glued anything to you.”

“You’re really a romantic at heart, you know.”

“No, I’m a pervert.”

The story in the conference room had become equally adhesive, if not as romantic. Cleary had a problem with his image, and it was going to be tough to be re-elected if he couldn’t connect with his voters properly. Parrots, who did not only the talking but the silences as well, made it plain that he was worried about the future of the strange ineffectual bit of flab he called a client. Cleary just nodded, probably a learned skill from Question Time. The one useful bit of information to date, such as it was, was that the person who’d mentioned the agency was Featherman.

The problem, as Parrots saw it, was that Cleary’s past, vague as it was, was becoming a liability. Labor, Liberal, and National voters saw him as a defector. Apparently the minor party voters didn’t see him as anything but a politician, and a greedy, slimy one. The added bonus to this fairly understandable view was documented by a poll Parrots had commissioned. The polling agent had played safe, and stuck to routine voting intention questions, and had just asked a multiple choice question regarding Cleary’s tenure as the local representative, i.e., Good, Bad, Neutral, Don’t Know.

It was the last question which had created a quite unique situation for the pollster. It’s customary for a polling agency to provide details about the sampling base, when and where the polls were done, and statistical breakdowns. As it happened, one of the polls was done at the local mall. The pollsters were quite surprised to note that every single adult shopper, when they saw the booth, did a survey. There were literally thousands of people, and being a Saturday, it was a fairly good representative survey. At first they’d been alarmed by the numbers, but as any statistician knows, a bigger survey isn’t necessarily more accurate. However, it is a head count of sorts, and can be interpreted as such.

Their problems started when they did the count. Eight thousand one hundred and seven people had done the questionnaire. The voting preferences were for major parties, which was no surprise, if not what Cleary wanted to hear. The question about his tenure as the local member, however, was informative. Of the total survey, all but two of the respondents had written in their own comments. Of these comments, 24% consisted of the word “bastard”, 37% had written “idiot”, and the remaining 37% were unprintable, even when translated from the various languages.

The polling agents, in having to address this result in their summary, had managed a form of tact not usually seen in demography:

“It will be seen from the data that local issues feature prominently in voter consciousness. It is evident from this survey that Mr. Cleary’s market image is well established, and that his tenure has significantly raised political awareness in the electorate. The sample incurs the normal statistical error factor of 5%.”

Which meant in an electorate of half a million people there were 25 thousand who might feel differently. Parrots had felt that bringing the survey to the meeting might help clarify the issues. Cleary, sitting opposite Al, looked like a child whose lollipop had been taken away from him. Parrots looked like a seedy little cretin. Al was looking forward to the weekend.

“We think Steve needs a change of image and some high profile issues to put him back in the voters’ good books,” enthused Parrots.

Apparently Parrots was the sort who will bet on a horse after it’s bolted and died of old age. It is possible to make issues out of nothing, but if your credibility is running at zero or less, no issue will do anything but remind people how little faith they have in you. Bill wondered for a moment if minders spent much time in denial. They obviously weren’t good at it. Al decided to end the discussion. How was another matter. It occurred to him that the only person likely to shut up Parrots would be Parrots. The quick way to silence the verbose is to ask them a question they can’t handle.

“How?” asked Al.

“Well…..we could do something about that water main that keeps breaking in the main street….no, that’s State…..we could try and get that sports center….except the ratepayers have taken out an injunction against the developer…..we could do a crime initiative……State, again….”

“Oh shut up, Parrots. This is the end. Forget it, I won’t bother standing,” said Cleary.

Parrots looked stunned, as did Al and Bill. That was three more sentences than Cleary had managed in the last two hours. It might well be more than he’s managed in years, mused Bill. Parrots now looked hurt.

“After all I’ve done for you…”

“All you’ve done…..you were the one who didn’t want to be on the Labor ticket, then we had to join, then leave, the Libs, then the Nationals….enough is enough. I’ve got more publicity by leaving political parties than I have joining them, and I’ve made more friends running over people than I have with all this crap. Get out of my sight!”

Parrots left, like a good whining cur should, and Cleary apologized to Al and Bill for wasting their time. They were starting to think that Cleary had managed to become a human being again as he walked with them out to the lift. In the foyer they encountered Carla’s excesses: Joe, blue tacked from head to toe, covered in most of the office fittings and several pictures from the coffee table magazines, including one of a well known model. Carla smiled and said,

“Al, Bill, I’d like you to meet Simian Ephemera, from the People Against Advertising Association.”

Cleary, without missing a beat, introduced himself and complimented Simian on the great work her organization was doing out there in the suburbs.