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The bank is on a cost-cutting drive so myself and JJ Ingersoll, the firm’s head of global focus, travel to New York first class for an important routine meeting on whether we should use postage stamps or just fax everything. Alas, our Coststream 2000 jet, recently re-christened “Give us a cut Greenspan”, remains in Broadgate. Times are that hard. We are sitting next to a quiet contemplative Swiss, when a British Airstrikes hostess bends over and asks whether he is a fan of Vietnamese cinema, dubbed in French. He replies Ja and is handed a small digital cassette. A miniature television lights up as he inserts the cassette and puts on his headphones. Curious, I lean over. I can just hear a stern militaristic voice if I slip my right leg over JJ’s shoulder and lean my cheek on my food tray. “Good morning, Mr Doerag,” says the voice. “You have been selected from 600 elite branch managers for a mission on which the fate of the Swiss-German speaking world rests. The mission is delicate and will only be successful should you put into practice all the subtlety and diligence gained in your peerless career opening savings accounts via lawyers in Grand Caveman. LISTEN CAREFULLY. “The man you see before you is Allan Chaff, our COC (Chief Operating Cost). Codename Shaft, he is the complex financial derivatives baron that threatens our plans to turn CS First Barstool into a well-trained division of Imperial Swiss Holdings. At present it is a mercenary guerrilla force, run by Chaff as a state within a state. Our informants first became worried last year when he earned more than the GDP of Ghana. We suspect he might be using these funds to set up a powerful hedge fund equipped with enough ground-to-air interest rate product to sink our formidable credit rating off the coast of Jutland. This is banned under the 1979 BIS Treaty on delta co-efficient proliferation. “Your ultimate boss, Mr Big in Zurich, better known as Rainer Pauer Shower, has decided to launch an all-out offensive from his base in the Cuckoo Lair where he spends his days listening to the dulcet vocals of Marlene Dietrich and his nights watching Mickey Mouse cartoons. As you may have heard, his recent masterplan, codename 1812, to subjugate Union Bank of Ebner was prematurely aborted when supply lines along the Bahnhofstrasse were cut by Nikolas Sinn putting down his phone in a pincer movement. Sinn’s scorched-earth initiative at the annual general meeting saw our siege repelled by a cross-fire action with snipers gossiping in newspapers. All was lost. “Mr Big needs a victory to re-affirm the borders of his empire. Building a long wall will not be enough this time and he has brought in Luke Müllerice whose previous experience includes disaster insurance, which makes his credentials impeccable. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to go in there as chief executive and restructure the company, turning Chaff into an ordinary highly-paid executive, properly motivated by a compensation scheme linked to the performance of the Swiss stock exchange. “Your mission will be made more difficult by Chaff, who will doubtless leave a number of high-octane derivatives in your way. Be particularly aware of the inverse flipper-kickers he calls his secretaries, codenames Bambi and Flipper, who have been known to strangle men to death at the first sign of a value-at-risk audit. Approach his office with caution. Whatever you do, do not let him press the red button on his desk which begins liquidating the firm’s in-the-money contracts and simultaneously activates a secret passageway to his triple-A submarine, collateralized on the Hudson and fuelled with enough leverage to get him to Panama. Should he do so, your licence to call an emergency board meeting will activate immediately. “Your communications will be handled by your secretary Frau Beart, codename Emmanuelle, who will be based in Zurich just next to your office, where she always sits. We have provided you with a digital point-of-contact voice communication device, also known as a mobile phone, to be found under your seat. This is particularly useful if your car breaks down on the way from JFK airport, in restaurants if you are expecting a call or, equally, if someone is trying to throw you off the top of a skyscraper in protest at their bonus. Mr Chaff is known to have eight such phones strategically located throughout the building. Be warned. “Your pointman, should you need to activate him, is MC Rudloff, codename Alf, a veteran of the firm who knows his way around the inner tracts of the air-conditioning units like he knows the inner regions of Soho. However, Alf should only be let loose in a grade one catastrophe situation. His thermo-ballistic need to settle old scores, using his virtuoso syndication skills and a potent Swiss-German, are highly dangerous. Exercise extreme caution. Should you need an assassin you can re-activate our sleeper, Diamond R Furever, codename Bob, now based in London and an expert with small-bore treasury instruments. “The other man you see on the screen is Daved Mulberry. Born: the White Horse, Washington. Age: classified. Previous jobs: running Saudi Arabia; writing pen-pal letters to Latin American debt-defaulters; and doing spell checks at the US treasury. He recently shaved off his moustache during covert trips to Hungary in which he posed as an EU citizen with Ian Budweiser in order to scoop up mandates. He currently shaves on a need-to-shave basis. Present role: he is chairman of CS First Barstool in Europe and his brief is to talk to the big pink newspaper about how our restructuring propels us into the top league. “If you should be caught, eat your large, tax-efficient bar of Goblerone. It contains cyanide and is deadlier than any of the derivatives Chaff might feed you should he capture you and take you to his mock-Tudor stately home. “That is all we know for the present moment. Should you choose to accept this mission, this tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.” I look over at JJ who is smiling in a fiendish way with his eyes closed, muttering, “Terminated, ah yes, you’re terminated”, and eating delicious caviar lavetta. What can it all mean? Next month: A struggle atop a high speed train over a computer disc containing the names and telephone numbers of CSFB’s former employees inside a dark tunnel under the Potomac river. |
