For a moment I thought of clutching my stomach, screaming ‘food poisoning’ and tumbling off my chair. But then I thought of a better idea. I excused myself, pointed at my phone and then walked out of the restaurant. Outside I spat the oyster into a postbox and then waited. When I went back after 15 minutes they had finished the oysters and ordered some salad and soup for all of us.

Thank god. The soup and salad were fine. But not spectacular. Dominic paid £230 for lunch. Rich fucker.

And I completely forgot about double-checking with Lily about the money. Now god only knows when I will get the time.

Now I think I will get a week of peace and quiet. Tom has already sent a confirmation email to Dominic.

Wonder what kind of people are going to join us on the project. I hope they are fun.

Can’t get the fucking taste of oysters out of my mouth.

12 April 2007

7.43 p.m.

THERE IS NO GOD.

Nothing else can explain what happened today.

So I went to office in the morning. Nowadays there is absolutely nothing to do except discuss LLTLF strategies with stupid Jenny. So after sometime I went to the innovation conference room and started playing games on my computer. Then I decided to, casually, browse through the backup of Jenny’s documents which I still have on my pen drive.

And then Tom called me for an urgent meeting. I ran to his room.

He asked me details of our LLTLF teams. I told him about Group A and Group B and that I would be taking care of finance in order to ‘enable’ our arrangement. He said this was good but he still wanted to make it look as if someone in Lederman was interacting with me. Otherwise, he said, people will ask why a consultant is handling so many funds. And he couldn’t do it himself. That would lead to unnecessary suspicions. I told him this made sense as long as he appointed somebody who would ‘play along’.

Tom said he had a better idea. He was going to allocate someone who was not only powerless to do anything but also too stupid to understand what was going on. All that this fellow would do was maintain paperwork, send emails and act the part. He would be designated as Tom’s special executive assistant for Corporate Social Responsibility. But his job would be to think little and speak even less.

I told Tom I was ok, but asked where he was going to find this fellow. Tom said he had asked HR to allocate someone from the new batch of data entry operators.

My heart stopped for a brief second.

OH. MY. GOD. NO.