Summerwine

At Greenland Dock the cobblestones are slick with whale-oil and flies rise thick and black as smoke into the air. The Prophet steps lightly from the tender onto the jetty, only her lightness of step preventing her flip-flopped feet from sliding away from her on the slimy surface, only that lightness, the way she exists as ephemerally as perfume, carrying her forwards through the desperate crowds who throng in the opposite direction, fistfulls of notes thrust forwards, trying to buy their way out of London.

Cut back two years. The Acolyte walked through Bishopsgate, Broadgate, Finchley Circus, a written offer in his breast pocket. Lunch time when the office blocks unleash their hordes like grain silos spilling grain, all identical in suits and shiny shoes. How many were brokers? traders? How many among them were millionaires? To the Acolyte's untutored eye there was no telling - perhaps there never was.

New quant. Doctorate. What was your thesis? Well you'll find this stuff easy then... We're going to put you on the Neru team with Gordon, good place to start, small team, big opportunities. Doddle for a man of your talents... Two days orientation then you'll transfer to the London Wall office. One other thing, all new hires get dinner at the Alhambra, how are you fixed for Friday? ... Can you cancel it? ... Excellent.

The Prophet cuts south of the river, dead land, warehouses and converted warehouses. No people. The stench doesn't hit her till SE1 and when it does it comes suddenly and doubles her over. A raft of the dead tangled around the piers of Tower Bridge, limbs flailing in the wake, blood crazed gannets screeching and the occasional grey flanks of larger, fouler things feasting beneath. The bridges are dangerous - no cover - and she keeps moving west to pick her crossing point.

The Alhambra was nestled into the old stolidity even as the old stolidity was being buried. Granite edifices built to a scale above human were themselves now dwarfed by gleaming spikes of steel and glass. Not giant these, just high; ambitious, aggressive, urgently modern because modern changed by the microsecond. What stolidity was left was paper thin, at five-thirty ties were loosened, jackets thrown over shoulders, Italian shoes replaced by snow white trainers. The momentum was unbearable.

The Alhambra was exclusive for the exclusive. Six month wait for a table and prices that nothing could justify except the exclusivity. Even the maitre-de double-took the name on the list, the Acolyte was in the company's private dining room, upstairs, past the other diners just so they knew there was somewhere more exclusive yet. Follow me sir, they're just serving champagne now.

What do you think? Something isn't it? ... They're showing you what's possible - if you come back here once in your whole career you'll have done well... Is that a genuine who? ... I don't know much about painting but it's a genuine somebody, I know that... The job? Gordon will fill you in on the details on Monday, basically we're buying and selling the same things packaged up in different ways. Simple if you get the sums right, and you're good at sums, right? ... Yes ... Yes ... No, technically you'll be working for Ventures No. 2 LP but Ventures No. 3 is the name on the door... No, it's quite simple actually; 3 is a limited liability partnership of 2 with 4, 5 and 6 carrying other aspects and Neru an offshore partner... No, don't worry about any of that, if you get worried ask Gordon... Here, let me top you up.

London Bridge would have been perfect, a narrow passage crowded by overhanging buildings on either side, but has been barricaded at Tooley Street; the army trying to contain the problem back when they thought it could be contained. The prophet tries but cannot climb over the barbed wire even from behind. The Millennium Bridge has been destroyed, something snapped the cables on one side and it now lolls into the river, flexing like a willow branch; Southwark Bridge, littered with burned out cars, might be passable but is still far too exposed to risk by daylight. The Prophet looks back and sees Cannon Street railway bridge, two abandoned commuter trains stretching across the full length of it. She could pick her way safely through them, carriage to carriage, hidden from prying eyes, able to peer out the windows and spot any danger. The fact she did not think of it earlier means others may miss it too. She doubles back to a deserted London Bridge station, drops onto the tracks, careful of the third rail in case it is still live, and follows them round between the rooftops.

The Acolyte wanted in. He hadn't known such riches existed within his reach, numbers bandied round over dinner were like national debt numbers, GDP numbers, they could buy a small nation with their spare change. He got it bad.

You've got it bad.

Gordon; fifty-something, Scottish, moustache, fatherly air, pictures of golf courses on his office wall. In meetings all morning then welcome-to-the-department pub lunch. Bought The Acolyte a pint without asking what he wanted.

They show you it once to give you a taste, then you either make it back there forever or never at all. Most of us are resigned to being never-at-alls. Let me guess, small town? smart as hell but no definite ambition? PHD because it meant deferring decisions? Something with humanitarian applications like earthquake prediction? ... Fire modelling, close enough. One of those subjects that you can add to but will never be solved in our lifetimes. Am I right? ... Here you're going to run numbers that mean something. Basically we're packaging up various south-seas futures and buying default swaps to hedge the risk plus throwing a bit into hurricane and coup futures and a few long put options on related commodities to cover us against the unforeseen. Simple really. You just have to make it all add up.

The Bank of England is burning, every pound note aflame. Around its fortress like parapets black figures, silhouetted against the fire, dance even as their flesh crackles and blisters. So it had been taken. On the barge the Prophet had watched over the shoulders of the sailors as the relief column approached to break the siege - televised by helicopter, every incident narrated by breathless reporters - one last ditch attempt to save all the money. The television signal had cut out before they knew if it would make it through or not.

She finds part of it on Lombard, tank tracks tangled by taught ribbons of gut, burn marks where they cooked out the crews.

This is close to the epicentre, the ground still littered with the burst remains of leaping stockbrokers, the walls pockmarked with bullet-holes, the air thick with smoke. The prophet does not know exactly where she is going, only that it will be at the centre of things. She trusts her instincts, she follows her nose, she is looking for a boy.

The Acolyte worked like a son-of-a-bitch. Contracted hours were nine to five-thirty but nobody arrived after eight and nobody left before six, the ambitious stayed longer. His first paycheque was more money than he had ever owned, but a flat in kilburn was over three hundred a week, travel more, his shoes, shirts and suit felt tired next to his colleagues and he maxed-out a credit card trying to look the part. After work they played at being truly rich, hitting clubs were the prices guaranteed a giddy thrill on their own, and all night casinos where they pretended nothing hurt as every last drop was hoovered up. What was a few thousand when a few million flashed across your monitor every morning? What was it to lose a month's pay in one unlucky bet at night, when one lucky bet during the day could net the bank more then most people would ever see in a lifetime.

In between he worked, the maths he had licked, hung-over, exhausted, hit by every virus that bred and multiplied down in the petri-dish of the tube, he had the maths licked. He ran the numbers, walked step by step up the chains of packaged futures, debts and offsets, risks and hedged risks. He laid out spreadsheets like Turkish carpets, threads of dependent positions interweaving in a complex colour coded language of his own. He spent weeks on it, checking and double checking, accounting for every factor from weather forecasts to political instability, but still it would not add up. It came out short.

At the Alhambra the doorman still stands outside the door, impassive and superior, a visible shoulder holster his only capitulation to the chaos.

Do you have a reservation?

What's keeps the hordes from tearing him to pieces? Is there yet some vestige of deference left behind their maddened eyes? a recognition that the exclusive of the exclusive is still beyond them? Are they perhaps scared of what would happen when the very highest point is levelled? Or is it the doorman's lack of fear that has made the difference? does their madness ebb in the face of his disdain?

Sorry. No entry without a reservation.

The Prophet does not know why the Alhambra is untouched by the chaos - answers are for those with their eyes on the past, but she knows she has found what she is looking for. She is intangible, transitory, evanescent; she passes through walls like a rumour, only a toe ring catching on the brickwork and then dropping to the ground as it is squeezed off. The doorman hears it sing as it hits the pavement but does not even turn his head, he has one job to do, one job only. Just like her.

The idea was born out of champagne and cocaine; out celebrating their bonuses (a figure so large he'd had to check if there'd been some mistake), in the small hours of the morning when the birds start singing and the empty streets echo to every movement, at the back of a club dazed and deluded, on a sofa with a crowd shouting across him, his lizard brain vibrating in sympathy with the music, still troubled because he knew he was right, because the numbers did not add up, because the odds never lied, because they had been luckier than it was possible to be. The idea came.

Crazy, he knew it even then, but it would not leave and the following morning it was waiting at the bottom of the bed, squatting in the shower, lurking among the straphangers on the tube, sitting on his desk when he crawled, grey-faced into work.

He followed the numbers a different direction. Where did the money come from, who risked it, what did it matter, how much did they need the bet to pay off. For weeks he wrestled with it, teaching himself whole new disciplines, working later than ever - long into the night. He stopped talking at the water cooler, skipped lunch, shunned going out after work. His whole mind was fixed on this one problem.

Gordon noticed he was up to something and wanted to know what. How to explain it? How to put it into words?

If enough people care, could that affect the outcome of events.

Gordon looked blank. The answer, of course, was of course.

But at a more fundamental level. The whole thing's built on optimism right? Without optimism it falls down like a house of cards (an old and lazy metaphor, he knew it). What if it's more than that? Every penny carries the weight of hope: mortgages, pensions, savings, speculations - and we leverage those pennies, tens, hundreds, thousands of times. What we are is an amplifier for hope. What if the very hope makes a difference, at a fundamental level, at a quantum level (another cliché) ...

If Schroedinger loved his cat, would it have stood more chance of surviving. Mass affects both time and space, why not hope, why not need, why not ambition and desire and ...

He ran out of words. Gordon told him to take a week off.

Time and space. Time and space. Time and space. Not until he knew what he was looking for did he start to see, fleetingly and out of the corner of his eye, things that should not have been there any more. Commercial traffic on the Thames, a bus routed around a bomb crater, a lamplighter going about his business, on a bitter night walking home from the office a roman legionary blowing into his hands as he patrolled the London Wall.

He was too late. They had gone too far. They were over-leveraged. The numbers were too big. Too much, too fast, too soon. Too many men in pink shirts moving around too much pretend money. The money was pretend but the hope was real and the effect of it was having side effects. The Acolyte foresaw the chaos but what could he do, what could anybody do against such careening ambition.

He wrote an e-mail: It's all going to collapse, perhaps in days, invite me back to the Alhambra and I'll tell you what you can do. He didn't expect an answer, not until it was too late.

The Prophet finds him in censorious mood, delivering a lecture to unimpressed old men.

I know why you invite new recruits here, he says. It's a glimpse of nirvana because who would not follow you if they thought you had the keys to paradise. Perhaps it's as much to fool you as them but it's all summerwine, you don't own the money, there was no money, the money did not exist. You're not even in debt, you just made it up.

The old men are unimpressed, they are not accustomed to being lectured, they have a helicopter on the roof and safe places to wait it all out, they have risked the chaos to hear this - the trick with the doorman will not last forever and soon the mob will take the last of the old order. These old men's minds are focussed on the order to come, and how to place themselves within it.

You said you'd tell us what we could do. What can we do?

The Acolyte grins. Nothing.

In seconds they are gone, gunshots ringing out from below and the sound of the door being forced. The mob scream, crazed, bloodthirsty, mindlessly destructive. The Acolyte has betrayed his masters and can only have one fate. They are running up the stairs.

The Prophet steps forwards, puts her hand on his shoulder, and leads him away.