Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

accept them as emblematic of the less pleasant and more Kafkaesque second phase of his life.

With his breath stuck in his throat and the panic of suffocation beginning to flush blood to his cheeks he listened to her complete her proposal. She would be back to visit him in a week and he could do what he liked in the meantime. He could change his name and fly to South America, he could hire a mercenary army to protect him, he could call the police, or book himself on the next Space Shuttle flight. In one week’s time she would return, she would kill or maim everyone who stood in her way, and she would expect him to shake her hand and accept that he now worked for her and the people she answered to.

It was actually the phrase ‘the people she answered to’ that bothered him the most: the idea that there was a hierarchy at work here and he wasn’t even dealing with the top rung of it was heartily distressing.

In the intervening week he did his best, though sometimes it felt like he was just going through the motions. He found an old sea fort on the Norfolk coast that had been retrofitted with a fall-out shelter in the late Seventies and he locked himself in there. He hired half a dozen freelance Israeli snipers to patrol the ramparts and borrowed a security team from a supplier of his in the Shan States: men who were usually deployed guarding drug convoys and fighting off honest-to-god pirates in the South China Sea. It didn’t do him much good, as some part of him knew it wouldn’t.

His one consolation, looking back on it, was that the tall, pale woman — whose name was Karst — had needed some assistance in getting to him. It was slim consolation indeed because her ‘team’ had consisted of one other, a young woman who only looked to be about seventeen according to one of the snipers who’d survived. While Kieran never got to know Karst very well, he did have occasional insights into her thinking. She was nothing if not calculating. With hindsight he suspected the young woman she’d brought with her would have been selected largely for psychological effect. Karst had made sure to kick his ass with what his male chauvinism would have to assume was their ‘B’ team. She’d leave it to him to imagine what a team made up of half a dozen of their alpha males was capable of.

For a while, working for Karst was actually a pleasant surprise — not because it was a bundle of laughs, but because his expectations had been so very low. He really was allowed to carry on pretty much as before, with the obvious proviso that three-quarters of the profits now went to someone else. He also had to submit to random inspections by their accountant, who was a strange man: frightened for his life much of the time and yet living like a king on the salary they paid him.

After three months, Karst came to see him in person for a second time. She explained that the next day she was going to come back and break his left arm. He protested that he had done nothing wrong and that he’d obeyed every order he’d been given. She said she knew that, and that was why it was only an arm — that and the fact he had a low psychological tolerance for physical harm. She lingered long enough to give him a brief lecture on the psychology of intimidation.

You had to be careful with proud men, she said, because hurting them could be counter-productive. It was usually best to attack their sense of control over their environment, perhaps by hurting a family member. In Kieran’s case, she said his pride was intellectual and hurting him physically would work perfectly well as a motivator, with the proviso that he must always be given a chance to protect himself first. This, she explained, would make it clear that he couldn’t think his way out of the situation, no matter how cleverly he schemed. That, plus the fear of more pain, would ensure he didn’t start looking for a way to regain his independence. She had selected the three-month mark because it was the time at which a sense of normality started to set in, and with it a possible resurgence of confidence, and thus it was a good moment to reinforce the lessons of their first encounter.

“Really,” she stressed, “it’s good that you fear pain and the prospect of being physically mutilated. If you didn’t, I might have to do something far, far worse than break a single bone.”

She turned to go and then remembered something: “Oh, and no painkillers. I’ll take a blood sample tomorrow. If your blood contains anything I don’t approve of we’ll have to go through this again, and next time I’ll be creative. That isn’t something you’d enjoy.”

He didn’t sleep much that night, as no doubt she’d intended. The expectation was far worse than the event, which was still bad enough to give him nightmares afterwards. He just wasn’t the sort of person who could take pain in his stride, not to mention the sensation of a bone snapping. And despite the fact that he would remember that experience as long as he lived, Karst had found a way to make it even more memorable. She had caught him in whatever invisible net she’d used to cut off his breath the first time they’d met and then she’d reached out towards him, not even making contact, and he’d felt his left humerus break.

As she left him with tears rolling down his face she gave him one last piece of wisdom, “Think about this too. I’ve never lied to you. When I tell you something will happen, it happens. That’s important, because one day I will promise you something good and I want you to know that it’s guaranteed, just like any of the painful things I predict for you. One day I’ll tell you how you can retire in comfort. It will be something to look forward to. But it won’t be for a while yet.”

The ‘good thing’ she’d mentioned was a long time in coming, but eventually it did arrive. First Kieran had to go through most of a decade of despair and agony. The effects of the hepatitis grew worse. No treatment worked; he was one of the fraction of the population whose immune systems couldn’t defeat the infection. Eventually it turned into cirrhosis. Which then progressed to a viral form of liver cancer.

Until it got really bad, Kieran carried on working. Even when he was spending most of his day lying helpless in an electrically-adjustable hospital bed he still got a kick out of directing the business — as Karst knew he would. It distracted him from the fact that he was dying. And of course since Karst’s takeover, he never needed to worry about security any more. If someone caused him problems he had a number he could call and that was that.

As his condition grew worse it became clear that he needed a new liver. And even though they’d fudged his medical records to make him appear more eligible than he was, he’d still been on the waiting list for three years and no suitable donor had presented themselves. He couldn’t wait much longer. And so in ‘94 he had his transplant; it took place in Costa Rica and Karst’s people arranged everything. He didn’t ask where the liver had come from or whether the donor had finished with it before it was extracted.

But rather than restore his health, the transplant brought with it a new set of problems. Tissue rejection set in, and the drugs he took to control his rebellious immune system allowed other infections to blossom. For eleven months he was more or less in a coma, getting weaker every day.

Time passed in a blur. And then one day he woke up. For a while he thought he’d died. He was dressed in white, in a beautiful room looking out over the mountains of Tuscany and he felt so healthy he thought he might burst. One look in the mirror convinced him that this must be some form of afterlife. His reflection showed a man in his late teens or perhaps the start of his twenties, whereas Kieran had just turned forty. The face he saw was his, though — except that his nose was different. Kieran’s nose had been big and bent; now it was straight and rather average.

The sense that he was in heaven lasted for the rest of that day and into the evening. And then, as he watched the sun setting over the distant peaks, Karst came to see him to explain what had happened, and he realised he was still alive.

She said, “We consider this an honour. We have made you young and healthy, which is not something we would normally do for… an employee. I told you one day that I would make you a promise and that it would be something good. This is the beginning of it. Saving your life is a reward for what you have done for us up until now.”

She gave him a moment to let that sink in and then went on, “We want you to go back to work. In fact, we want you to take on some extra responsibilities. You’re an ideal choice to run several of our operations and I think you’ll enjoy the challenges of your new job.”

Kieran sensed there was a ‘but’ coming. This definitely wasn’t heaven: no afterlife he’d ever imagined would have included working for Karst. This seemed a lot more like business as usual, but taken to a new level of weirdness.

Karst said, “We’re good employers. The longer you work for us the better your retirement package will be, but we can offer you one thing no one else can. We’ll give you back all the years that you give to us. When you leave us, you’ll be young and rich and free. But first you have to earn it. Does that sound fair?”

Karst had him pegged. By now he knew that crossing her was certain death — and doubtless dramatically excruciating. This latest development proved that if they wanted to they could ensure that working for them cost him nothing and gained him everything. It really was an offer you couldn’t refuse.

As she was leaving, Karst mentioned, “We threw in an old-fashioned nose job for free. It avoids various complications down the line.”

Like having anyone believe his story if he chose to tell someone, he thought. His fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere, he’d always maintained a low profile, he had no proper longstanding friendships or any living relatives he was in touch with — and he didn’t even look like the old Kieran. He smiled in cold appreciation; Karst really knew her stuff.

It took a while for the reality of the change to sink in. His first job was to rebuild the top level of his old organisation, replacing anyone who’d known him before. The parts of the business that had been on the downturn in the early Nineties were on their last legs by now. It was time for a fresh start. Karst gave him control of a number of additional ventures she’d previously been handling directly. He was able to make himself useful by bringing his usual flair for synergy and clever logistics to each of them. As Karst had promised, he even enjoyed it for a little while. But then his curiosity began to stir and threatened to spoil it for him.

He would occasionally meet Karst’s colleagues and found them to be as taciturn as she was.