Cracks in the dam

I've not slept. It's getting light and outside the tightly drawn curtains, London is rising and going to work and play. Not me. I can never go to work again. I'm going on the run.

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Last night I left the office in a daze. The markets are exploding. Our portfolios have been shredded. And that's just the equities - where we still have real interests in real companies. The derivatives funds are wiped out. They just don't exist any more - the emperor's clothes revealed. I though my funds were safe. I had resisted my new director's attempts to browbeat me in to investing in companies that existed only to borrow and invest in other companies' parcels of toxic assets. But apparently not. Somehow, despite my vigilance, he has engineered a massive exposure to possibly the most highly geared, toxic collection of US assets of all time and IT'S GOING TO BRING OUR COMPANY DOWN! All those householders, paying their insurance premiums to secure their lives, their homes, their old age - they're going to lose everything. Last night the only people that knew this were me and my Director, Vijay. Today he'll tell the Board and they'll look for a scapegoat. It won't be Vijay, he'll make sure of that.

Which leaves me. The innocent one. The one that told the Board we should have nothing to do with these juicy, lucrative investment opportunities. The one that turned down countless proposals and was berated for being too cautious. The only one, it seems amongst the entire senior management who remembers the fortunes lost in the dotcom boom and was determined not to repeat the mistakes of investing in a product you didn't understand, couldn't touch and smell, managed by a 20 year old whizz kid.

There are rumours, there have been for days, that a major insurance company is about to announce huge, unimaginable losses. Is today the day we find out who it is?

Last night, as the office closed down around me and colleagues turned off computers and went home or off to Friday night drinks, I scoured the system for evidence, loading files and email strings onto a USB drive. Hope to god I've got it all: the bullying emails from Vijay; my damning research notes; my diary; the pdfs of the sale and purchase agreements I finally tracked down when I hacked into Vijay's computer. I've got it all. But I don't think that will save me from the Directors when they realise they will be held accountable if they can't put the blame solely on some rogue trader.  Framing me is their only chance to leave with their pensions intact like Fred the Shred. 

I look at the papers in front of me - should I send them to the FSA or the Serious Fraud Office, or even Gordon Brown? It all seems pointless, the SFO has not yet managed a decent conviction; the FSA has bee powerless to control the City, whose grandees have just taken their payoffs and run! Gordon Brown is on a lecture tour in Brazil and now that his role is reduced to soundbite generation on everything from Jade Goody's death to healthy eating, no-one's listening to him any more. 

It occurs to me that that is what I should do. Run. Whatever happens, even a full exoneration, will never lift the taint of such disaster from me. I'll never work in the City again.

Walking into the darkened sitting room to fetch my Blackberry, I glance out of the tall window at Cornwall Gardens below in the growing light and stiffen. Standing on the pavement outside is a small group holding fluffy microphone booms and video camera. Christ! The press are on to me! I picture vividly my tense figure displayed on the news, trying to hide my face, looking guilty, the cynical, gloating commentary, my face becoming public property. Recognised and vilified like Fred Goodwin. Car vandalised, flat windows broken. I can't help myself,  I start to cry from fear and self-pity.  Yet the tears free up a fresh determination. I will disappear. Deprived of a visible target and with so many competing ill news stories, the media will move on. Six months, a year from now, perhaps people will not remember and recognise me. But where do I go till then? In my haste, pacing around the flat, I have knocked against a bookshelf and it has shed its contents to the floor. Bright orange and green covered Ordnance survey maps lie pooled. A shred of an idea gleams in my mind.