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meetings are frequently held. Outside the row of conference rooms is a large kitchen station that looks like a coffee bar. From there, drinks and snacks and samples of new recipes can be collected throughout the day by any employee. From time to time during longer meetings, an assistant comes in with fresh cakes or muffins.
    He is immediately irritated by the fact that everyone present already has their laptops flipped open, humming, expectant. It seems to him to be a false show of eagerness. This deal should have been – could have been – completed in principle several days ago. But he has been finding Melissa intractable on certain key points. As soon as the problems arose, he removed himself from the negotiations for two full weeks, a tactic designed to worry her into compromising – but Melissa appears to have nerves strung like steel wires and has stuck with him every step of the way. In retrospect, he realises that anyone who has gotten so far so young in the business world, as Melissa Johnson has, is likely to be a far stronger negotiator than he. In fact, what he has been seeing with considerable clarity during the past several meetings is that for the last decades, during all the time he has built up his business, he has been largely protected. He has always had the majority stake in his own business, he has always been able to run it as he chooses, and he has always chosen to surround himself with like-minded people. He has never bought or sold a company until now, has never had to join in the ruthless games in which others in his position are so well schooled. These past weeks have made him feel like something of a gentleman amateur who has wandered into a kind of financial Olympics where all the other players are highly trained and motivated in a single-minded way with which he cannot quite sympathise.
    He sits down, and pours himself some coffee from the pot that sits on the corner of the table.
    “Good morning,” he says to the room, and there is a ripple of greeting in reply. “Where’s Melissa?”
    “She’s in the bathroom, Mr Ivanov. She’ll just be a second.”
    He nods, and turns to look out of the window while they wait.
    Melissa Johnson leans her head against the cool glass of the long washroom mirror and closes her eyes against the overhead lights. The oppressive ache in the centre of her forehead that has been with her since the early hours of the morning has spread now to the left side of her head, and is building into a deep throbbing sensation. She knows that, left unattended, it will mutate into a migraine within an hour or two. Not now, she thinks, please not now. She can hardly leave everyone waiting while she rushes out for medication. It would be unprofessional, and even worse, they would all know she was feeling rough. They would immediately sense an advantage. Alexander Ivanov, she feels, is just waiting to sight a weakness so he can up the deal. She rolls her shoulders, a poor attempt to loosen clenched muscles, and tries to recall the last time she had a migraine. She remembers suddenly, and in some detail – she was closing the telecom deal; they’d worked the whole night, and she had forgotten to eat dinner or breakfast. Her blood sugar had dropped. But that was at least two years ago. Since then she has stayed off red wine and red meat, and cut out chocolate and most carbohydrates. She works out each morning, and most useful of all, she has a set of relaxation exercises that her trainer taught her, which are unobtrusive enough to use even during business meetings.
    She opens her eyes, and leans back again. Splashes some water onto her face, and then stands gripping the sides of the basin. She hates the fact that today, when she is so near to closing this deal with Alexander, she is tense enough, apprehensive enough, to give herself a migraine. It does not speak well of her inner strength, or her confidence, and she is someone that prides herself on possessing both in copious