Bacchus and Sanderson (Deceased) (35 page)

“It’s odd. Looking at these letters and numbers in small defined groups, I feel I should know what they are.” He turned to Annabel and asked,

“Do you know what this means?”

“I think so. You do too. When it occurs to you, it’ll seem so obvious.”

William continued staring, absorbed by the elusiveness of the answer to the puzzle. Sitting back, he smiled and pushed the iPad back across the table to Annabel.

“The Old Testament references confused me, I was only looking for New Testament. The cunning devil has used both. I don’t think he has included the Apocrypha, but I’ll need to check the whole document. This is going to be a long job, twenty pages and two hundred groups per page. Ben’s going to have fun. I’ll send him an email and call him later to find out how he is getting on.”

***

                            Charles looked up from the view of the Home secretary pacing his office muttering to himself.

“What happened?”

Under other circumstances, the curt question would have irritated Charles, but he wanted to share Felicities triumph, so he smiled and answered.

“She was magnificent. Authoritative, persuasive and threatening, very threatening.”

Hannah looked at him unconvinced,

“Show me.”

Charles looked at her, a confused expression on his face.

“Show you? How?”

Hannah looked straight in front of her and said,

“Like this.”

She nodded at the space in front of her and said,

“Replay” A soft square appeared shimmering with a translucent area inside the soft outer edges of the square. An image appeared showing the room as it had appeared to Charles. The image was three-dimensional and could be viewed from any angle to get different perspectives on what was happening in the room.

“Play.”

The scene began to play out as Charles had seen it an hour earlier.

“Forward.”

The images began to scroll forward at twice-normal speed.

“Forward.”

The second forward command sped the images to five times normal speed and when Hannah said,

“Forward.”

The images sped to ten times normal.

After three minutes the images they were watching had slowed to normal speed and they were viewing Jonathan Andrews in real time.

“Well?” Charles said.

Hannah continued to watch the Home Secretary pacing around his office.

“I think she’s overplayed it. Though the carrot she offered was impressive; the stick, the requirement,” she clarified, “was difficult to achieve. She might have a problem. So might we.”

***

                            Siobhan rushed into Thrashers office, flustered and worried.

“Gerald your wife’s her, in reception. She insists that she sees you and sees you now. I’ve tried to mollify her and explained that you had a vital client meeting to prepare for, but she told me to ‘get my skinny arse into his office and don’t reappear until he’s with you.’ She seems a little upset.”

Despite the fact he didn’t have the time to see her, he smiled at her description of Siobhan, which was quite accurate. Thrasher loved his wife very much, but she knew never to come to the office. This was his work life, she was his home life. He recognised this must be serious, so he said to Siobhan,

“Show her in and bring coffee please Siobhan.”

              Seconds later his wife burst through the door. He got up and enveloped her curvaceous body in a comforting hug and then led her to the client sofa and asked what was wrong. Sophia looked at him and said, her voice brittle with anger,

“What have you done? Who have you upset? Deceived? Swindled?”

Thrasher looked at his wife, no surprise on his face; just resignation. He smiled to reassure her and then said,

“What happened?”

“This,” she said shuddering and took a padded envelope out of her bag which she threw onto the table with obvious disgust.

Thrasher picked it up and peered inside. Inside was a whole tongue, from a pig or sheep and a note pinned to it with a two-inch nail. The note read:

‘Tell your husband to be a good boy and be truthful, honest and quick. Next time it’ll be his.’

Thrasher’s colour had changed from his normal flushed hue to grey. He gasped and slumped to one side grasping his waste paper basket and retching into it. After a moment, he sat back upright panting with the exertion. His wife passed him the glass of water on his desk and he sipped it. After a few sips, his colour began to return.

“Felicity.”

“Felicity, what about her?”

“This was her.” He pointed with his index at the envelope on his desk.

“The Cortez’s have an enforcer, I don’t know who it is, but he’s ruthless. If she wanted my tongue out, he’d do it without hesitation.
This is a warning to tell her everything she wants to hear as soon as she asks.”

Sophia Thrasher looked at her husband and said,

“You have to leave. Daddy will set you up in your own practice, he’s been offering for years. Leave now.”

Thrasher shakes his head,

“Not yet, but soon. I am going to make her life a little more interesting than she expects. When I do leave, she will smear me. She’ll say I’ve been with prostitutes and rent boys. She’ll try to ruin me professionally. She’ll say I take drugs; she might even try to plant some on me. This could get very messy. I need you to know that I could never be with anyone but you or take drugs or do anything dishonest. Ok?”

Sophia had tears streaming down her face, she sobbed,

“Tonight, you need to swear and affidavit with daddy. He can hold on to that as evidence if she gets difficult. I know you love me. I love you too.”

She got up and walked over to the mirror and repaired her makeup, then came over gave him a hug and a kiss and started towards the door. Holding the handle she said with passion,

“Tell the skinny bitch to bring it on”

Jemima looked at Ben’s bare bottom as he attempted to pull on his boxer shorts standing up. After losing his balance three times he collapsed in frustration onto the bed and shouted,

“I can’t even stand on one leg. For Christ sake why are you with a cripple like me?” He picked up his crutch that he had abandoned by the side of the bed earlier that afternoon and threw it across the room.

“Ahhgrh! Bollocks”

“Better now?” Jemima asked, propping herself up on one arm so that she could see him. Not waiting for an answer she continued,

“You have a gammy leg, you use a crutch, you fall over if you try and stand on one leg. And? Get over yourself and get dressed. We need to talk and I can’t concentrate if I know your nether regions are naked and accessible.”

              Ben grinned loving her way of cutting through his self-indulgent moments without being rude or unkind. After pulling his clothes on he limped across to the desk, retrieved his crutch and sat down opening his MacBook.

“Email from William,” he said reading as he spoke.

“Genius. Of course.” Turning around to face Jemima, he noticed that she was sitting up in bed a pillow propped up behind her and the sheet stopping mid thigh.

“If you want to talk, it would help my concentration if you could put a top on.”

Pouting she grabbed her shirt and put it on, but only doing a couple of the buttons up.

“I thought you liked my breasts”

“I do, but they stop me concentrating on anything else. So we need to talk?”

“You first. William’s email?”

Ben read the email again then said, paraphrasing,

“They’ve worked out the code, or think they have. It isn’t scientific notation or anything similar, but biblical references. I’ll need to write a quick program to access an online King James bible and search each reference and translate out to clear text. Should have the message by lunch time.”

Turning back to his computer, he began working on the program. After a few minutes, he stopped and looked around at Jemima, still sat in bed.

“Did you say you needed to talk as well?”

Jemima’s face had lost i
ts
playfulness and become harder and serious.

“Yesterday, I spoke to Pablo.” Ben looked at her and shrugged looking a little confused.

“Pablo is our Colombian cousin who runs the Colombian end of the Cortez business. Pablo is a cocaine baron and a very suspicious man.” Jemima smiled at Ben and continued,

“As you know I can be very persuasive. Pablo now believes that I am Felicity’s right hand woman with my fingers in all of her pies and that I will be handling the receipt of his next delivery to Felicity. Six tonnes of Colombian pure will be arriving in ten days time. Pablo however is not a stupid man. He will send word to me when the ship that is carrying the coke is underway. He will then tell me the name of the ship, its destination port and estimated time of arrival. None of that is of any use to us…” Ben finished the sentence for her.

“Because he will have spoken to Felicity to confirm you are her right hand woman and she will shriek at him, tell him he is a fucking buffoon and demand to know what he told you. He will say he told you nothing, which is, in fact, true and Felicity will tighten her security further.”

Jemima nodded and then smiled.

“I have a boyfriend who is a computer genius, so that setback need not concern us.”

“Thank you for your faith in me but how do my computer skills help?” Jemima said nothing, letting Ben think and answer his own question. He sat for a moment deep in thought. Jemima was right of course, his MacBook Pro was an amazing ally and he conceded that he was pretty talented. How though, based upon the very basic information she had gleaned from Pablo, could he deduce anything useful?

              Turning away from Jemima, he stared at the computer screen for a moment and began typing. Still concentrating on the MacBook, he asked Jemima,

“Where is your family operation based in Colombia?”

“Head office is in Cali, but operations and the tankers are based in Buenaventura”

Ben typed a set of instructions into the laptop and hit the enter key.

“I’m searching for a list of all of the tankers owned by CHC and their current locations and status. Do you believe Pablo when he said the shipment would be coming in ten days?”

Jemima thought for a long moment before replying,

“Yes, I do. The information he gave about the time frame was unguarded. I had pushed him, which he isn’t used to, and he reacted. He regained his composure and reverted to type. You don’t stay alive as a Capo of the largest drugs Cartel in southern Colombia by being anything other than obsessive about security.”

              Ben was staring at the screen of his computer watching as a world map materialised with large dots of various colours representing Cortez boats. He hover the mouse pointer over a dot and a square appeared filled with information on the vessel. Name, location coordinates, tonnage, course and cargo. The cargo was of particular interest. He was sure the cocaine was being transported as a liquid and so needed to be shipped in a tanker. The map showed over one hundred vessels spread around the world, from Europe to Asia and North America to the tip of Africa. Turning the MacBook Pro around so that Jemima would be able to see he began describing what she could see on the screen.

“Each dot represents a Cortez ship. The majority we can discount as they are too far from Buenaventura. Of the remainder,” he indicated the ships closest to southern Colombia,

“Only these ten are tankers.” He pointed to the ships he was referring to, indicated by a red dot.

“Now none of these ships are in port at the moment or have been in port in the last twenty four hours. This means that the cocaine hasn’t yet been loaded. For the ship to be loaded with the cocaine solution and the bio-ethanol leave port and arrive in UK waters within the time frame Pablo let slip, the boat would need to follow the shortest route. The shortest route from Buenaventura to the UK is through the Panama Canal and into the Caribbean Sea. To be able to pass through the Panama Canal, the ship must be of a class called Panamax.”

              Ben typed more instructions into the MacBook Pro and hit return. Of the ten tankers closest to Buenaventura that had until a moment before been on the screen, only three now remained.

Jemima looked at the remaining red dots and hovered over each in turn.

“CHC Princess, CHC Amazonia and CHC Cartagena. One of them is our ship, but we won’t know until one of them goes into port and then heads towards the Panama Canal.”

***

              William read through his copy of Ernest’s will
,
reviewing the items he had been tasked with achieving by his father. Foremost was discovering why Jonas had been killed and how this had happened. The how had been furnished by Jemima Cortez, a large amount of pharmaceutical grade cocaine that he had ingested disguised in the chilli he had been given at Alexander Cortez’s launch party. The ‘why’ was trickier.