Authors: Nic Bennett
“Secure,” said the man on the other end of the phone.
“You have an update for me?”
“I do. The loss is offloaded, and Lightbody’s out. The bank won’t make a fuss. They need a quick solution, and he has history.”
“The Russian?” Kloot asked.
“Highly agitated. I have no doubt that his masters in Moscow are very unhappy. I understand he and a couple of gorillas have already paid Lightbody a visit. I’m sure Lightbody will be running for the hills.”
“And what about the boy? Has he remained loyal? If he turns, it will be your responsibility to ensure that he is removed. We cannot afford any more mistakes. He is your recruit.”
“Yes, I am sure,” the man replied. “And I am fully aware of my responsibilities,” he added with a hint of irritation in his voice. “One of Amelia’s bimbos is close to the boy. She told us that he was meeting Lightbody, and we passed on the information to the Russian. The feedback is that he is terrified following the Russian’s intervention and won’t be going near his father again. As for his loyalty to me, training a child is like training an animal. Yesterday I took away everything he aspired to—the money, the independence, the status. Tomorrow I will give it back. He will know that it is better for him to denounce his father than lose his future, and I will be able to keep an eye on him.”
Kloot chuckled, a rare sound for one of the world’s most inscrutable criminal masterminds. “Ha ha. I taught you well.”
“You did.”
“Well, I hope you are right. He reminded me of you at around the same age. If he turns out to be half as good as you, our money will be in good hands for another generation. I will report back to my colleagues in the League that they have nothing to be concerned about.”
“You might also add that I will now be looking after the Russian’s
money. Another lesson of yours I recall—keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“Excellent! Excellent!” said Kloot. “Once more unto the breach!”
“Once more indeed.”
It was six
forty-five when Jonah’s phone rang. He had spent the afternoon on the move, watching all the time for the Q7 or anything else suspicious. He was now in a café in Soho, drinking his sixth coffee of the day. He picked up his phone from the table and looked at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. He let it ring three times before answering, and when he did, he stayed silent, waiting for the person on the other end to identify him or herself.
For a moment there was silence at both ends before the caller spoke. “It’s me, Jonah—your father.” Jonah breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ve switched SIM cards.”
“Hi,” said Jonah speaking quietly, one elbow on the table and his head down.
“When can you meet me at Helsby Cattermole?”
“Hellcat! You can’t be serious?” he hissed.
“It has to be there, I’m afraid,” said David. “The information I’m getting can’t leave the building. That’s the agreement with my
inside contact. And don’t worry about being caught. Everyone’s gone home.”
Jonah put his hand on his forehead and the other elbow on the table, gently shaking his head. “Well, how are we going to get in with all the security?”
“We’ll meet in the underground garage. There’s a fire escape on Foster Lane. It will be open.”
Jonah was silent, weighing his options.
“Please, Jonah. You wanted evidence. I have evidence,” David pleaded.
Jonah remembered Creedence’s comment:
Where I come from, you’re innocent until proven guilty
. He held the phone closer. “Okay,” he said. “I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you there.”
Jonah put his phone in his pocket and downed the rest of his coffee. He went outside to Frith Street, finding it packed with early evening drinkers spilling out of the bars and cafés. The Vespa was parked across the street, and Jonah weaved his way through the crowds to reach it, before heading east to the City.
Although sunset was not for another half an hour, Foster Lane was dark when Jonah arrived, the tall buildings around the narrow street shortening the day. He parked the Vespa and walked warily down the deserted lane, keeping his helmet on to ensure his face was covered. The fire escape was on the left and had been wedged open a fraction as promised with a small piece of wood. Jonah looked around to check that there was nobody following him and slipped through the door, noticing the descending staircase ahead.
When he closed the door behind him, he was in complete darkness and silence.
He took the helmet off and stood still, partly to let his eyes adjust to the lack of light and partly out of fear. What was the saying? Once bitten, twice shy. He’d already been beaten up once today. Why was he coming back for more? He didn’t have an answer. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out the staircase once again, and, holding on to the handrail, he made his way carefully downward, acutely aware of the cold of the metal on his hand and the soft sound of his sneakers on the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he could discern the shadowy shapes of pillars and cars in the low light, but where was his dad? What was he supposed to do now? Should he call out?
A shaft of light speared down the stairs behind him and swiftly disappeared. Someone
was
following him! Jonah stepped quickly around to the left and pressed himself up behind a pillar, trying to control his shallow breathing. The person at the top wasn’t moving. He was standing there listening. Listening for what? For him? Jonah held his breath. A thin beam of light from a flashlight flicked around and started coming down the stairs. Jonah could feel sweat breaking on his forehead.
“Jonah?” a voice whispered, and Jonah let the air out of his lungs. “Jonah? Where are you?”
“I’m here, Dad.” Jonah stepped out from behind the pillar. The thin light moved toward him. “Thanks a lot for that, by the way,” he said, crossing his arms. “I was scared witless.”
“Sorry,” said David. “I wanted to check nobody was tailing you.” Then motioning to Jonah, he added, “Come with me,” and began
walking toward the far side of the garage. As he did, he flashed the light across the license plate of each vehicle, allowing Jonah a glimpse of the kinds of cars that were parked there. Jonah’s jaw dropped as he took in the car manufacturers. He hadn’t seen anything like this display since visiting the National Motor Museum. There were Ferraris, Aston Martins, Bentleys, Porsches, and what looked like a McLaren F1 and a Lamborghini. A row of Harley-Davidson and Ducati bikes also caught his attention.
As Jonah took in the cars and bikes one after another, his initial excitement began to waver. These were things he could never have unless he somehow managed to prove his father’s innocence. And even then it wasn’t likely, at least not without maintaining his relationship with the Baron, a relationship that still hung in the balance.
David stopped in front of a Bentley.
“Nice one, Dad,” Jonah began, commenting on his taste in sedans. It was not until he followed the precise direction of his father’s gaze that he saw that David was concentrating on the license plate, not on the car itself.
David walked around to the rear door, pulled it open, shone the light inside, and turned back to Jonah. “Here we go. Come on, let’s get inside. We can talk in here without risk of being heard if someone comes down.”
Jonah opened his eyes wide, and he followed his father into the Bentley’s expansive backseat, smelling the leather, marveling at the space, and touching the wooden inserts. “Wow. Whose car is this?” he asked as David ripped open the top of a brown envelope and flicked through its contents.
“The same person who left this envelope here. He’s someone in
the Helsby Cattermole investigation team who’s willing to help me, but only in a limited way, and he must remain nameless. Now close the door.” David’s tone was terse.
Jonah pulled the door shut. It was much heavier than he expected and closed with a solid thunk.
His father pulled down the cream leather arm rest between them to use as a table and placed the envelope on top. The lights in the car faded gently, putting them back into darkness save for the thin light from David’s pencil flashlight. “Right, I’ll give you the facts, and then I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” he said, taking a sheet of paper out of the envelope and laying it face up on the armrest.
Jonah nodded along, eager to know once and for all what exactly was going on here.
“These are the official trading records from my computer for Friday, September twelfth.”
Jonah looked down at the familiar layout of account numbers, dates, times, stock codes, volumes, and prices.
“At nine fifty-four
P.M.
UK time, I allegedly bought one hundred million dollars of Allegro Home Finance derivatives. For every dollar below five, there would be a loss of a hundred million. With Allegro Home Finance shares worth nothing, the loss is five hundred million. Make sense?” he said in a history teacher monotone.
Jonah nodded again. Of course he understood. They’d been trading derivatives all last week at the Bunker.
“I happened to have been online at nine fifty-four
P.M.
seeing what the U.S. markets were doing at the close, even though I was out of town. My online access can be traced, and so theoretically I could have been trading.” David paused. “I wasn’t.” He searched
Jonah’s eyes, desperate for him to understand. “Which means the records have been manipulated so that it looks as if the trades came from my computer. Agreed?”
“Okay …” Jonah replied cautiously. This was a lot to take in.
David continued, “At nine fifty-four
P.M.
the Baron was in the building. The access card records show that he entered the trading floor at nine thirty-five
P.M.
and left at ten twenty-five
P.M.
”
Jonah remembered seeing the Baron outside the pub, engrossed in his phone call. It must have been just before nine thirty
P.M.
because he’d looked at his watch before waving goodbye to the Bunker Boys, and it had been exactly nine twenty-five.
David picked up the envelope and pulled out three additional sheets of paper. He laid two of them on the seat and shone the flashlight at them. “The telephone records of his cell phone and landline indicate that he neither made nor received any calls or texts during this time, or for the forty-five minutes preceding his entry into the building. However”—he paused and turned over the third piece of paper, a photograph—“this picture taken by the CCTV cameras in reception suggests otherwise.”
Jonah leaned forward and peered at the picture. It showed the Baron with a phone in his hand as if just completing a call. It was a flip-style phone, not his usual smartphone.
“The phone you see here is not registered with Helsby Cattermole as is required,” David explained, “and that makes his using it all that much more suspicious.” Jonah tried to revisualize the Baron outside the pub.
Yes. He had been using the flip phone
. So, whatever conversation he had been having, it had taken him back to the office.
“Finally, the access records show that Clive from Settlements
was in the building on Sunday evening,” David continued. “After the announcement by the U.S. government that it would not bail out Allegro Home Finance.” He took a second photo out of the envelope and laid it on top of all the other documents. “As you know, Clive is now dead.”
Jonah gagged when the flashlight revealed what was in the photograph: a dead body with the top of its head missing and blood everywhere. David turned the photo face down and extinguished the light. Jonah shivered. The fear that had, for a short while, withdrawn to the background of his consciousness jumped to the foreground once more. “You think he was murdered, don’t you?” he asked his father.
“I do,” David answered bluntly. “I think that the Baron took a massive punt on Allegro Home Finance being rescued, based on some information he had received. When the trade went wrong, he couldn’t accept the loss and persuaded Clive to switch the trade into one of my accounts on Sunday evening. And then he killed him. Or got someone else to do it.”
Jonah swore loudly inside his head.
The Baron wouldn’t kill someone, would he?!
“I think he must have had inside information that turned out to be wrong. You’d have to be absolutely sure of your facts to put that much money down. And don’t forget, he couldn’t have done it through Helsby Cattermole. He would have had to have gotten clearance.”
“Why not?” Jonah replied, the vision of Clive’s corpse still with him.
“It’s too big a trade and too risky to do without approvals. He’d
have been asked questions he couldn’t answer. I reckon it was for his personal account or for some trading syndicate he’s part of.”
Jonah thought of the twenty-five million dollars of Allegro Home Finance shares the Baron had asked him to buy. He’d called it a “small punt.” The maximum they could lose was twenty-five million dollars. This was in a completely different league. His dad was right. You wouldn’t make a massive derivatives trade like this without a very good idea that you were right. The downside was too great. It could be a syndicate? Was that where Amelia came in?
He turned to his father. “Creedence thinks Amelia tipped Scrotycz off that we were meeting in Richmond Park. Does that seem plausible to you?” Jonah threw the question at David, expecting him to be surprised.
He wasn’t. “I’d guessed something like that had happened,” he said. “That letter to Scrotycz didn’t come from Helsby Cattermole.”
“Wait, what?” It was Jonah who was surprised.
“Nothing was sent out from the bank. My company insider would have known if it was.”
Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “So you think it was Amelia who sent that letter to Scrotycz, naming you as the one responsible for losing his money?”
“I think it is very possible.” David’s expression was blank, impossible to read. “But it’s irrelevant at this stage. The problem is that all of this evidence—the Baron’s second phone, Clive’s working on a Sunday, the fraudulent letter—is circumstantial. The only hard evidence says that I’m the one who’s guilty: the trades are on my account; I was online at the time they were made; and I have history.”