Due Diligence: A Thriller (51 page)

“How much do you want to spend?”

“I want something quiet. Not showy.”

“Plenty of hotels ’round here.”

“Out of the center.”

“I could take you to Swiss Cottage,” said the driver.

“Where’s that?”

“A few miles away. North London. My manor. Couple of hotels there. That be all right?”

“Okay,” said Rob.

“Suits me,” said the driver. He glanced at his watch. “Time to knock off, anyways.”

The cab swung left and then right, and came out into a big road with a wide grass divider down the middle. They went through a gap in the divider and started heading in the other direction. There was a huge park on the left. The cab motor growled now, picking up speed.

Rob thought about the moment he saw that gun coming out from behind the door. A black muzzle. He wasn’t even sure if he had recognized what it was. Something just made him throw himself against the door. Maybe it was Emmy’s shout. He just reacted—reflex, not thought.

He didn’t know how that man had come to be there. Once they’d made it out of JFK, he had thought, they were free. And a day later there was someone waiting in their hotel room. How? He couldn’t work it out. Had there been someone waiting to follow them at Heathrow? But if there had been, they’d have to have known that he and Emmy were flying there in the first place. And how could they have known that? Someone would have had to have seen which flight they boarded out of JFK. But to do that, someone would have had to have known they were going to JFK. But they didn’t know that themselves until just before they left Emmy’s apartment. Which meant someone would have had to have followed them from there. But he was fairly certain no one had trailed them. And besides, if someone had, that made no sense at all. If they were able to follow them out of Emmy’s apartment, why wouldn’t they have gotten to them then, in New York? Why let them get all the way London and then wait an extra day? That was crazy.

And how had they known exactly where he was? Not only the hotel, the exact room. He wasn’t even in the ledger under his real name. He was Bill Smith. There was no one who could connect the name Rob Holding with room 24 in the Bartlett Hotel. The only person who could do that was …

Rob froze.

Andrew Bassett?

Surely Bassett couldn’t be involved in this. He was the one Leopard was trying to buy. He was the one Rob was trying to help. But then …

Why not? Maybe Bassett
was
involved. Why was he so quick to do the deal with Leopard? Maybe Bassett was as deep into the murky side of this deal as anyone. Maybe he had his own reasons for wanting it to go ahead, and go ahead quickly. In fact, who was to say it wasn’t Bassett, not Wilson, who had instigated Greg’s death and the hunt for him that seemed to be following it?

Who else had known where he was staying? No one. Who else could have found him? Again, no one.

So what was he supposed to do now? He felt caged in, blocked at every exit. If both sides were after him, if Andrew Bassett was …

No. To be precise, he hadn’t talked to Andrew Bassett. He hadn’t given him the details of his location. Not directly. In fact, he didn’t even know whether Bassett got the message. He had given it to his secretary.

That made sense. Or more sense, anyway. They could have gotten to his secretary, told her to let them know if he turned up. Rob remembered her voice. A cold, efficient English voice. Could they have gotten to her?

He glanced at Emmy. He almost wanted to laugh. This was absurd. He didn’t know who he could talk to. He didn’t know who was on whose side. It was like a movie. Stuff like this didn’t happen in real life.

He thought through everything again. The conclusions were the same. He didn’t know who was on whose side. That meant he could trust no one. He would have to work on the assumption that everyone—within the Buffalo as well as the Leopard—was against him. It was insane, but he didn’t have a choice.

They had stopped. The cab was outside a hotel in a narrow street of terrace houses. Rob peered at it out of the window.

“Don’t like the look of it,” he said.

“Can’t be too picky this time of night,” replied the driver.

“Do you know any others around here?”

“If you like. Won’t be no different, though.”

The cab moved off. They drove around a couple of corners and came to another, similar-looking hotel in another street.

“Fine,” said Rob. “How much more do I owe you?”

He paid and they got out. The driver gave him one last quizzical glance and drove away. The cab went around a corner. The sound of the motor faded into the night.

Rob waited until it was gone.

“Aren’t we going in?” said Emmy.

“Not here.”

They walked back the way they had come and went to the first hotel they had stopped at.

*   *   *

The room was drab, shabby. The voltage in the light was low. The carpet was an old floral pattern of dark blue and violet and the floorboards creaked as he walked in. Rob felt safer once they were inside, once he had locked the door behind them, but it was a false sense of security, he knew. They had found them once, they had gotten into their room. What was to stop them finding him again?

At last they could talk. Emmy told him everything that had happened. She thought the man had kept her alive in case Rob didn’t come back and he was going to need her to get to him. He had said nothing else in the hour that he had held her captive, even when she tried to get him talking. Just told her to shut the fuck up, told her he’d kill her if she said anything when Rob came back.

“But you shouted.”

“I had to. I couldn’t let you just walk in.”

“What did he do?”

“He put the gun against my head. He only took it away when the door opened.” Emmy closed her eyes, remembering. “That was the worst moment of my life, seeing that door open. I was sure I was going to see you die.”

Rob squeezed her hand. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, waiting there, unable to warn him, unable to do anything but wait for the knock that she wished would never come.

“I should have kept shouting,” she said.

“No.”

“Of course I should. I should have kept shouting until you went away.”

“And he would’ve shot you. And what would I have done? I would have come straight in to see what happened.”

“I didn’t want to be a liability.” Emmy put her head in her hands. “I should never have come. You were right.”

“Emmy, are you insane?” Rob took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “You saved my life. If you hadn’t been here I would have been in that room by myself when he came. If we’d gone with my plan, right now, you’d be at your folks’ in Rochester and I’d be dead on the carpet in that hotel room. You know what? Your plan was better.”

Emmy smiled.

“You’re the bait, by the way. Didn’t I tell you that? You’re the bait.”

“Don’t push it, Rob.”

Rob sat back from her, raising his hands. “Hey, you’re the planmeister, Bridges. Just tell me what to do next.”

She shook her head. “You think Wally got out of there?”

“He should have. He wasn’t hurt. He probably ran like hell, just like us.”

“So what now?”

Emmy had worked out for herself, of course, that either Bassett or his secretary must have been the one who provided the information about where to find them. Rob said that he had decided to trust no one, either in the Leopard or the Buffalo. Yet he still had to get to Bassett. He had to put the information to him, challenge him to ignore it.

But how? Phone calls, e-mails, faxes, everything, Rob knew, to the CEO of a company like Buffalo would go through his secretary.

“You need someone like Nicole,” said Emmy. “Our receptionist at Lascelle. She’d make sure you got through to him.”

“Not every company’s lucky enough to have a Nicole.”

“True.”

“Besides, it may be the secretary who gave us away.”

Emmy frowned. “You know what you need? You need to get him at a public event, like a book launch or something. Something where there are people around and you can say what you want and there are witnesses so he can’t ignore it.”

“I don’t know if Andrew Bassett’s written any books lately.”

“Whatever. You need to get him in public.”

Rob thought about it. Emmy was right. If Bassett was involved in all this, then even if he had a meeting with him one on one, Bassett could simply listen and walk away and ignore everything Rob said. But if the allegations were made in public, if he demanded that BritEnergy investigate Grogon and ExPar in front of a roomful of people, with a couple of journalists or photographers in attendance, Bassett would have to do it.

But how would he get to him in public? You’d need to know where he was going to be, and when, and how to get access. In other words, you’d need to know his daily schedule. And that, of course, was with his secretary.

Or you’d need an event so public that everyone knew about it. An open event, one that didn’t have invitations, an event where people were expected simply to turn up at the time …

Rob broke into a smile. “Emmy, you’re a genius.”

“Don’t tell me he’s launching a book.”

No, it was better than that. Way better. It was the perfect event. It was already scheduled, Rob knew, to take place in two days’ time, right here, in London, in front of a roomful of journalists. And Andrew Bassett was going to be the star performer.

56

The call kicked off at nine-thirty
A.M.
Thursday Louisiana time. Originally it was meant to have been a brief discussion between Mike Wilson, Andrew Bassett, and Amanda Bellinger to cover off the last details of the announcement. But things never work like that. By now, the day before the announcement, the circle of people who knew about the deal had widened and everyone who could claim a right wanted to have a say. There were people sitting in all over the world. In Baton Rouge Mike Wilson, Doug Earl, Lyall Gelb, and Jackie Rubin were gathered around the speakerphone in Wilson’s office. Calling in from separate offices in New York were Amanda Bellinger and Pete Stanzy. In London were Andrew Bassett, Anthony Warne, Oliver Trewin, and Francesca Dillon, BritEnergy’s head of public affairs. Caspar Johnson, head of the Morgan Stanley team advising BritEnergy, was on a line from Vienna.

The two in-house public affairs people, Jackie Rubin and Francesca Dillon, were both angry because they had been told about the deal just the day before, only to discover that Amanda Bellinger had been working on a media strategy for a week. They also had the most to lose. Not too far in the future, they realized, they would probably be competing for the same job. Hence they were desperate to have some kind of impact, to change something, anything, to show how important they were. Amanda knew exactly what was going on and played them perfectly, taking a suggestion from each of them over trivialities and navigating skillfully around the important points, on which she had no intention of giving ground. Mike Wilson let Amanda handle it and tuned out as the discussion continued. After forty-five minutes he had had enough.

“Is there anything else we absolutely have to cover?” he demanded in the middle of some excruciating argument between Jackie and Francesca over the order of the contact numbers for the public affairs offices in the online press release.

Jackie and Francesca fell silent.

“All right,” said Wilson, “we’re done then. Amanda, you work out any outstanding details and let the others know.”

In New York, Amanda Bellinger smiled.

“Doug? Anthony?” said Wilson to the legal guys. “Anything critical from the legal side?”

“No, I think we’re all right at this end,” said Anthony Warne.

Doug Earl, sitting across the table from Wilson, nodded. Wilson glanced at Lyall Gelb. Gelb shook his head. He hadn’t said a word throughout the conference.

“Anything else from anyone that absolutely can’t be dealt with off-line?”

Silence.

“Okay,” said Wilson. “Andy, you want to say anything?”

Andrew Bassett cleared his throat. “I’d just like to thank everyone for all their hard work on this. The presentation looks excellent. Pete, thanks to you and your team at Dyson Whitney. Caspar, well done to your chaps as well. Amanda, what can I say? You’ve made Jackie and Francesca’s work a hundred times easier. Thanks to everyone. Now you just have to watch Mike and me mess it up!”

There were laughs all around.

“Well said, Andy,” said Wilson. “I second that. Thanks a lot, guys. Now, let’s do it! Andy, Mandy, you want to stay on the line, please? Everyone else, thank you very much.”

There were murmurs of good-bye. “Mike,” said Stanzy. “I’ll call you later.”

“Fine,” said Wilson. Doug Earl and Lyall Gelb were leaving his office. “I’ll need to talk to you later, Lyall,” said Wilson. Gelb nodded. Jackie was still hovering at the table, trying to say something about setting up time with him that afternoon to go over things. Wilson looked at her impatiently. Jackie persisted. “Jackie, I’ve got people on the line,” he said pointedly. “Talk to Stella.” At last she left. Wilson waited until she had closed the door. “Andy, you still there?”

“Still here, Mike.”

“Mandy?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Wilson, “I just hate crap like that. Everyone’s got to make sure their prints are on the paper.”

Amanda and Andrew Bassett laughed.

“Okay. Listen, Andy, I just wanted to check. Everything okay for you? You happy with the presentation?”

“Yes.”

“The FAQs?”

“Yes. Very good. Very happy.”

“The FAQs are a guide, right? We can ad-lib a little there. But the presentation we do exactly by the script. Agreed?”

“Absolutely, Mike.”

“All right,” said Wilson. “Mandy? Everything set?”

“Yes. Andrew, you start at three
P.M.
sharp. Mike, you go at ten, so you’re exactly synchronized. By the way, Mike, Bloomberg’s covering you live in New York.”

“That came through?” said Wilson. “Great. Well done, Mandy.”

“Andrew, there’ll be no live TV with you, but I believe Sky Business and CNN Business News will be shooting video. Have you done that before?”