by Peter James
BILLIONAIRE
PETER JAMES
PAN BOOKS
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
THE HOUSE ON COLD HILL
1
DEAD LETTER DROP
ATOM BOMB ANGEL
FOR ALEX, DEBBIE AND KATEY
FOREWORD
They say timing is everything in life. Being in the right place at the right time. I’ve certainly come to believe that. I met my wife, Lara, on a ski-lift in France, one of those ‘bubbles’ – a gondola contraption like a mini-cable car. If she or I had taken the one after or the one before – they were separated by thirty seconds – we’d have probably never met.
I’ve often wondered if timing was the reason why Billionaire and my two novels before it – Dead Letter Drop and Atom Bomb Angel – failed to set the literary world alight when they were first published back in the early 1980s. Either that or they – erm – weren’t that great! Taking the latter view, I kept the books out of print for three decades, and it was only after numerous requests from many of you, my lovely readers, complaining that the prices for the originals on eBay and such put them out of reach, that I relented and allowed them to be republished.
But let me try to defend myself, first, with the timing. From as far back as I can remember I wanted, above all else, to be a published novelist. From around the age of eight I began writing my thoughts into a red notebook I kept beside my bed. I found it a while ago in the bottom of a trunk and it was full of such great pearls of wisdom as, ‘Life is a bowl of custard. It’s all right until you fall in.’ I returned it to the bottom of the trunk!
I wrote three novels in my late teens and early twenties, including one I was convinced was the Great British Novel. All three are at the bottom of that same trunk, where they will remain until the mice have digested them. But the Great British Novel got me an agent in New York, who signed me up at the age of twenty. That was a huge moment for me – to realize that someone out in that real publishing world actually believed in me.
I then spent the best part of a decade writing and producing film and television, including being almost entirely responsible for a comedy movie called Spanish Fly, starring Terry Thomas and Leslie Philips, which the eminent film critic Barry Norman reviewed on his BBC Film Night programme, calling it, ‘Probably the least funny British funny film ever made, and without doubt the worst British film since the Second World War.’ The review prompted my then wife to say to me, ‘When are you going to write that novel you’ve always been dreaming about and talking about?’
That very week there was an article in The Times that said there was a shortage of spy thrillers being written. So I had a go at writing one, Dead Letter Drop, and to my absolute amazement it was accepted for publication by the eminent British publishing house WH Allen. To my even bigger amazement, the book totally didn’t sell! They had given me a two-book contract, and I wrote a second spy thriller, Atom Bomb Angel. That did equally badly!
My publishers were quick to assure me it was not the quality of the writing that held the books back; rather it was all down to unfortunate timing. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s fault for bringing in perestroika and glasnost. The writing was on the wall for the Soviet Union, and in just a few years that Big Wall in Berlin would be coming down. The era of the Russians as the bad guys was coming to an end, so nobody really cared about spy thrillers anymore. That was what my publishers told me.
I needed to find something else to write about, something that might capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s, and something that might appeal to a wide spread of readers. Money was the topic, I decided – everyone was fascinated by money back then. It was the era of the Porsche-driving, champagne-swilling yuppies, the era of consumption more conspicuous than ever before. One of the defining phrases of the 1980s came from Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in the film Wall Street – ‘Greed is good.’ So I wrote my third novel, Billionaire, a thriller about greed, ambition, money and success – with a fair smattering of sex and action. But it didn’t sell any better than the first two. Maybe the world was becoming saturated with books and films about money and greed. Or maybe, as I suspect is closer to the truth, this was a book on which I was still cutting my teeth, still learning my craft. So, dear reader, please read it with that in mind and forgive me its deficiencies!
But there is a postscript that perhaps vindicates me – even if just a little. In 2014 Dead Letter Drop came back into print, and to my astonishment went to number four on the Sunday Times bestseller list. But even more incredibly, in May 2015 it went to number one in Russia!
See, timing is everything!
Peter James
Sussex
‘How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.’
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (1819–1861)
1
Two of the men driving eastwards down the M4 Motorway, near London’s Heathrow Airport, were driving particularly badly. One drove badly because he was a rotten driver. The other, who was normally a good driver, was distracted by the blonde girl in the seat beside him who was trying to remove his trousers.
It was five past one on a blazing hot early June afternoon. Both men were late. One was on his way to his office in the City of London. The other was on his way to kill someone not very important.
‘Move over, you bastard, move over!’ Baenhaker pushed down on the horn rim with the palm of his right hand. ‘Oh move over, why can’t you just move over?’ He pushed the horn rim twice more, holding it down each time for several seconds, holding it down so hard that the thin metal cut into his hand.
‘You pig,’ declared Baenhaker. ‘You bloody pig!’ He pulled the head-lamp switch on the dashboard full out, pushed it back in, then pulled it out again. In the bright sun, there was only the faintest gleam from the lights that reflected on the gun metal grey paintwork of the Porsche in front of him. He pushed the light switch back in. ‘Fucker!’ he shouted uselessly through his windscreen, and yanked the switch back out. It came away in his hand; he tried to replace it, dropped it, and it rolled away somewhere underneath his feet.
Baenhaker glanced at his watch: one-five; over half an hour late already, not yet past Heathrow Airport, and stuck behind this bastard in his Porsche crawling along in the fast lane. He banged the horn rim down hard and held it there for several more seconds before releasing it. He was now convinced that the driver in front was blocking his path deliberately. His rage caused him to start breathing in short sharp bursts; he looked at the red ribbon on his speedometer, flickering between forty and forty-five miles per hour, and wondered whether to risk getting booked by passing on the inside. He decided not to; he knew this motorway was always crawling with police.
Baenhaker’s Volvo, with its faded red paintwork and worn upholstery, was living testament to the car company’s claims about the longevity of its products; this particular one had survived one hundred and thirty-seven thousand miles and six owners since it had first rolled out of the Cardiff dealer’s showroom. Baenhaker had bought it neither for its looks nor its durability nor its history; he had bought it because it had been all that he cou
ld afford. Whenever he saw any young man of similar age to himself driving a smart car, he became eaten up with jealousy. He had not yet seen the driver of the Porsche, but he had already decided that he was young. He had also decided that, whoever he was, he hated him more than he had ever hated anyone before in his life. He was not yet to know it, but in a few moments he was going to have good reason to magnify that hatred by several hundred per cent.
‘You shmuk!’ he yelled. He pushed the horn down hard, and held it there. This time, he decided, he was going to keep it pressed down until the Porsche moved over.
Alex Rocq gripped the small three-spoked wheel tightly. The refrigerated air in the cockpit of the Porsche 911 Turbo had a rarefied smell of new leather and expensive perfume. Four Blaupunkt speakers delivered the crystal-clear, graphite-equalized, DBX expanded rendering of Elton John’s solemn farewells to a Yellow Brick Road.
‘Not here!’ said Rocq, wriggling and trying to move upright in his seat. He took his right hand off the steering wheel, and tried to refasten his fly zipper. He put his hand back on the wheel, and her hand pulled the zipper down again. At the same time, her tongue burrowed into his left ear.
‘Winkie wants to come out,’ she said.
‘Amanda, I can’t drive.’
‘Why don’t you pull over?’
‘I have to get to the office. Ouch!’ A very cold hand slid down inside the front of his trousers. He was vaguely aware, a mile or so down the motorway ahead, of some obstruction in the fast lane: an orange hazard light was flashing. Above the music was another noise, something persistent. Her mane of expensively highlighted blonde hair descended onto his lap. ‘Come on, stop it!’ He tried to push her off with his elbow; that noise persisted. He glanced at the speedometer. ‘Christ!’ Forty miles per hour in the fast lane. A sharp pain: ‘Owww!’ he yelled. ‘You’re hurting!’
Rocq looked in the mirror; there was on old Volvo with its lights blazing, right on his tail. He pressed the accelerator down and as the Porsche surged forward, it began to move over into the middle lane. ‘Sit up, Amanda, for God’s sake – someone’s passing us.’
‘Mesugener!’ shouted Baenhaker, as the Porsche suddenly pulled away from him, as if taunting him, and then moved over into the middle lane, as if to really rub it in. ‘What the hell do you think you’re bloody playing at?’ he yelled. He changed down into third gear, and flattened the accelerator. The steady ticking of his engine turned into a hard-working roar, but for some moments he made no headway against the Porsche. Then the Porsche suddenly slowed down, and Baenhaker began to draw level. As he did so, he removed his left arm from the steering wheel, opened up his index finger and middle finger, and began to flick V-signs at the driver of the Porsche for all he was worth. But the driver did not notice him; he appeared to Baenhaker to be in a trance.
‘Bloody well concentrate on your driving!’ yelled Baenhaker. Then he saw a mane of blonde hair rise up from the driver’s lap, and the smiling face of a beautiful girl look up at the driver, and say something.
Baenhaker’s eyes became transfixed on the girl’s face. Already contorted with anger, his own face now assumed an expression that would have opened the bowels of a rabid vampire bat. The girl he was staring at was the girl whom he had been planning to propose to this past weekend. They should have spent the weekend together in the country. Today was Monday; on the Thursday, she had telephoned him to say that the weekend was off because she had suddenly been called to an international architects’ conference in Cologne. He had never been to an architects’ conference, but what he was looking at didn’t look much like an international architects’ conference to him.
He sat, stunned. He mouthed, ‘Bitch,’ but no words came out. She didn’t even notice him. Suddenly, the Porsche accelerated off again. He turned his eyes back to the road. Less than fifty feet in front of him, and completely stationary, was a tarmac-spreading lorry; along its back was a massive flashing arrow that pointed to the left. At seventy miles per hour, fifty feet wasn’t very far.
Baenhaker stood on the brake pedal, and froze. The Volvo slewed to the right, ripping into the central reservation barrier; the front left of the car slammed into the rear of the lorry. As if on some nightmare ride at a fairground, Baenhaker felt the rear of the car rise up, and keep rising, and then over, slowly, very slowly, everything suddenly went into slow motion, and he knew he was going to die.
Then everything speeded up again. The roof smashed into the tarmac, and the windscreen exploded in front of his eyes; fragments of glass rushed in, lashing him like winter rain. Then up again, and over. He was aware of lorries, cars, screechings, roarings, silence for a moment, followed by the bang of a thousand dustbin lids; all four doors flew open and there was rushing wind, then over again, then sliding, sliding like a mad thing, now downwards, down a dip, then stopping dead. Baenhaker carried on travelling forwards; his chest snapped the steering wheel in half; his forehead ripped open on the windscreen trim.
He hung, upside down, half-impaled on the steering column, with his head out through where the windscreen had been, supported by several inches of wet mud, his eyes staring at a grassy bank. He was still alive somehow, he knew; but the pain was terrible; and then, he realized, there were more pains, so many pains, one after the other, all getting worse, and he began to panic, for he knew, again, that he was going to die. He could feel his life ebbing away and he raged silently at himself, and then began to feel sad, and then raged again. He didn’t want to die, not here, not alone in this ditch, not with Amanda with that creep in his Porsche, whoever he was, and her not even knowing that he was here, not even caring a damn. It was ebbing away; he tried to stop it, but he knew it was no use. He lapsed into unconsciousness.
Baenhaker might have felt a great deal better had he known that in a few weeks’ time instructions would be issued, by the highest authority he knew, for the driver of that Porsche to be tracked down and killed.
2
The gunboat cut through the ink-black water of the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The water was flat now, with just a slight swell; the storm that had raged for the past two days had finally died at dusk.
The commander of the gunboat, Nasir Hoos, stood beside the pilot on the bridge and looked at his watch. It was 1.30 a.m. At 5.00 the sun would appear and within an hour, the sea would become a glorious cobalt blue. But right now it was darker than the oil in the supertankers they were out here to protect: an average of three supertankers an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, churned down through the Strait and turned right for the Western World. There was one now; he could see its lights. It was about five miles off, and coming across behind them.
The radar operator looked up from the screen. ‘I’m picking up something three miles to starboard, coming this way very slowly.’
Hoos nodded. Probably a fishing dhow; the night seas were sprinkled with them, badly lit and badly sailed. He looked out of the window, squinting his eyes to cut out the cabin light. ‘Three miles did you say, Hamoud?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t see anything. Probably a damned dhow without lights. Better take a look.’ He turned to the pilot. ‘Starboard thirty.’
‘Starboard thirty, Sir,’ the pilot repeated, turning the wheel. ‘Thirty of the starboard wheel on, Sir.’
The fast boat swung round quickly. Hoos waited a few moments and then gave the command to straighten out: ‘Steady.’
‘Steady, Sir. Course zero five degrees.’
‘Steer zero five.’
Hoos took his night-vision field-glasses and went out onto the deck; he put the glasses to his eyes and stared ahead, but could see nothing. The warm breeze gently whipped his face. He waited for five minutes, then raised his field-glasses again. He could make out the shape of a dhow, a fairly large one, about two miles dead ahead, and carrying no lights.
‘Gun posts,’ commanded Hoos. He never took chances on night patrol. The boat had four gun posts – twin MG machine
guns mounted fore and aft, and twenty-millimetre cannon also fore and aft. ‘Slow ahead. Search lights,’ he said, after another eight minutes.
Five hundred yards of ocean in front of them erupted into a bright glare under the beams of the eight halogen search lights. Seconds later, the dark hull of the dhow rocked into the centre like an eerie stage prop in a pantomime. The forward guns swivelled and trained on the dhow and, with its speed cut to five knots, the gunboat cautiously began to circle the dhow in a large arc.
Hoos switched on the loud-hailer. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. Come up on deck and identify yourselves.’ The voice cracked out over the water; the dhow remained silent. As they closed in, they saw that the sail was in tatters and the mast was broken and tilting crazily; there was no sign of any movement. As they came around the stern of the dhow, they saw two figures slumped on the rear deck. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. You are in territorial waters of Oman. Anyone who is below deck is to come up immediately and identify himself.’
The silence persisted. ‘Take her alongside,’ said Hoos. ‘Stand by to board.’
The pilot brought the gunboat beam-to-beam with the dhow, and six naval ratings and a Petty Officer jumped aboard. Two secured the two vessels together and the other five went below, Webley revolvers drawn. After a few minutes, the Petty Officer came back up on deck and addressed Hoos, who remained standing on the gunboat.
‘Two below, Sir, two on deck; all dead. They are all in the uniform of the Israeli Navy, Sir.’
‘What?’
‘They’re Israeli sailors, Sir.’
Israeli sailors? Hoos felt a cold shiver run through him. What, he wondered, were Israeli sailors doing on a fishing dhow in the middle of the Persian Gulf? Something was wrong here, very wrong indeed. Piracy in the Gulf was not uncommon; boats with murdered crews he had seen before, several times. But this was different. He jumped onto the dhow, examined each dead sailor carefully, and then looked all around the deck and the squalid cabin area. There was no sign of violence, only the remains of an unfinished meal on four plates – an extremely nasty-looking dried-up stew.
