‘I don’t know yet. North of three million.’
‘Nothing up front, same risks. If it doesn’t come off, nothing at the end of it, either. Five per cent.’
‘That’s a big slice of pie for a bit of old paperwork. Two, that’s it.’
‘Three and you have Grey Tony writhing at your feet.’
‘Deal.’
Magda popped the caviar and sour cream smothered blini she had prepared for herself into her mouth and reached across the table to shake Nat’s hand.
‘Mr Anthony R. Schliemann. The R stands for Randolph by the way. Randy Randolph? His sort are prime red-light bait, but Grey Tony is just too grey. I get to work and find out that Tony has a hunting lodge in the Sierras, complete with several square miles of bear’n’salmon-infested wilderness. He even has a collection of vintage Ansel Adams prints to hang between the dead animal heads.’
‘Ansel Adams?’
‘Photographer, classic Americana and they don’t come cheap. Also, he has an ex-wife to support – no kids, but—’
‘You sure? There’s a photo on his desk – boy and a girl in the back of a convertible.’
‘No shit? The douche keeps a picture of someone else’s kids on his desk. Creepy. Whatever, you can’t buy Tony’s lifestyle on a government salary. Payola? Too obvious – and you take a kickback, the supplier has you by the balls forever. Tony wouldn’t like that. I was getting nowhere, so I asked a financial whizz friend what she would do if she wielded a multi-billion-dollar budget and wanted to make herself a nice bonus. It goes like this, she said. You’re about to give a fat contract to a quoted company, you buy their shares, award the contract, the shares get marked up, jackpot. Now we’re into Tony’s game. He’s using proxies and offshores, but I know who to pay and San Hui have deep pockets. Pretty soon I find out that Tony is going the other way, too: he uses CFDs to bet against the share prices of companies he doesn’t give contracts to.’
‘And CFDs are what exactly?’
‘Contracts for Difference: it’s a way of betting that a share price will fall, handy if you know it’s going to because you’re their biggest customer and you’re about to give all their work to a competitor.’
‘Clever old Tony.’
‘He was even talking up the chances of companies he was going to shaft just so the price would fall harder. Never made much on any deal, but the drip drip drip totalled up nicely. Would it all stand up in court, with an army of attorneys stirring in several hundred pages of mumbo-jumbo to prove he didn’t have the first idea what the fuck was going on? I don’t know, but I established the pattern and he knew it. There’s enough to get him stomped all over by a team of granite-faced internal affairs types, anyway. He’d have been White Tony by the time they’d finished with him.’
Nat laughed. She was disappointed that the stick she was going to beat Grey Tony with wasn’t more substantial – a garish photograph or two would have been nice. But if this information had been used to force the NSA man’s hand once, it could do so again.
‘You’re a genius,’ Nat told her companion, who had tucked a pink napkin into her shirt collar and was cracking open the claw of a stupendously large lobster she had chosen from the tank.
‘I know. When are you seeing him?’
‘Tomorrow night – he’s taking me to Holworthy’s for dinner.’
‘He’s in LA?’
‘Giving face-time to some lucky West Coast contractors. He was slimy as hell on the phone. I think he may be planning to make a pass at me.’
‘You wouldn’t, would you?’
‘I might have, if you hadn’t come up with the goods.’
‘Another point for saving you from that!’ said Magda. ‘Jeez, Nat, I wish I had that sweet little body of yours, I could have made a fortune.’
‘You have made a fortune,’ Nat reminded her.
‘Sure,’ said Magda. ‘Well, I wish I had it anyway. You expecting to dedicate it to a lifelong relationship any time soon?’
‘Certainly not. It would cramp my style.’
Magda pointed a large finger at her. ‘You are a certified grade one booty-waggling, dick-snagging harlot and I love you for it. Speaking of making passes, you know, I’ve got to be more fun than Grey Tony.’
Nat saw that Magda was blushing – a splendid and magnanimous blush, like a fanfare played on a giant trumpet.
‘Shame on you, Magda Podolski, hitting on a defenceless Ukrainian girl so far from home,’ she said.
‘OK, I’ll park that one. So, Grey Tony Schliemann: what’s the plan?’
James snapped awake and felt the night stretching away like a dark wasteland at his back. Somewhere in that wasteland a man was kneeling while another cut the flesh from his shoulders. He sat up quickly to dispel the memory, and the blood throbbed behind his eyes.
Salif and Younes visited three times during the day: when he heard the scratch of the key in the lock, James noted the relative positions of the strip of light from the door and the square of light from the window, so he’d have some sense of the time. Already it was clear they were creatures of routine: three meals, each with its prescription of ibuprofen, penicillin and diazepam; then, just as the rhombus of fading yellow reached half way up the wall above his mattress, they arrived to escort him to Nazli’s den.
‘You got the toothbrush?’
James nodded. It had come with lunch – a well-used implement you would not readily put in your mouth, but a toothbrush nonetheless.
‘Now I’d like toothpaste. And a book.’
Nazli flicked at his lock of hair, then reached for his orange soda.
‘What is the block where I’m held actually for?’
‘What should I tell you – it’s just a guest wing.’
‘A guest wing? Like a motel, you mean. With razor wire. And no traffic. Though in fact three trucks came and went last night. Delivering the weekly shop, I suppose?’
‘Shall we get on?’ said Nazli.
James had decided not to pursue the pretence that the IPD400 didn’t work – there were better ways of delaying their progress, and he could easily convince Nazli that he was co-operating without actually doing anything of the kind. There were dangerous men at the compound, but the foppish tech sitting opposite was not one of them. In fact, James thought Nazli’s prospects of coming through this ordeal unscathed were not much better than his own. The longer they tinkered, the better for both of them.
He removed a side panel and pointed out three rows of tiny switches attached to the rack of circuit boards. There were twenty-seven in all: until you flipped the right combination, the IPD400 wouldn’t start up cleanly, but entered a continuous boot sequence. It was a crude but effective device because it looked like a software glitch: in James’s experience, software techs regarded meddling with a computer’s innards as a kind of low-grade sorcery.
‘How long do you think it would have taken you to find that?’
There was no answer, but Nazli recorded the key in his notebook – it could be re-set in a matter of seconds, but he didn’t need to know that. James booted up and told him to look away while he entered the password.
‘You’ll have to give it to me some time,’ Nazli complained.
James thought not. The IPD400, anyway, had a double lock: enter the first half of the password and it would let you in, but most of the critical code would be disabled and the system would fail to penetrate even the puniest defences.
‘Have a look around, get to know the OS and file structures. It’s cut-down Red Hat, as lean as I could make it. There’s a list of commands here – they’ll give you a good idea of what it can do. I’ll work on the Sun server – using IP-over-satellite is going to be a problem for us and I have a few ideas.’
The Sun was running a newish Solaris release with various cumbersome (and to James’s mind pointless) genuflections towards a Mac-style interface. The account set up for him did not grant access to the internet – no doubt Rakesh Nazli thought that rendered it sec
ure. He was wrong. James found and launched a copy of Emacs, a venerable and more or less ubiquitous text editor that, in the right hands, could flip every switch in the capacious conjuror’s holdall that is the Solaris operating system. He turned echo off, so the screen didn’t display his keystrokes, then started to type C code from memory. He found a standard compiler, instructed it to make an executable, and waited for the report. There were several errors, and he had to turn echo back on to find and correct them.
‘If I run Initiate manual trace,’ asked Nazli, ‘will it then merge the results with data from auto-traces on the same address?’
‘No,’ said James, and explained why, simultaneously checking that his program executed correctly. It was a naughty piece of work, a keystroke logger he’d written himself: every touch on the keyboard would now be recorded until an escape sequence was entered. However, to complete the job, he needed to get the operating system to start the program before the login page, so it could capture passwords. Only a sysadmin could perform that function, so James wrote a script that, when Nazli next logged in with sysadmin privileges, would present him with a dialog box which announced: POSSIBLE DATA CORRUPTION AT SECTOR 4222000.987.9800 – REPAIR OR CONTINUE? Unless Nazli was feeling especially paranoid, he would click Repair. Upon which, the keystroke logger would be incorporated into the Sun server’s boot routine. A few seconds later, Nazli would see a messagebox telling him: THE DATA WAS SUCCESSFULLY RECOVERED. PLEASE LOG OUT TO COMPLETE THE REPAIR. What that actually meant was: YOU JUST INSTALLED A SPY ON YOUR SERVER. NOW LOG IN AGAIN SO I CAN CAPTURE YOUR PASSWORD.
James exorcised the Sun of the evidence of what he’d been up to. The script was a weak link, but it couldn’t be helped. He looked around him. On a shelf below the ranks of monitors was a pile of coiled ethernet cables. He stretched out his leg and found that he could hook them with his foot and pull them closer. When he had them almost below his chair, he said: ‘Can you get the temperature down? I don’t feel well and it’s like a furnace in here.’
Nazli got up and crossed to the window. James picked up the cables and tucked them into his waistband. The air conditioning unit started up. It sounded like a handful of bolts in a washing machine.
‘You’d think that whoever can spend a hundred grand on DP kit could afford a decent air conditioner,’ James said disagreeably. ‘I feel sick. I need to lie down.’
He stood up, then doubled over the coiled cables at his waist and groaned. Salif was summoned and James swayed through the door, giving a fair imitation of a man about to be sick. His guards wasted no time getting him back to the guest wing, as Nazli called it. As they crossed the compound, James surreptitiously inspected the black plastic cowlings perched like a row of hunched ravens on the roof.
Nikolai Kocharian was greeting his two favoured lieutenants at Marrakech airport. Mikhail was a man to whom the word squat did no justice – he looked like a cartoon version of his boss. His youth had been spent in state gyms in the company of weightlifters who were at least a rank better than him at the only thing he was good at. He wasn’t exactly bitter about it, but he knew that when people looked at him they saw a low-built man with thighs of improbable girth, and he would have liked the consolation of being able to tell them, if the opportunity arose, that he had a clutch of Olympic weightlifting medals to his name.
Relative to Mikhail, Anton was tall, even elegant; but the effect was spoiled by his small black eyes and the grimace that played at the corners of his mouth. He was the fruit of a liaison between his Ukrainian mother and a Scottish production-line engineer who was working on contract at the Kamaz commercial vehicles plant in Kiev, where Nikolai and Natalya’s stepfather was also employed. Anton’s errant father had enough Presbyterian severity in his soul to prompt him to atone for his fling by paying for Anton to read Business Studies at Dundee University. Anton had subsequently put his business skills to work by producing and starring in a series of pornographic movies called Bitches of the East, and the knowledge that he was, demonstrably, a stud still made itself evident in the come-and-get-me-girls poses he struck whenever on public display.
Nikolai had told them that their trip to Morocco was a holiday, so they had dressed accordingly: Mikhail wore a scarlet CSKA Sofia football sports shirt that he had tucked into his black tracksuit bottoms in order to hide the fact that it would otherwise have hung to his knees; Anton sported cream chinos and an orange short-sleeved shirt with ‘Let’s Play!’ emblazoned at a jazzy angle across the back. Mikhail carried a Nike sports grip, while Anton had acquired a counterfeit Louis Vuitton wheeled suitcase.
‘Hello, Boss,’ Anton said. ‘We got here.’
Mikhail agreed by means of the quiet grunt that constituted the larger part of his vocabulary.
‘Where the fuck did you get that suitcase,’ Nikolai said, ‘you look like a poof.’
‘Louis Vuitton,’ said Anton. He pronounced it carefully, voo-it-on.
‘Do yourself a favour. Give it to the next shirtlifter who comes chasing after your skinny butt, huh?’
Mikhail chuckled, a surprisingly melodious sound, while Anton’s grimace blossomed into a full-blown scowl. Nikolai slapped him on the back and led them to the taxi rank. As they drove into Marrakech, Nikolai recognised in Anton’s demeanour the same mingled alarm and disgust he had felt the previous Friday on the journey into town with his sister, and it pleased him now to be able to adopt her role of cosmopolitan traveller, at ease in a thousand exotic destinations.
‘You give money to the beggars here, it’s normal,’ he informed them.
Mikhail frowned. This was a side of his boss he hadn’t seen before.
‘It’s fucking hot,’ he observed.
‘Of course it’s fucking hot,’ said Anton, ‘we’re in fucking Africa. What’s the deal, Boss?’
Nikolai tapped his nose conspiratorially and pointed at the taxi driver. Anton shrugged and looked out of the window. Mikhail glowered at the driver until eventually the man looked over his shoulder. ‘You have beautiful holiday in Marrakech, sir!’
Mikhail maintained his glare for a few seconds, then turned to the window and folded his arms in a meaningful way.
‘You want some nice girls, boss?’ the driver asked. ‘I fix you very nice girls.’
‘Could be—’ said Anton.
‘No, we don’t,’ Nikolai interrupted.
‘Maybe you like some boys. Real pretty boys in Marrakech, boss, look just like girls!’
‘The fuck he saying?’ Mikhail demanded.
‘Forget it,’ said Nikolai. He was thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have invited these two out to Marrakech. Anton was already thinking of his dick, and when Mikhail folded his arms like that it was generally to stop himself throwing a punch.
They arrived at the Holiday Inn, where Nat had booked them a room – explaining to Nikolai that she didn’t think the Riad was right for a pair of migrants from the Kiev underworld.
‘Get yourselves smartened up and meet me in reception at nine-thirty,’ Nikolai told them. ‘We’re going to the casino – there’s a man who hangs around there. I need to check him out.’
Two hours after nightfall, James took the screwdriver he had purloined from Nazli’s desk into the shower room and inspected the vent in the ceiling: a slatted plastic plate with slotted bolt-heads set a few inches in from each corner. The bolts would fasten to the black plastic cowling above, so that the two parts clamped the flat roof: undo them, and you could remove the lower plate and push the cowling aside, leaving a hole that should be wide enough to climb through. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reach them. The shower room was just a few feet across, though. Climbers shimmied up narrow rock-funnels just by bracing themselves against the walls. He tried it. Maintaining the starting position was easy; moving up, less so. After five minutes’ uncertain effort, he was no more than three feet off the ground. He felt ridiculous, huffing and grunting from his lowly perch. Sam would have told him that he should run up the wall, using the balance and ener
gy of his chi to transform forward into vertical momentum at the point where floor became wall – no doubt informing him that only a fool would consider trudging up as he seemed bent on doing. Thinking of Sam’s indignation brought a spasm of laughter to his stomach, and he lost his grip and fell to the concrete floor.
Five minutes later he was looking down with a certain sense of satisfaction. He wasn’t going to race anyone up the north face of the Eiger, but he was learning the knack. He anchored himself with his feet, then located the screwdriver in the slot of one of the screw-heads. The blade was too small and the bolts tightly fastened – he got two of them out, but the others wouldn’t budge. He reached up, forced two fingers between the slats of the vent and pulled. The plastic broke with a loud snap. Too loud. One of the dogs barked. He climbed down, went to the window and watched the dog circle and settle, then went back to the vent.
He fiddled with the stubborn bolts for half an hour, then slid down to the floor, furious at being balked in this stupid way, like some cack-handed home improver defeated by a bit of awkward plumbing. He forced himself to do a t’ai chi form, then sat and thought. There was no way he could break though the vent without setting off the dogs. OK then, set them off.
He stripped and threw his clothes on the mattress, hid the screwdriver in the toilet and went back up the wall. He anchored himself and gripped the vent on either side, then swung out. His weight ripped the plastic vent from the ceiling and James crashed to the floor in a shower of concrete chips, with the vent wrapped around his fingers.
The dogs went berserk, their howls and barks ripping through the silence. James stuffed the vent under his mattress and banged hard on the door. He kept banging until he heard his guards arrive, then leaned against the wall, rolling his head from side to side as the dogs roared beneath his window.
‘Let me go!’ James shrieked. He barked in demented imitation of the dogs. He raised his voice a pitch and screamed: ‘Let me go you bastards!’
The older one, Salif, wrestled James onto the mattress while his partner hovered, AK47 at the ready. Salif cuffed him open-handed across the top of the head. James set up a low whimper and curled into the foetal position. A gratified expression came over the younger guard’s face.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 10
