Game of Greed

by Charlotte Larsen

  “So, to sum up, if you stay on the right side of the track for the next twenty years, you’ll regain access to your funds. However, and this is the second and perhaps even more compelling reason, if you choose not to comply, I am afraid you might come down with something like…let’s see…liver failure. Which basically means you’ll have to spend the rest of your working life in a nursing home. Without any distractions, so as to maintain a healthy and calm environment for you. Your partners, of course, will be devastated, but they will be too busy taking over your clients to pay you a visit.” Francis looks her straight in the eyes. “How does that sound? To me, it sounds like living death. At forty-two!” He pauses. “Have I convinced you?”

  “You have,” the woman answers. “But how will I regain credibility if my name is smeared in tomorrow’s papers?”

  “That has been taken care of. I have made a few interferences on your behalf, which I can very easily undo, mind you. Your role in the body-parts business is extinct. Your name has disappeared from all files that the press have access to. You won’t be mentioned tomorrow when all hell breaks loose. Furthermore, I’ve had a chat with your key mob guy, and I managed to convince him that you laying low for a while is actually a good idea. For him, too. Obviously, there are a number of people who’ll be rather cross with you. But we both know that you thrive on danger. And besides, we’ll be babysitting you for a long, long time to come.”

  There is no way she will stay clean, he thinks as he walks away from the restaurant. No way. But I might recruit her. Just as a precaution and to give her a way to utilize her considerable skills. With the right encouragement, she’d as easily work for me by destroying greed than feeding her own avarice.

  His phone rings shortly before daybreak. Francis reaches across a tangled mass of blonde hair to pick it up. “Yes?” he says, none too politely.

  “Is this the Presbyterian Church?” a male voice asks.

  “Wrong number,” Francis snaps. But he hangs up immediately, jumps out of bed, and hurries down the corridor into his study. The moment he enters, another phone rings. He picks it up on the second ring.

  “Thomas! What’s up?”

  “I have some news. Are we sure this line is secure?”

  “Yes,” Francis answers, “we do daily sweeps at the moment. Go on. Tell me.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you’re not going to like this ” Thomas says reluctantly.

  “Get on with it, man,” Francis interrupts. “What is it?”

  “We’ve found out what the nature of the connection is and it’s a very strong connection, as a matter of fact between de Lingua and Schwartz. It would seem that Schwartz’s eldest son, James, went to Harvard with de Lingua back in the early nineties and they became inseparable for several years. And from what we have been able to find out, the old man grew very fond of young de Lingua. As he well might. De Lingua was studious, hardworking, a cautious drinker, and only moderately interested in women, whereas James fell very far from the tree. He was a gambler, hardly ever showed up for class, flunked his exams, and generally partied his way through college on Daddy’s money.” Thomas breaks for air, his excitement and pride quite obvious.

  “We know that Schwartz invited de Lingua along on vacations in a vain attempt to rein in his own son. There are no indications that this plan worked. But it must have created a bond between de Lingua and Schwartz because the Schwartz family began a tradition of visiting de Lingua’s family for Christmas holidays. They would usually fly over and spend a few days with the de Lingua family before retreating to a luxury bungalow on the south coast. Mind you, this was way before terrorism and tsunamis had rendered the island off limits. Back then, you still needed a fair amount of money to afford luxury holidays in Sri Lanka. Sorry, I digress.”

  Francis interjects, “It supports our suspicion that they knew each other, and it fits well with Schwartz’s calendar, where Jo found trips to Sri Lanka going back several years. Only we had no idea how close they really are…” Francis seems lost in thought.

  Thomas continues, too excited to allow Francis his deliberations. “It does. But everything changed on an icy winter’s night in 1999 when James managed to get himself killed in a car accident. Personally, I don’t think the world has missed out on much, but obviously, Schwartz was deeply distressed. His heir and eldest son dies in the bloom of youth. We have made the inference that Schwartz drew de Lingua even closer to him after that and that he himself became more ruthless. But that’s more of a psychological extrapolation than a conclusion based on hard evidence. But that’s not all.” Thomas hesitates.

  Francis snaps, “Continue!”

  “We are now certain that de Lingua killed Bhante Padman. Or rather, had somebody do it for him.”

  “Explain that to me!” Francis demands.

  “Bhante Padman, or rather, Asanta Darsha, which is his birth name, came from one of the families working the land of the de Lingua family. Therefore, he was considered to belong body and soul to de Lingua. Asanta’s family had belonged to the de Lingua family for generations. But somehow, Asanta must have been made of different stuff, or somebody must have come his way because, in his teens, he suddenly got up and left the only world he knew. We believe that Schwartz provided de Lingua with the intelligence that Asanta had joined the opposition I mean us. And for a proud, aristocratic landowner like de Lingua, realizing that one of his subjects has not only left the estate but joined the enemy must have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty. And deadly, too.”

  “Bloody hell, Thomas! How could we miss this? It’s been right in front of us all along. While we have been busy preventing Schwartz from destroying Smith, Turner, and Stevenson, he has been happily aiming at least one deadly blow at our organization, he has taken Jo out of circulation, and who knows how many other attacks he has prepared against us? I really didn’t think he would go that far. This is open warfare, not just a play of tactics and intellect.” Francis is clearly exasperated. “You know what this means, don’t you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Jo is in much more danger than we thought. We reckoned that de Lingua was a simple subcontractor, taking care of storage facilities, as it were. Now, this puts a whole new spin on why she has been gone for so long. I was hoping she was busy working de Lingua to find out about Wharton and any other little jobs he might be carrying out for Schwartz. But that is most likely not the case. Hell, perhaps he even had us figured out from the very beginning and has kept her imprisoned all this time! If she’s not dead already, she might be very soon.”

  His voice sharper, he says, “We need to find her, Thomas! Before it is too late! Do we have any clue as to where she might be?”

  “Not exactly, no. But if we can assume that she’s near de Lingua and that he hasn’t just dumped her somewhere, then we could try to intercept his phones. We might be able to locate him by traffic and perhaps something noticeable being said. It will require a lot of work, obviously, since we would have to hack into the local network, find all his phones, landlines and cells, and listen in on all of them. And then just pray that he’s not sophisticated enough to use Internet-based communication or voice-over Internet telephony. Because that’s a whole other ball game to get into. Very difficult. It’s much simpler with old-fashioned networks that move through predictable routers. At any rate, we’ll need a larger surveillance team. I can pull in everybody and have them do double shifts with minimal breaks. We can do that for up to a week. But I might need another six or seven people to cover all the lines. Can we get extra people?”

  “Leave that to me. I’ll get you what you need. Just get on with it.”

  They hang up. Francis slumps down in the chair. With closed eyes, he rubs his face with both hands, thinking about the situation, which is a lot less advantageous than he had thought only a short time ago. The tables certainly are turned now. And for all his hubris about closing down Schwartz’s initiatives one by one, Schwartz has been playing them all along. Francis really didn’t see this coming. “My
God,” he thinks, “how arrogant I have been, believing that it was our decision to have her infiltrate de Lingua’s organization. Now it would appear that he actually kidnapped her without any of us knowing. What have I done?”

  Dawn is breaking before he stands up and leaves the room.

  Chapter 18

  During the days, she busies herself by analyzing the situation. Lying in the lounge, shadows and sunlight moving across her eyelids, she finds that it’s a challenging exercise for her mind to examine the case without the benefit of pen, paper, or a computer to keep track of all the details and their connections. Day by day, she goes over all available information. Everything she remembers. Playing around with it. Connecting things in different, even entirely incongruous ways. And every day she discovers that she remembers just a little bit more, that extra detail that changes the overall picture slightly.

  Then one afternoon, she sits up with a start. De Lingua and Bhante Padman! There has to be a connection! She can’t explain why she thinks so, or even track the chain of details that led her to this conclusion. But she knows without a doubt that she is right. And if there is indeed a connection, chances are that de Lingua had something to do with Padman’s death. And if de Lingua had something to do with Padman’s death, he would most certainly know of Padman’s connection to their organization and even to the current operation. And if that is the case, she is in a lot more danger than she’d thought.

  Suddenly, everything makes sense. When she and Francis had been confident, arrogant even, in assuming they called the shots by infiltrating de Lingua’s lair, the only voice of caution had been Dhammakarati’s. A fellow countryman, someone who understood the Sri Lankan culture. And somebody who, by his earlier association with de Lingua, might be in as much danger as she is.

  But it’s still unclear to Jo why he keeps her here. He has done nothing to get to know her, to draw out information. He hasn’t even come to see her. Perhaps his objective or rather Schwartz’s objective is to keep her out of the loop, while they do…what?

  Nevertheless, she had walked right into a trap. De Lingua and Schwartz knew much more than anyone in her organization had believed. And their willingness to use violence to reach their goals may be limitless.

  Jo desperately needs an opening. Just a crack in which to make a move.

  On the eighth day of her stay, Pierre de Lingua’s young valet arrives at the bungalow with a dinner invitation. De Lingua has finally decided to see her, probably assuming she will be tender by now.

  The valet has passed by daily, sometimes several times a day. She suspects him of making up reasons to see her, or maybe he is just keeping an eye on her and then reporting back to his boss. Like the rest of the staff, whether houseboys or guards, he never smiles. The only smile she’s had in eight days was from one of the gardeners. And that seemed as illicit an experience as if he had actually kissed her. But this man, the personal and close valet of de Lingua, is the least smiling of the nonsmiling. He treats her dismissively underneath a very thin layer of respect. She can almost see the accumulated humiliations that generations before him have suffered. She picks up a strong energy of violence, aggression, and brutality in him. She senses that he would be a powerful force, if let free. Yet, at the same time, she senses that he sees right through her. Not that he can penetrate her thoughts or see what is on her mind. But rather, the way he looks at her strips away every layer of modern civilization and women’s liberation and leaves only her raw and aggressive sexuality. As violent as his. And quite as hostile.

  She wants him badly. The power of his sexuality is so strong that she can hardly trust her body when he’s around. And he knows it. She wants him to take her with his rightful brutality; she wants to sacrifice herself to him, without questions, without conditions. She wants to hit him, to hurt him, to damage him. She hardly recognizes this side of herself. In saner moments, during the day when he’s not there, she tends to put it down to kidnapper’s power, to the Stockholm syndrome. She knows that if she were to humiliate this overly confident and very proud man, it would only give him an excuse to unleash his deep hatred of women on her. And that is precisely the temptation he offers her. The risk he presents.

  Now he’s circling around her, forcing her to turn around unless she wants him standing behind her. She walks away from him. He follows. “De Lingua asks that you join him and a friend for dinner. Eight o’clock. Dress for cocktails.”

  She doesn’t answer. This is not an invitation but an order. Although what anybody hopes to gain from a civilized dinner and cocktails, she fails to see. She senses the pleasure he takes in ordering her around. She needs to readdress the balance, take control. “Make sure I get some other shoes. I can’t wear the ones in the wardrobe.”

  She feels him stiffen behind her, dangerously. “Of course, ma’am. You need another size?” She turns around, eyeing him coldly. If she were free, if he didn’t have this added power over her, would they be even? She wonders. Or is his misogynous hatred so strong that he would destroy himself before allowing a woman to defeat him?

  Later that evening, she’s seated opposite Wharton, with de Lingua at the far end of the table. If she hadn’t actually been here, she would have had trouble believing the situation. Having a civilized dinner with your captor and the man who is the direct reason for your captivity must be the height of sophistication. A gentleman’s warfare. Politely asking permission before maiming your opponent. Nevertheless, here they are. Wharton and Jo steal glances at one another. Wharton looks like a man who is under significant but not unmanageable pressure. She’s impressed by how calm and collected he is. That might come in handy when Francis gets his act together, which she has no doubt that he will. By now, she has no illusions about her ability to leave this place on her own. She will never be able to do that.

  While she knows who Wharton is, he would be excused for being fooled by the fact that she’s friendly with de Lingua. Although friendly might be stretching it. The tone of their conversation reminds her of cut-glass, old-school Englishmen delivering deadly insults that may only be deciphered by those went to one of the better public schools.

  They have finished the smoked meats with wild berries and roasted yams when de Lingua suggests they take dessert in the adjoining room. A houseboy pulls back her chair, and just as she gets up, she pretends to stumble, losing her balance. The houseboy immediately bends down to help her up, and de Lingua is by her side in an instant, either out of concern for her well-being or her resourcefulness. Their reactions are predatory, smooth, and very fast. That’s all she needs to know. No room for mistakes. She will not be given any second chances. If, indeed, a first.

  During dinner, de Lingua had instigated the conversation by constantly inquiring about their views on this topic or that. Safe and trivial topics that could neither harm nor help anybody. Jo marvels at his conversational skill. He is so charming, polite, and civilized with two people who are effectively his prisoners. Part of her hates him for taking away her freedom, for mocking her and Wharton in the face of his superior power. But part of her also fully enjoys the game, the manipulation, the mental showdown. While he definitively holds the physical power, she is at least as mentally strong as he is, if not stronger. Her years of training with the best have sharpened her mental flexibility and robustness to a point where she can envision her own death without missing a heartbeat. In theory, at least. It’s quite another matter when the threat is real and not just a figment of your mind. And it is certainly something else entirely in the depth of the dark, lonely nights.

  Nevertheless, one does need to watch a man who is capable of that kind of charade, she thinks as she enters the lounge on the arm of de Lingua, who by now shows extra courteousness.

  She decides to raise the stakes.

  While the two men are smoking cigars, she’s nursing a brandy. There is an almost amicable atmosphere in the room, which Jo breaks without warning. “Do you know Bhante Padman, Pierre?”

  De Lingua looks
up, his expression changing not the slightest, but his eyes glinting dangerously in the candlelight. If she had hoped to catch him out, she failed.

  “But yes, I most certainly do. Do you?”

  Jo smiles coldly at him. “No. I just helped him down from the rafters. You know he was killed, don’t you?”

  “Ah, yes, so I’ve heard.” De Lingua strokes his chin delicately, as if in deep reflection. “Strange that somebody should want to kill a monk. Perhaps he was being naughty?” He smiles, a cold-blooded predator, reminding her of a snake deadly, treacherous, but beautiful.

  Wharton looks from one to another, confused. But he seems too stunned to interrupt.

  “Well, if following your conviction is being naughty, then he might have been. But otherwise, I don’t think he did much harm.” Jo’s voice is almost a hiss.

  “Don’t be naïve, Jo. Or pretend to be. You know, and I know that Bhante Padman used to be Asanta Darsha of my estate in the Northern Province.” De Lingua pretends to be surprised. “Oh! You didn’t know? Ah, well, he was. And then he ran away. Without saying goodbye. Not very nice of him, do you think?”

  “You bastard!”