An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected

by Schäfer, Fred

  “That’s quite a mouthful of straightforward legal stuff.”

  “Quite simple, it is a bit like buying a second hand car.”

  “Bought as seen and driven.” Tony enjoyed Nancy’s story.

  “As it turned out,” Nancy continued, “the judge had to explain to each one of the buyers that he had received exactly what he had bought according to the contract he had signed.”

  “Fair enough. But why did they sign such a – forgive me for saying so – stupid and one-sided contract in the first place? Didn’t they show the contract to their lawyers first?”

  “They did. And, of course, their lawyers advised them not to sign the contract.”

  “And?”

  “I told them if they didn’t sign they wouldn’t get the paintings.”

  “And?”

  “Of nineteen prospective buyers thirteen walked away and six signed, paid and became the owners of beautiful paintings.”

  “I can’t really feel sorry for them,” Tony commented.

  “No! Don’t! They were, and still are, rich and corrupt politicians and there is no need to feel sorry for them. They became victims of their greed.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  “Why?”

  “I was a bit concerned that you might have done something bad.”

  “Something bad ... like what?”

  “I don’t know, just something – you know, really, really bad.”

  Nancy thought about what Tony had said before she replied, “Like, for example, selling a mansion at the Cote Azure on behalf of the former mayor of Marseilles for three million euros and keeping every cent of it?”

  “I vaguely remember that case,” Tony replied. “I lived in Paris for a while, years ago.” His voice displayed no emotions, except, perhaps, a slight inquisitiveness.

  “Well, that’s bad, really, really bad; isn’t it?”

  “Well … no. I don’t think that was really, really bad … was it?” Tony replied hesitantly.

  “Some people think it was.”

  “If my memory serves me right, I would say there was an element of justice involved.”

  “Justice! Robbing a man of three million euros, you would call that justice?”

  Tony was unyielding. “Yes. I think it was justice. If I remember correctly, I believe that the mayor you talked about is now in prison because when the police investigated the sale of his mansion – or the robbery, as you put it – they discovered that he had bought the mansion with money which he had made over a period of two decades by smuggling hundreds of women and children from Africa to France.”

  “I didn’t know he was in prison. But what’s so bad about helping women and children escape from poverty?”

  “Nothing, if that’s all you do. But didn’t he sell them into prostitution and slavery? – and that’s bad, very bad.”

  “Okay,” Nancy conceded, “If that’s what he did you are right, of course. So, maybe the man who sold the mansion and pocketed the money did nothing really bad. I am wondering who that man could have been.”

  Tony was left with a problem. He was the man who, five years earlier, had sold the mansion to an Arabian sheik and then arranged for the money from the sale to be transferred to his bank account in the Bahamas. At the time, the sale of the mansion was a big story in the French media. They loved it and speculated for weeks about who might have pulled off such a rip off. Even a famous Italian con artist who had been dead for two years was suspected of the crime. Until today the French police have no idea how it all happened. It had been Tony’s most daring and most successful coup in France. Why, Tony was wondering, did Nancy bring up this event? Could she know that he was the man behind it? This seemed impossible. But why did she bring it up? Was it just a coincidence?

  “What are you really saying?” he asked.

  “I am not so sure what I am saying…,” Nancy conceded. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind meeting that man one day. He must be a hell of a good salesman.”

  “Are you thinking perhaps that the two of you would make a good couple? You selling paintings and him selling mansions. Very interesting.”

  “What an intriguing thought!”

  12

  Mike, Christina and two forensic experts spent two and a half days in the dead publisher’s factory. The factory was guarded by six police officers. In addition, but unknown to the police, two women were observing the neighbourhood of the factory. They were the same women who had observed the events which led to the deactivation of the bombs. They worked with hidden cameras and changed their appearances every few hours. They changed cars, dresses, hats, wore wigs, walked past the building dressed up as men, as couples, as housewives.

  These women were not interested in what the police did, they were trying to discover who, apart from themselves, was also observing or trying to observe what was going on.

  After the two bombs were deactivated, the evening of the same day, Mike was sitting in a room together with the two women, an elderly lady and a man in his forties. The elderly lady and the man were the same two people who had helped a woman and her partner to escape to Australia a few days earlier. Mike studied the video recordings which his media contacts had made after the explosion at the publisher’s apartment. The recordings showed inquisitive people. Amongst all the people that he could see in the recordings, he was not able to identify anyone who might have focused primarily on him or who otherwise seemed suspicious. The focus of the people shifted from minute to minute, often from second to second, to what seemed most spectacular. When two fire fighters ran from one side of the building to the other, all eyes followed them. When a minute later massive flames shot up from a spot on the building which until then had seemed inactive, their attention switched immediately from the fire fighters to the flames. Mike was looking for someone whose attention did not shift, someone whose attention remained focused, either on a particular part of the building or on him or on something else. But he was not able to identify anyone.

  “So far we have absolutely nothing to go on,” he said. “Our forensics did not come up with anything that we could relate to other crimes; no fingerprints, no DNA, no bullets with markings similar to bullets that have been used in other shootings, no bomb fragments that are sufficiently similar to other known bombs, nothing.”

  “Did your people find anything of interest in the factory?” the man in his forties asked.

  “Nothing so far.”

  “What exactly are they looking for?”

  “Something that someone would prefer to see destroyed.”

  “That’s not a very specific thing to look for.”

  “You’re right. That’s about as vague as you can be. Ideally I’d hope that they would find a few pages with text of a spectacularly interesting nature. Perhaps about a crime.”

  “So, they are looking for paper,” the man in his forties said.

  “Not necessarily,” the elderly lady added.

  “No, not necessarily,” Mike agreed. “I would say they are looking for information, which these days can mean an awful lot. It could mean paper, a thumb drive, chips, tapes, hard disks and at least another half a dozen hardware pieces that are commonly used to store information.”

  “And probably a few more dozen hardware things which are not commonly used,” one of the two women said.

  “Exactly,” Mike agreed. “What we are looking for could be a coded message which the publisher, in an attempt to hide it, has scribbled on the toilet wall.”

  “Did you find messages on the toilet walls?” the woman asked.

  “No, that was just the most extreme example I could think of.”

  For several minutes nobody spoke. They all had a glass of red wine on the table in front of them; there was also wine in one of the two bottles on the table. Most of the glasses were almost empty. The elderly lady took the bottle and distributed the remaining wine evenly amongst them. They looked at each other, lifted their glasses and emptied them. They were in no hurry. Every
thing took place in a measured way.

  Mike got up and said, “I think we will be at the factory until the end of the week at least. I would appreciate it if you could keep watching the neighbourhood. If you see something of interest, send me the agreed one letter text message.”

  “D for danger and W for someone is watching,” one of the women said.

  Mike nodded. “Thanks. Time for me to go to bed.”

  Everybody nodded. They all knew Mike did not function well if he didn’t have enough sleep; three to four hours was the minimum he needed, five hours was better and six hours was perfect and that was what he meant when he talked about a good night’s sleep. It was shortly before midnight. By the time he was home it would be half past midnight. He would get up at six o’clock. He was looking forward to a reasonable five to six hour night.

  Had he known what awaited him at his place, he might not have gone home; he might have spent the night in a hotel instead.

  13

  Daniel Brice asked, “Who is this guy?”

  “His name is Tony Jackson. According to his passport he is an American, fifty two years old and lives in New York.”

  “What else?” commissaire Daniel Brice asked the research assistant.

  “That’s all we know about him.”

  “Has he ever been in France before?”

  “Not according to our records.”

  “In other words, we don’t know. Our records are shit, but even if they were accurate and complete, he could have been here with a different passport and a different name.”

  “Did he come across as a person who might have several passports?” the assistant asked.

  “He came across as the fastest and most dangerous man that I have met in a long time,” the commissaire replied.

  “Do you want me to talk to our contacts in New York and see if they know more about him?”

  “No, not yet. They would want to know what we have against him.”

  “What do we have against him?”

  “My gut feeling; nothing more.”

  “How bad?”

  “Just bad; every cell in my body tells me that he is going to be trouble.”

  “There are lots of cells in the human body,” the assistant remarked.

  “How many would you say?”

  “Tens of trillions or hundreds of trillions or maybe thousands of trillions. I don’t think anybody ever counted them. And, by the way, most of them are bacteria.”

  “An awful lot of trouble. An awful lot of bacteria.”

  After a short pause the assistant asked, “Why did you pick on him in the first place?”

  “We didn’t pick on him, we picked on his girlfriend.”

  “What do you have against her?”

  “Nothing really. We wanted to give her a message, wanted to let her know that we hadn’t forgotten her and that we would keep an eye on her.”

  “Did she get the message?”

  At this point commissaire Daniel Brice decided his conversation with the research assistant had gone far enough. He hadn’t told him the full story about why they had, to use the assistant’s words, picked on her. Although he knew the assistant well, he wasn’t here to be interrogated by him. Furthermore, he also wasn’t sure about the correct answer to the man’s last question: did she get the message? Maybe she did; maybe she didn’t; maybe there was a message he, the commissaire, was meant to get.

  14

  When Tony phoned L’Astrance to reserve a table for Nancy and him for dinner he thought he heard a faint, hardly noticeable noise, like a distant echo, through the phone line. Or maybe he heard nothing, maybe he just imagined it. Or maybe the world spoke to him … After he had finished his call he said to Nancy, “I think they bugged the phone; just a gut feeling.”

  “I’m not surprised. They don’t like it if an American cowboy beats up a French police officer.”

  “No, I didn’t think they’d like that. I guess they also don’t like it if a smart American girl, who seemed to have had a lot of fun with their legal system, returns for another go at it.”

  “That may well be how it looks to them.” After a few seconds Nancy continued, “Do you think it would help if we told them that we are here on holiday? I mean, I realise we told them that already at the airport, but it can’t hurt to repeat it.”

  “Okay,” Tony replied, “that’s a good idea.” He took the phone and waited for a second or two before he said, “This is a message for commissaire Daniel Brice. We would feel honoured if he could please join us for dinner tonight; venue and time as per our previous call.” Tony then once more called the restaurant L’Astrance and changed the reservation from a table for two to a table for three.

  “Do you think he’ll turn up?”

  “If he receives the message,” Tony replied, “in other words, if the slight noise I could hear or imagined really is what I believe it is, I think he may turn up.”

  “You could be right. He is kind of different, not your usual zero eight fifteen policeman.”

  “zero eight fifteen – I haven’t heard that for a while.”

  “It doesn’t happen very often that I am invited to the L’Astrance,” commissaire Daniel Brice said as he shook hands first with Nancy, then with Tony. “Could you hear a faint noise in the telephone line?”

  “Yes,” Tony replied, “we suspected that the phone was bugged but, of course, the faint sound that I heard could have been something else.”

  “So, you decided to invite me, to find out.”

  “We want to tell you why we are in France; that’s why we invited you.”

  “And we had a certain impression of you,” added Nancy, “and thought you might be an interesting person to have dinner with.”

  Daniel Brice did not respond. His face was calm and friendly. He was a bit shorter than Tony, maybe two inches; he was a fit man, self confident, and as he looked from Nancy to Tony it was obvious that he was happy just to sit and wait and see what else they had to say.

  “We are here on holiday”, Nancy said.

  “And we are here to buy paintings,” Tony added.

  “Fake paintings?”

  “You could say so, although we will make sure that they will be clearly and officially marked as copies.”

  For the next ten minutes their conversation stopped as they discussed various dinner options with the head waiter. After they had ordered Nancy remarked that this was not at all like placing an order for something to eat, it was more like discussing everybody’s most favourite meal amongst friends and then arriving at the conclusion that each one would receive the absolute best meal he had been able to work out during the discussion. The commissaire said that, although he had never been at the L’Astrance before, the way things had taken place so far was exactly the way he had thought they would.

  Tony continued where the previous conversation had come to an end. “When Nancy told me about the painters she knows here during the flight from New York to Paris, I asked her to introduce me to them. If their paintings are as good as Nancy told me, I would love to buy some of them. I can’t afford original paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky, Dali and so on, but if I can afford copies and if they look as good as the originals, why not buy them?”

  “Yes, why not indeed,” the commissaire agreed.

  Tony looked at him questioningly. The way he had said ‘Yes, why not indeed’, didn’t sound right. Nancy, too, looked at the commissaire as if she was waiting for more to come.

  The commissaire didn’t disappoint. Looking at Nancy, he added, “I assume we are talking about the same four painters whose paintings you sold five years ago.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Have you been in contact with them in recent weeks?”

  “No, I lost contact with them.”

  “I see”, commissaire Daniel Bryce replied. “And now, suddenly, on a holiday flight from New York to Paris you two decided to visit them and purchase a few paintings.” As he said this his focus changed from Nanc
y to Tony. He finished by saying, “I don’t believe you.”

  Before Nancy was able to say anything, Tony replied, “You’re right, this is not entirely correct; but before I tell you the truth, just tell me please, why you don’t believe us.”

  “Okay. When my colleague and I approached you at the airport and asked you to follow us, I could see at your first reaction,” – the commissaire looked at Tony as he said this – “that you had no idea what it could be that we were after. You looked genuinely surprised, whereas you,” – and his focus shifted to Nancy – “immediately suspected that our approach was somehow related to the paintings you sold years ago.”

  Tony and Nancy did not reply. They waited for the commissaire to continue, which he did.

  “I suspect that you, Monsieur, knew nothing about Madam Nancy’s past, as far as her relationship with painters and paintings in Paris was concerned. Would you agree that this observation is correct?”

  “Perfectly correct,” Tony admitted with a smile.

  “Equally, I believe I can say with confidence that Madam knew nothing about the speed and accuracy with which you are able to physically deactivate an opponent. She was surprised, just as I was impressed. Madam, do you agree with this assessment?”

  “I was very surprised, indeed.”

  “So, please tell me the truth now. Why are you suddenly interested in buying so called fake paintings from painters you have not been in touch with for years?” They could see that he expected an answer from Nancy.

  Nancy looked at the commissaire intensely. It was obvious that she was deciding if she was talking to a man she could trust. After a few seconds, instead of answering the commissaire’s question, she asked a question herself. “Is there something I don’t know, but perhaps I should know?”

  “This may well be the case, Madam.”

  “Okay. You are right, when we arrived at the airport, Tony knew nothing about my past in Paris. In the meantime we talked about it and he knows pretty much exactly what you know. I assume you know about the court case and its outcome?”