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

by Schäfer, Fred

  The commissaire, Nancy and Tony looked at the waiter astounded. What was he driving at? The commissaire asked, “Is he poisoning us?”

  “I am afraid Monsieur, yes, in a way he is poisoning you.”

  “Please tell us what you mean,” Nancy pleaded.

  “If you have eaten the boss’s cooking once, and I believe this is your first time here, you will compare it with whatever you eat for the rest of your life and you will never find anything equal.”

  “This is his daily crime?”

  “I am afraid so, yes.” The waiter bowed and left. His face showed that he enjoyed the impression he had created and that was reflected in the faces of the woman and two men at the table.

  “I am afraid this evening is going to cost you a bit,” the commissaire said, looking to Tony.

  He is trying to develop a feeling for how wealthy I am, Tony thought. He replied, “They have no menus here and so far nobody said anything about the prices, it could all be free or you could be right. They can charge whatever they like. Should it turn out to be too expensive, I may have to ask you to use your taxpayer funded credit card.”

  The commissaire laughed, “We can wash the dishes.”

  Tony smiled and said, “I guess I have invited you and if this means Nancy and I have to eat burgers at McDonald’s for the remainder of our holiday in Paris, then so be it. But now let’s enjoy this impressive looking wine and then tell us what your investigations about the murdered painters have revealed so far.”

  “Well,” the commissaire said, “all three were shot and, as far as we could find out, all three had the same visitor the day before they were shot.”

  18

  During her five years with the NY Drug Enforcement Agency Christina had managed to extort substantial payments from eleven middle and five upper echelon drug dealers. What she did not know was that some of these dealers talked about her blackmailing activities, although they did this very carefully. They didn’t admit that they were blackmailed; they just talked about it and asked questions, pretending that they had heard rumours. At first nothing happened as a consequence of these talks. In the drug business people get killed and beaten up and caught every day; it is a dirty business and a bit of blackmailing was nothing to get the syndicate bosses excited.

  However, this changed almost abruptly when at the end of Christina’s fourth year as drug enforcement officer two very upper echelon members of two of New York’s leading drug syndicates were successfully blackmailed by her. Christina was aware that she was working with men high up in the ranks of her enemies. She probably could have extorted several millions of dollars from each of the two drug bosses, but she was smart enough – or she thought she was smart enough – to limit her demands to $800,000 each.

  She collected the money. Her method of collecting it was elegant and unique and although the drug bosses tried to catch her in the process, she managed to get away without difficulty. She then decided she would do another two or three extortions before she walked away from this part of her life.

  Eight months later, she was just about to write her letter of resignation, she found out that a drug syndicate had put out a three million dollar reward on her head. To be more accurate, the reward was not for her head specifically, because nobody amongst the bad guys knew that it was her head that they were looking for. There was, very simply, a reward of three million dollars offered for the head, of whoever the head belonged to, that had disrupted the NY drug business with a serious of annoying extortions in recent years.

  Christina decided that to resign now could draw attention to her which she didn’t need. She had made a lot of money, the drug bosses knew that someone had made a lot of money, for her to resign now could look suspicious. She had arrested many drug traffickers and it was likely that she was being watched by the drug guys, just as many other drug law enforcement officers were watched and just as the drug law enforcement people kept an eye on people in the drug business. Almost everybody was watching somebody and she could not assume that she was an exception.

  She decided to stop her extortion business and stay with the agency for another two years. Two more years as an honest officer, she said to herself, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a small price to pay for several millions in three bank accounts. In two years, she concluded, things would have settled down and her resignation would attract no underworld scrutiny.

  But she had not counted on her emotions and on one man. That man was detective Mike Thompson, whom she met for the first time at a seminar shortly after she had decided to delay her resignation. Mike was one of the presenters and long before he had finished his presentation she knew that she wanted to be with this man.

  She phoned him the next day and told him that she had been working in drug law enforcement for the past five years and was interested in a change, preferably doing the kind of work he had been talking about during his presentation. Mike agreed to meet her and they discussed her newly developed interest and how he could be of help.

  Six months later she was his partner. By the time she had finished the training which she had to pass before she could be appointed junior detective officer, Mike’s partner had resigned and she was moved into the vacant position. How she had managed to achieve this, Mike never found out. He also never made an attempt to find it out. He knew how the system worked. People used their influence, they called in favours and when they were creative enough they ended up with what they wanted. He wanted an initiative orientated partner and after he had interviewed her and done his background checks, he had no doubts that Christina could be, or could develop into, the kind of person he had in mind. She didn’t indicate the slightest bit that she was in love with him.

  It has to be said, love was not an easy business for her. She had been looking forward to a life of financial freedom, not to a life with a boyfriend. She told herself that this was a stupid kind of love. She hardly knew Mike Thomson. It was like love at first sight, something which she never believed in, not as a teenager and certainly not now, at the age of forty two. She told herself that she was kidding herself.

  They worked well together. They clicked. They became friends and one day they had sex. This in spite of Christina’s determined reasoning only a few weeks earlier that they should not have sex as long as they worked for the police. That she would first win the lottery … first lottery, then sex. Before they enjoyed the togetherness of their naked bodies for the first time they talked about it. They worked things out and then had sex exactly the way they had agreed to go about it. First they had dinner, then sex, then they watched TV; all at her place. Shortly after one o’clock in the morning Mike went home to his place. He was a happy man and he was certain that he had left a happy woman behind.

  During the days prior to their first time in bed, they had discussed Christina’s initial concerns: that sex could have a negative impact on their work, that it could impair their focus and concentration, which could mean death or that they could seriously fall in love with each other. They now answered these concerns with “No! No problem. No worries.” (They both were in a hurry.) Except the last topic – that they could seriously fall in love with each other – they were honest enough to each other and to themselves that this topic could not be put aside with a definite “No”. After all, nobody knows the future. In the end they agreed that it was not their intention to let their sexual relationship develop into something deeper, but should it happen, they would have to deal with it. Christina still did not tell Mike that she had been in love with him ever since she saw him the first time.

  “How then do you suggest we should deal with it?” Mike asked.

  “If we both develop deeper feelings for each other,” Christina replied, “well, I guess that is okay then.”

  “Okay, but what if only one of us develops these deeper feelings and the other one would just be happy to continue with meaningless sex, what then?”

  “Sex isn’t meaningless.”

  “Let m
e rephrase this: what if only one of us develops these deeper feelings and the other one would be happy to continue having meaningful sex and nothing else, what then?”

  Christina smiled and replied, “In that case, meaningful sex wins.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely!” And then, she thought, we’ll see what follows. But she didn’t say this.

  19

  “Why do they want to see you dead?” Christina asked. She, Mike and their boss, chief inspector Neil Norman, were sitting in the chief inspector’s office.

  “They think I know something.”

  “What do they think you know?” the chief inspector asked.

  “The question is not only what they think I know, the next question is why is it important to them that I’m dead in the event that I know what they think I know? That knowledge or information that they think I may have, why is that dangerous to them? And if I had that knowledge, why do they assume that I haven’t yet passed it on to you and other people? If I had passed it on there would be no point in killing me anymore. It must be a kind of knowledge, a secret really, that I would prefer to keep to myself.”

  “And what could that secret be?” the chief inspector asked.

  Mike did not bother to reply. He wondered if his boss comprehended the full implications of what he had explained. An organization, it seemed, wanted to kill him because of something he knew. They didn’t want to know what he knew. And they seemed to be confident that he had not passed it on to anybody else, otherwise killing him would no longer make sense. Or somebody is crazy, Mike thought, although this was one option he did not seriously entertain.

  “Our forensic people are certain that the two men killed in their car by the exploding grenades were the same men that killed the publisher and injured you in the bar,” Christina continued. “According to your report, the publisher told you on the phone that he had come across a story that may help the police to resolve a major crime, which had taken place some time ago. Then in the bar, just before he got killed, he said to you, ‘… when I have to decide about whether or not to publish a book, the major criteria is whether the text has something to say about forgotten truths or forgotten unsolved crimes. A week ago I received a copy of a text about…’ Now, Mike, think hard if there was anything else that he might have mentioned and that could give us a clue what it might be that he wanted to talk to you about.”

  “No. There was nothing else.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because I thought about it a lot. I thought about it with my eyes open and closed. I went through every second I spent with him and I am certain there was nothing else that he mentioned. However …”

  “However what?” the chief inspector interrupted, when Mike didn’t continue for a few seconds.

  “If my assumption, that they want to kill me because they think I know something, is correct, then whatever knowledge they think I have is something that can exist in my head and can also exist in the form of a physical record.”

  At this point Mike closed his eyes. Both his boss and Christina knew him well enough not to interrupt him. But even if they had talked to him, he might have totally ignored them. They had experienced his sudden listening episodes before and had learned to respect them.

  “Whatever it is they think I know is something they also know,” Mike continued after less than two minutes.

  “Of course, you’re right!” both his boss and Christina agreed almost at the same moment after they had thought for less than a second about Mike’s statement. “If they didn’t know what they think you know they wouldn’t try to kill you, they would try to squeeze it out of you.”

  “So, what could it be?”

  “Maybe evidence about a crime they committed?” Christina contemplated.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s think about the publisher. What do we know about him? What kind of person was he? What kind of interests did he have?”

  “He produced 720,000 books in twelve years and we don’t have a clue about what happened to these books,” Neil Norman reflected.

  “True, but that’s just another riddle. What is it that we know about him? Forget what we don’t know.”

  Christina paged through one of the reports in front of her and listed what they knew. “He lived with a fake passport. Coming from the UK he arrived in New York fourteen years ago. He collected old books and manuscripts. He republished old religious and philosophical books and manuscripts provided that they contained something about old truths or unsolved crimes. A week before he met Mike in the bar he received a copy of a text about… These were his last words before he was killed.”

  “What exactly was his last sentence?” the chief inspector asked.

  Mike replied, “A week ago I received a copy of a text about…”

  “Yes,” Christina confirmed. “That’s exactly the sentence as per your report.”

  “What else do we know about him?”

  “We found a bank account with nearly one point five million dollars in his name. He opened this account within one month of his arrival with an initial deposit of one hundred dollars. Two weeks later a money transfer of seventeen million dollars was credited to his account. He had advised the relevant authorities of this transfer in advance and whatever he told them seemed to have satisfied their requirements. The money came from a Swiss bank account and there were no subsequent questions or investigations as far as we could establish, which is a bit unusual. We therefore can’t entirely exclude the possibility that he paid someone to keep things quiet. We know that he bought his apartment and his printing business within six months of his arrival in New York and that he paid for it in full. He paid a bit less than four million dollars for his apartment and his business. Apart from interest payments he had no money credited to his account after the initial seventeen million dollars. There was a regular outflow from his account of a bit less than one million dollars annually. You both read the report and know about it. Do you want me to go through it to refresh your memory?”

  “Yes, please,” the chief inspector replied.

  “He did a lot of travelling for which he paid most of the time with his AmEx card, sometimes he paid in cash. On average he travelled every six months for three weeks to either a South European country or to a Middle East country. We don’t know how he managed to travel overseas after his fake passport had expired. We assume he had a renewed second fake passport, although we haven’t found one. He stayed in five star hotels. He always used the name Edward Rose. He always paid his AmEx bills two or three days before they were due by transferring money from his bank account via the Internet to his AmEx account. He had business arrangements with two printing and book binding companies and with one transport company. The printing and book binding companies produced his books, the transport company delivered the books to his company. He paid all invoices over the internet by direct bank transfers. He never did a tax return and he managed to do that without ever coming to the IRS’s attention. He took a lot of cash out of his bank account, usually between ten and thirty thousand dollars a month. He reliably gave the bank five days’ notice prior to his cash withdrawals. He was well known at the bank and often dealt with the bank manager himself. About twice a year he had lunch with the bank manager. In the bank manager’s opinion he was a trustworthy business man. He was always well dressed in a suit, with tie et cetera, he was overweight, he was articulate and his lunch conversations with the bank manager covered almost exclusively political and economical matters.”

  “Almost exclusively,” interrupted the chief inspector. “Refresh my memory please; what did they talk about on those occasions when they did not talk about the economy and politics?”

  “They talked about their teenage children.”

  “Ah yes, what was that about?”

  “The bank manager has three daughters and his relationship with them was difficult. The dead publisher claimed to have two teenage daughters and his relationship with them,
he told the bank manager, was challenging, but okay. According to the bank manager, the publisher was able to help him. He told him repeatedly that he must learn to listen and see life from his daughters’ perspectives and not from his own perspective. One statement which the publisher apparently repeated frequently and which the bank manager had written down, was: ‘You can only expect your daughters to understand you when you talk in a context that makes sense to them; as long as you talk in a context that makes only sense to you, you should not be surprised if they have no idea what you are talking about and consequently reject your advice. How can you talk in a context that makes sense to them? You can do it if you see life from their perspective.’ Not bad advice, if you think about it.”

  Mike nodded and commented, “In summary you could say our dead publisher is a villain as far as his fake passport is concerned. He is a mystery man as far as his disappearing books, his journeys and his initial seventeen million dollars are concerned and he is a good father as far as his relationship with his daughters is concerned, whether they are real or fictional. Would you agree?”

  Neither Christina nor the chief inspector replied. There was no need. Mike had summarized their understanding of the dead man perfectly.

  20

  “Could you identify the visitor?” Tony asked commissaire Daniel Brice.

  “Unfortunately, no. We have descriptions of him, but not of his face, only of the way he was dressed.”

  “Is there anything unusual about the way he was dressed?”

  “He wore a grey suit and a red basque cap. A grey suit and a red basque cap are nothing unusual in themselves. It was more the combination of these two items that helped some people to remember that they had seen such a man. In one case he was seen walking down the steps in one of the houses were a painter was killed. A woman walking a few metres behind him remembered him. Unfortunately, she didn’t see his face. In the other two cases he was seen leaving the houses in which the other two murdered painters lived. Again, the people outside the houses didn’t see his face; they saw him walking away.”