‘Ha, ha! Right, the money. Well, that’s the best reason there is. Right, Kelly?’
They began sorting themselves out to leave. George called for the bill but Thurston beat him to it.
‘No, no. We absolutely insist, George. It’s been a great pleasure, even if next time we have to bring our own juice. Ha, ha. Only kidding, honestly. It’s a neat place. Seventeenth century, right? My wife’ll go bananas when she hears. She loves historic things.’ The pub wouldn’t accept Thurston’s corporate Amex card, and he paid with dollops of notes, counting them out like a five-year-old with Monopoly money.
‘We’ll take it as far as we can with what you’ve given us. Kelly’s our spreadsheet genius-’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that-’
‘No, really, she is - and we’ll do our crunching as fast as we can and kick the idea round at head office. If we need any more information, Kelly’ll give you a call. I’ll keep my eye on her, though, make sure she doesn’t ask you for too much. Always the perfectionist, right, Kelly?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that -’
‘All being well, we’ll call you in a couple of weeks to sort out a site visit and maybe start to negotiate ourselves a deal. OK? How does that sound, George?’
‘That’s fine. But the fact that I’m considering a sale is very confidential. Nobody except for me knows about it, and for the moment that’s how I want to keep it. If you want to call me, that’s OK, but just pretend you’re a friend of mine. Don’t let my - er - secretary know that you’re calling about a business matter.’
‘You want confidentiality, George. Sure. We understand that.’ Thurston was very earnest. ‘You’re not alone in that. Many of the companies who have joined the Oregon family have had similar considerations, and we do our best to respect that. We believe that honouring confidentiality is a key part of ethical business behaviour. Kelly, you and George are old friends, right?’
‘Sure. Right.’ Another big smile made its way down George’s spine and lodged like jelly in his knees. ‘I’ll be very sensitive to that.’
‘And one other thing,’ said George. ‘I assumed you would want a site visit at some stage and that’s fine. But if you could make yourselves as inconspicuous as possible when you come, it would really help. I don’t want your visit to upset my workers.’
‘We’ll be so inconspicuous, you won’t even notice we’ve been.’
George shook hands, and made ready to leave.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.
‘Great meeting you,’ they said. ‘And see you again soon.’
George watched them leave. A billow of late spring rain coming in from the west washed across the grey pub car-park. George drove away, feeling depressed.
2
A moral conundrum. How far would Matthew go for his million?
Insider trading was somehow OK. He hated the fear and the risk and the lying, but it was only the risk of getting caught that perturbed him. If he could be a hundred percent sure it was safe, he’d do it all day every day, make his million and as much more as he could, until his time ran out.
Betray Fiona? No. That he wouldn’t do, not after Sophie. He knew that his insider trading had taken risks with Fiona’s trust that weren’t his to take, but all the same she was more precious than a million pounds and all his father’s money. She was off-limits.
But between the black and the white, there lie a million greys. Dove, silver, ice, ash, steel, slate, char coal, gunpowder. What Belial suggested wasn’t at the nearly-white end of grey. It was up there with the gunpowder and charcoal. It’s true, no individual would be obviously hurt by it, but all the same, even as Bernard Gradley’s son, you couldn’t help but learn some basic rules. And the rules were explicit. What Belial suggested was wrong.
Would Matthew do it? The rules were clear, but his mind was not. He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know.
3
‘Sorry you had to trail all the way out here,’ said Lord Hatherleigh to his son-in-law. ‘Parking’s getting so damn difficult these days.’
The service elevator dropped them at the top storey, leaving them to walk the last bit up two flights of concrete stairs. From the windswept roof of the office block, the dense heart of London stretched away to the south. West of them, Hampstead Heath spread like a dark island in the neon tide.
‘I love this thing. Saves hours, despite the trouble parking. Elizabeth’s none too keen on it though.’
Zack wasn’t all that keen on ‘this thing’ either, but he didn’t like to seem wimpish in front of his father-in-law, and he climbed resolutely into the small helicopter. As Lord Hatherleigh checked his instruments and established radio contact with Central London flight control, a spatter of rain fell across the windscreen. Zack looked at the rain and found himself wishing he had been able to join Sarah and Elizabeth on the train down to Ovenden House a few hours earlier. When he was at work he hardly thought about Sarah. He had a job to do and he got on with it. But at other times he resented time spent away from her. It wasn’t that he was in love, he insisted, just that in one package Sarah supplied him with all the things that an eighty-hour week at Weinstein Lukes deprived him of: relaxation, fun, sex, warmth, laughter. He was looking forward to seeing her this evening, and he let his mind skip over the two hundred dark miles that lay between them.
Hatherleigh was done with his checks. ‘All set?’ he asked, and started the engine.
Above their heads, the drooping fins began to tum. As they increased in speed, something in the feel of the helicopter changed. Before it had sat heavily on the concrete roof, a thing of metal, clumsy and dead. Now, life vibrated through it, standing as a dancer stands, lightly. Before Zack even noticed movement, the helicopter was six feet off the ground, the lovely safe roof below unreachable, and all those windy miles ahead.
Both men were silent as Hatherleigh took the ‘copter up to small aircraft cruising altitude, across the great city and out beyond Heathrow’s thundering airways. A late-arriving jumbo from the States passed close by, leaving Zack feeling like a pedal-cyclist on a motorway.
He knew a few rules about helicopter flights for the nervous. Don’t look down. Don’t think of where you are. Never remember that you’re in a tiny glass egg, a transparent bubble, a speck of foam with only air to lean on.
Zack broke the first rule soon after the passage of the jumbo. And in the giddiness of seeing suburban London spread like a map beneath him, he broke the second rule too. He tried to think about Sarah instead, or about the forthcoming weekend, or about his father’s cash, and the certainty that it would soon be his. None of these comforting thoughts helped, and a buffet of turbulence, which lifted then dropped the little craft, emphasised all too strongly the extent of Zack’s dependence on the unreliable skies.
‘OK?’ asked Hatherleigh, into quieter airspace now and able to relax.
Zack nodded. He didn’t like talking in the helicopter, yelling above the blades, but Hatherleigh always enjoyed it and Zack needed anything to take his mind off his fear.
‘I’m fine,’ he yelled. ‘How are things going at South China?’
It had now been two months since Hatherleigh Pacific had enjoyed control of South China, and Hatherleigh and Scottie had been busy whipping their new acquisition into shape.
‘Good. Shipping side is amazing. There’s a whole damn goldmine there and the lazy sods before us never even bothered to dig. Scottie’s fired all the existing bunch and brought in the best of our own managers from Hatherleigh Coastal. In a couple of years, we’ll be making more from South China’s ships than from our own.’
‘That’s great.’ Zack’s conversation wasn’t too clever when he was frightened.
Hatherleigh’s route was simple. He picked up the M3 motorway out of London, then, just after Basingstoke, he’d follow the A303 west all the way to Devon. The lighted canal of traffic below at least gave something for Zack’s eyes to hang on to in the luminous dark. The shower of rain which gusted ov
er them in London had returned in company and a series of squalls pitched into the helicopter. Hatherleigh made constant minute adjustments to keep on course. Basingstoke passed beneath them and Hatherleigh skipped the southward bulge of the road, to rejoin it somewhere over Andover. Beyond Andover lay Salisbury Plain and the dark pillars of Stonehenge.
‘How about the property side and the bank itself?’ bawled Zack.
‘Property’s great. Land slap-bang where we want it. Our property guys are delighted. Bank’s a different matter. It’ll take time to get it sorted, but we don’t see too much of a problem. So far, we’re all very pleased.’
The helicopter sped on into the thickening night. The weather was getting worse and Hatherleigh ducked lower to keep his eyes on the landmarks beneath. To Zack’s inexperienced eyes, the traffic on the A303 looked very thin or perhaps the falling rain simply swallowed the lights. In any case, it felt a dangerous and friendless journey. Every now and then, Hatherleigh spoke to air-traffic control, requesting and obtaining permissions, soliciting and passing information. To them, this was just another rainy Friday night, nothing to be upset about.
‘Be entering a front, soon. May be a bit bumpy.’
Zack only caught the last couple of words. He didn’t know if Hatherleigh was warning him or just passing on routine information. Zack assumed it was routine, but his pulse rate accelerated anyway. It’d be nice to see Sarah again, to share a hot bath with her. Outside the rain increased. The helicopter left the A303 and headed west across the Vale of Somerset towards the distant fires of Taunton. The wind was strong and gusty, and Zack felt the metal cage around him ride the gusts like a boat on the open sea. They passed over Taunton and the M5, the last bright lights they’d see. As they headed over the Brendon Hills to Exmoor, there’d be a few clusters marking villages and scattered dots for farmhouses; otherwise only the endless sighing black of forest, night, and open moor.
Ovenden House lay south of Exmoor, but Hatherleigh always enjoyed spinning over the moor before wheeling south to Ovenden. Tonight was no exception despite the weather, and Hatherleigh focused furiously on the dark land below. If he strayed too high, he risked losing visibility in the low-lying cloud; too low and the lightless peaks of Exmoor could rise to meet him.
‘Did you find out where South China’s extra profits were coming from?’ yelled Zack, desperate to keep his brain occupied with anything except where he was.
‘Yes. From the roulette wheel, every penny.’
‘Speculation?’
‘Yes. They played a pretty dangerous game from the look of it. Loaded up on some tax gimmick - RosEs it’s called - that your crowd is pushing hard at the moment. Is RosEs one of your brainwaves?’
‘I had some input,’ said Zack, not wanting to take the credit for something that Hatherleigh would be certain to disapprove of.
‘Yes, well, it certainly encouraged South China to take risks that they shouldn’t have taken.’
‘At least they came out on the right side.’
Hatherleigh glanced sideways at Zack. It was oldfashioned of him, he knew, but he didn’t like the culture of instant wealth, and he had a hunch that Zack had more to do with RosEs than he let on. Hatherleigh’s glance found Zack, lit up by the instrument panel, pressing his angular frame into the padded seat. He looked nervous. Hatherleigh looked ahead again, eyes raking into the darkness ahead, fingers sensing every tug on the helicopter’s frame. He nodded.
‘River Exe below us now. We’ll follow it south to Ovenden.’ Then turning his attention back to business, he added, ‘Yes, we’ve closed down the casino, but apparently we can’t shut down the trading rooms altogether, much as I’d like to. You’d understand all that better than me.’
There was a sudden flash, which Zack, in his fear, immediately assumed came from some major fault with the helicopter. He would have leaped from his seat, except that his seat belt caught him. As a second flash lit the sky, he realised without much reduction in his anguish that the helicopter was fine, but the rain clouds were producing bolts of lightning and hurling them in fiery poles to earth. Zack was sitting amidst the fireworks of giants. By now, he was in a state of naked terror. He would never, ever travel this way again. He’d sit in eternal traffic jams if he had to. He’d walk if he had to. He’d cross England on a pogo-stick. The helicopter followed the rushing river below, chased by the fury of the thunder and the screaming lightning. Zack wanted to continue talking, anything to distract his attention.
‘You’ve checked their books carefully have you? I know our guys were surprised at how greedy South China seemed to be.’
Hatherleigh’s eyes strayed once again from the unmarked way ahead to Zack’s taut face.
‘Yes. We’ve checked their books.’
Zack nodded. He felt like vomiting. Hatherleigh glanced again. Was Zack worried by something? Something apart from the lightning, that is?
‘You could ask your guys to send us a list of transactions,’ said Hatherleigh. ‘That way, we could check off what you sold us against what South China bought. Seems like a sensible precaution to take. Good idea.’
Zack nodded in feeble assent. He could imagine the bitching and moaning that that kind of request would cause on the Weinstein Lukes trading floor, but a client was a client and he’d get Hatherleigh what he wanted.
Just then a flash of lightning seemed to explode directly in front of them. Simultaneously, a downdraught of wind snatched the helicopter and threw it down, causing Zack to lose his belly somewhere in the black ness above. The black lift shaft carried them on down, until Zack’s fingernails cut into the seat cover. Another dart of lightning lit up a bristle of treetops at what seemed no distance away. If they’d been rocks on a lee shore, Zack couldn’t have been more frightened. In his terror, he almost felt the first branches sweeping against the base of the helicopter, sucking them down into certain death. They were still moving downwards fast.
‘Look out!’ he cried.
Hatherleigh didn’t take his eyes from the rain-blotted screen. But with his right hand he thumped his passenger and pointed. In the midst of the Ovenden House woodland, a white-painted H was lit up. Hatherleigh dropped the helicopter on to the landing pad with the gentlest of impacts.
‘We’re here,’ said the viscount. Beneath the feeble shelter of Zack’s city raincoat, the two men ran across the grass to the welcoming stones of Ovenden House.
4
Matthew entered the lift. It had a corrugated rubber floor, metal walls and a rubber buffer running right round the compartment at waist height. The compartment was perhaps twenty feet long, ten feet wide and twelve feet high. A plaque on the wall indicated a maximum carrying capacity of thirteen thousand five hundred kilos. Thirteen and a half tons. Two hundred people.
‘Get a lot of elephants down here, do you?’ asked Matthew.
The security guard shook his head.
‘Bullion. Gold and silver. The loading bay’s not a secure area. That means that whenever we need to transport anything, we take an armoured truck downstairs. It uses this lift.’
A security camera in the ceiling winked as Matthew looked at it. The security guard pressed the down button on the lift and spoke simultaneously into a video intercom. Unseen colleagues in the control room verified his face and voice. They released a lock on the lift and it moved slowly down. It was six twenty-two in the morning.
The Madison offices in London are architecturally unremarkable, except for one thing. They are nearly as deep as they are high. There are seven storeys above ground, four larger storeys below.
The first underground level is dedicated to the canteen, a gym, some storerooms, the mailroom, a sickbay. A few other bits and bobs. Nothing exciting.
Below that level, there’s a floor devoted to mainframe computers, back-up phone switchboards, emergency generators, data storage, and tapes of all trading-room phone calls. The entire level is capable of being sealed off in the event of fire, flood, or terrorist attack The floor is imp
ortant, but, important as it is, the next two floors below ground hold something of far greater worth.
Madison boasts the world’s largest custody business.
The idea of custody is simple. If you buy a few bars of gold, you don’t want to dig a hole in the ground to store them, but you don’t want to leave them knocking around your desk either. So you come to somebody - Madison for instance - and ask them to look after your gold for you. Madison is happy to oblige. They charge you a fee. Pop the bullion in their vaults and everyone’s happy.
The third floor below ground is given over to the admin staff who look after the vaults. But Matthew was headed for the floor below that. The vaults themselves. Belial had been right. There is a well-kept secret at Madison, and Matthew had only just been inducted.
The vaults are guarded by a single door. The door is guarded by a triple lock. Each lock is released only when a certain combination has been correctly inserted. One set of combinations is passed from security guard to security guard on a fortnightly shift pattern. The second set of combinations is passed between police officers belonging to the Metropolitan Police Force’s Valuable Commodities Unit, known as ValCom. The police officers also change on a fortnightly basis, but the shifts are out of sync with those of the Madison security guards. The third and final set of combinations is passed down amongst Madison vice presidents on a weekly basis. All three sets of combinations are changed every six weeks, but again, out of sync, so that one combination is altered every second week.
Matthew’s promotion meant he was down on the vault duty rota. He would be on duty for a total of four weeks this year. This week. Again in about a month’s time. Then again, a couple of times in autumn, after his father’s deadline had expired.
Belial’s suggestion was madness, but Matthew couldn’t get it out of his head. He wasn’t going to do anything today. Nothing this week, even. Nothing at all, except look and listen. Belial’s suggestion was almost certainly insane, but there was nothing illegal about looking.
The Money Makers Page 49
