by Tom Cain
‘I’m sure investors will be very interested to hear that. So let’s cover another subject on which I’m sure they will welcome your insight. This week you’ll be coming to the UK. What is your view of the state of the British economy? The government is pursuing policies that have attracted support from some commentators and business leaders, but also tremendous opposition from trade unions and special interest groups, as well as their political opponents. Where do you stand?’
Zorn’s shrug conveyed an impression of relaxed impartiality. ‘I don’t stand anywhere politically. To be honest with you, Stephen, I’m not interested in political parties or ideology. I’m interested in situations as I see them, and the opportunities that confront me. But just to pick up on my earlier comments, I guess if I were talking to the British Prime Minister I’d advise him to take a real good look at the security of his national energy supplies. The UK is very vulnerable to external disruptions. Power-generating capacity has been allowed to decline drastically, relative to need. Plus, for political reasons the UK is way overcommitted to wind-power, which strikes me as just about the dumbest idea imaginable. I mean, the wind stops and you’re screwed… ah, can I say that?’
Sackur grimaced. ‘Not really, but-’
‘Well, anyway… the UK has to import most of its oil, its natural gas and increasingly its electrical power, which is cabled in from France. I mean, come on! Check out the history you have with the French. Are you sure you want their hand on the light switch?’ Zorn laughed engagingly, drawing a smile out of Sackur before adopting a much more serious expression again. ‘But that’s the story all over. British Energy, the nuclear power station operator, was sold to Electricite de France. A consortium of German companies is building four more nukes. And the designs they’re using will be either French or Japanese. So basically you’ve lost national control of your own power grid. To me that’s a disastrous situation. Britain is wide open to its very own 9/11, and when that attack comes, it-’
‘Not “if” it comes?’
‘No, Stephen, I believe that this is a case of “when”, and any major terrorist event will have consequences that go way beyond the actual incident itself. I can see major falls on the Footsie, led by the energy sector, instability in the price of oil, downward pressure on sterling, and knock-on effects in all the nations that have bought into the UK energy market. With the economic situation as fragile as it is, well, I have to say that I’m a bear on Britain, and also on specific sectors of both the US and European economies…’
Zorn had seen all he needed. He closed the screen and gave a grunt of satisfaction. This time there was no danger of the message failing to get through. The financial public relations firm he had retained to publicize the launch of his fund had emailed a press release, along with a three-minute extract from the interview containing all the key lines, to a carefully chosen list of news organizations, columnists and bloggers. Within minutes of the interview’s opening, the tweets had started. Now Zorn began adding fuel to the fire through his own newly opened @malzorn Twitter account.
‘Are u saying I shouldn’t be investing in #globaloilcorps?’ one follower asked.
Zorn replied, ‘Put it this way, I’d get out of @BP_America (again) if I were you! Or go short.’
Another follower gleefully remarked that, ‘@Number10gov must be sh*ttin bricks after #zornhardtalk.’
Zorn grinned, thought for a moment, then typed, ‘Just my way of giving the PM a Monday morning wake-up call — get him out of bed real fast today!’
Looking at his screens, he saw that the Asian markets were already putting pressure on international oil corporations with significant UK investments, as well as multinational gas and electricity providers. Sterling lost ground against both the euro and the dollar. When the FTSE index opened at 8.30 a.m. it was sixty-five points down. Oil, however, was gaining: up five dollars a barrel in early trading.
‘Excellent,’ murmured Malachi Zorn, lying almost horizontally in his chair, his feet up on his desk, sipping a cup of fresh coffee. ‘Just excellent.’
A newsfeed was crawling like a ticker tape across the bottom of one of his screens. An item caught Zorn’s eye, and he flipped forward in his chair, leaning towards the screen to get a closer view. It seemed that more of the money that the fraudster Bernie Madoff had stolen from his clients had been found. There were indications that it might amount to as much as five billion dollars. Zorn stretched back in his chair again, and grinned.
‘You know the big mistake you made, buddy?’ he murmured, as if speaking to Madoff in his prison cell. ‘When they came for you, you were still around.’
20
Carn Drum Farm
‘It’s a nice bit of land you’ve got here, Taff,’ said Dave Smethurst, giving an appreciative nod as he gazed at the magnificent Welsh landscape, its wild beauty only magnified by the dramatic shafts of morning sunlight that pierced the thick, charcoal-grey clouds like beams from a ‘Super Trouper’ spotlight.
‘I know,’ Gryffud said, looking out at the hills he loved with all his soul. ‘If I ever wonder why I’m doing all this, I just come out here and witness the glory of what nature can do in the absence of mankind… and then I know what I’m fighting for.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Smethurst, with flat indifference to Gryffud’s oration. Then he added, ‘We’re going to fuck up some of this nature good and proper, you know that, right? And not just here, neither.’
Gryffud grimaced. ‘That’s unavoidable. I wish there was any other way at all of doing this. But since there isn’t, we have to accept that it’s a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.’
‘Collateral damage, eh?’ said Smethurst. ‘I know all about that.’
Gryffud caught the snide tone in his voice. ‘Are you saying I’m no better than some fascist American general? Is that it?’
‘I’m saying I don’t give a shit. There’s no justification you could give me I haven’t heard before. It’s all bullshit, if you ask me. But it’s none of my business, is it? I’m here to do a job, collect my money, keep my mouth shut and fuck off. And that’s what I’m going to do.’
‘You don’t care about the future of the planet, then? I don’t understand how anyone can have that attitude. And if that’s how you feel, I wonder if you’re really the right man for the job.’
Gryffud glared at Smethurst. He was a good six inches taller, and several stone heavier than the former soldier. But the smaller man just grinned at him.
‘Calm down, Taff. I don’t care about the planet because it’s got fuck all to do with me. It’s been here for billions of years, and it’ll carry on for billions more when I’m gone. But I do care about my trade. I’m the dog’s bollocks at what I do, right? And I’ll do a better job for you than any other bastard you’re likely to find. That’s why I’m the right man for the job.’
Gryffud nodded grudgingly, reflecting as he did so that it had not been him who had found Smethurst. That, too, had been Uschi Kremer. She’d been given his name, she said, by a friend of a friend.
‘OK,’ Gryffud said. ‘Let’s get on with it. How do you want to proceed?’
They were standing on the hillside above a cwm — the steep, curved head of a glacial valley — that fanned out as the land fell away before them.
‘Basically, the target as a whole covers an area of about fifteen hundred metres by nine hundred, which is way too big for us. So I think we should concentrate on a smaller area, about two hundred metres by one hundred, in the south-west quadrant. That’s got two advantages, right? Number one, it’s full of juicy targets, and you should be able to set off some nice little chain reactions that’ll do far more damage than your actual strikes. And number two, it’s the area of the facility that’s closest to the launch site. The place you picked is a kilometre from the refinery. That’s at the absolute extreme limit of the range I can get from these things.’
‘There’s no alternative. All the land closer to the refinery is owned by National
Petroleum, and there are regular security patrols.’
‘But the place you’ve picked is safe, right? ’Cos we’re proper fucked if anyone catches us with this little lot in the van.’
‘Don’t worry. The property’s derelict. Some developer from London bought it, thinking he could convert it into holiday cottages, but he couldn’t get planning permission. Now he can’t sell it, and he’s letting it rot. Believe me, nobody goes there.’
Smethurst seemed satisfied with what he’d heard. ‘Fair enough. Right then, I’ve set up a proving ground so we can get all our trajectories worked out as precisely as possible. The target area is just over there…’
Smethurst pointed at a small, flat patch of land at the bottom of the main slope, with hills rising all around it like an auditorium around a stage. Then he went on, ‘And the launch site is eleven hundred metres over there to the south-east.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘Obviously, what I’ve got to do is work out the basic characteristics of the projectiles, the propellant and the launchers, yeah? I need to know how far the little bastards go at any given trajectory; how long it takes them to get there; how much fuel to use; and how long I have to set the mortar fuses. Once I know that, all I have to do is plot the angle and distance from the actual launch-point to the specific targets you’ll be aiming to take out. Then I work out the right combinations of fuse, launch-angle and propellant…’
‘Sounds complicated,’ Gryffud said.
‘Don’t you worry, pal, I’ve got programs on the laptop to do all that.’
‘And you’re confident we can do something that will really make people sit up and ask questions?’
Smethurst grinned and slapped the big man on the back. ‘Fuck, yeah, Taffy-boy. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’
21
The All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon, London
The second Monday of Wimbledon is regarded by many tennis lovers as the best day of the whole tournament. Weather permitting, the last sixteen in both the ladies’ and men’s competitions all play, so there are top seeds on court all day long. Sadly, not all of them are worth watching.
The opening match on Centre Court featured the women’s world number one, a sturdy-thighed Swede who had spent the past ten days wandering around Wimbledon Village in her time off without once being recognized. Five minutes and three games into the first set, with half the seats still waiting to be filled by ticket-holders who were more interested in finishing their lunch, she was already flattening a patently inferior Bulgarian. The Bulgarian, however, was winning the decibel battle. As her grunts and shrieks echoed around London SW19, Zorn turned to his guests and said, ‘If I want to hear a noise like that I’ll go rent some lesbian porn.’ He took out his phone and went online to the BBC’s Wimbledon home page. To Zorn’s delight a match on Court Two had been done and dusted as quickly as this one was likely to be. ‘OK, Come with me. I’ve got something better.’
Zorn was entertaining two investors and their partners as his guests today. One was Carlos Castizo, the heir to a Colombian drug-cartel fortune, who, like a Latin American Michael Corleone, was engaged in giving his family’s enterprises a sheen of legitimate respectability. The other was Mort Lockheimer, the former head of asset-backed bond trading at a now-defunct Wall Street bank. Lockheimer’s trades, specifically the vast sums he had wagered and then lost on subprime mortgage bonds — in the mistaken belief that property prices could only go up — were arguably the single biggest factor in his former employer’s demise. He had thereby cost thousands of bank workers their jobs and left shareholders with nothing, but, by a great stroke of good fortune, Lockheimer had actually left the bank about three months before his entire portfolio was revealed to be a ten-billion-dollar liability, rather than the great asset he had claimed, taking a golden parachute of more than a hundred million dollars with him. He had now spent all of that, and more than twice as much again — all of it borrowed — on buying into Zorn Global.
For Lockheimer, this was a win-win deal. He was absolutely certain that Zorn was going to make him a fortune. But more than that, to be an investor in Zorn Global was to be a member of a very exclusive club, one that was talked about with admiration and envy in the smartest, richest circles. Mort Lockheimer had attracted a great deal of negative publicity in the months after his losses on subprime trades were written about in a host of blogs, newspaper articles and even books on the financial crisis. He’d been made to look like a crook. Even worse, he’d looked like an idiot. His wife Charlene and daughters Chelsey and Alissa had been humiliated, and had retaliated by heaping vast amounts of acrid, bitter shit on him. Now he looked like a hero again, or less of a schmuck, at any rate.
Be that as it may, though, Charlene was not happy about Zorn’s change of plan. ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ she hissed in Lockheimer’s ear. ‘I want to sit on Centre Court. Tell him we ain’t moving.’
‘You tell him,’ Lockheimer countered. ‘That guy’s gonna make us more money than we’ve seen in our whole fuckin’ lives. If he wants to go sit someplace else, that’s what we do. And if he asks you to blow him, just get on your knees and start sucking.’
‘Screw you, asshole,’ Charlene glowered. But even though she was simmering with resentment, she picked up her bag and followed her husband up the steps to the exit. And when Zorn asked her how she was, she put on her broadest, most plastic smile and said, ‘Just great!’
To anyone watching Zorn — and someone was — he appeared far more entertained watching the squabbles — for Castizo’s twenty-two-year-old mistress was no happier to be moving than Lockheimer’s fortysomething wife — than the abysmal tennis being served up on court. It was as if he was confirming in his own mind just how desperate these already wealthy individuals were to give him large amounts of their money. Messing around with their day was as good a way as any to test the depths of their greed. And of course, unlike his guests, Zorn did have a genuine interest in tennis. He’d actually come to Wimbledon for the sport.
Accompanied by Ahmad Razzaq, Zorn led the way out of Centre Court and through all the people trying to get on to Wimbledon’s so-called Tea Lawn — in actual fact the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s staff car park, dolled up for the fortnight with a bandstand and tables with green and purple striped parasols. There was more muttering from both sets of guests, which only intensified as a posse of uniformed security guards barged their way past, stepping on the toes of one of the women’s Louboutin sandals as they went, escorting a dark, thickset, heavily stubbled player.
‘That’s Hernandez, the number nine seed,’ said Zorn, as the black uniforms and white tennis clothes were swallowed up by the crowd. ‘Tough guy, plays real hard, never gives up on a ball. But he’s up against Arana, and I say the kid wins it in four.’
The path towards Number Two Court narrowed, cramming spectators making their way there even more tightly together. The court was a plain concrete bowl, whose only concession to show court glamour was its padded seats. There were no celebrities to be spotted, no royal box to gawp at. Zorn could not have cared less. Oscar Hernandez was the established player, but Quinton Arana was a nineteen-year-old qualifier on a mission. The son of a blue-collar family from a Pennsylvania mining town, he’d already taken two seeded scalps in the first week, and he was gunning for a third. Zorn watched a couple of ultra-competitive rallies, filled with fizzing ground strokes, applauded both players as they chased down seemingly lost causes, gave a loud, ‘Yeah!’ of delight, and declared, ‘Now this is what I call tennis!’
22
Carver heard every word. His seat was to the side of the court, ideally placed to observe Zorn and his party in the front row, behind the nearest baseline. The collapsible umbrella on his lap concealed a directional microphone. The khaki canvas fishing bag next to it contained a hidden camera. It had not been detected in the derisory bag-check to which he’d been subjected at the entrance gate, nor had there been any body-search o
r scanner, a fact that would make his life a great deal easier later in the week. The camera was sending pictures back to the iPad that was also in the bag, along with a rolled-up copy of that day’s Herald Tribune newspaper, a V-neck cotton sweater from J. Crew, and a packet of throat lozenges. Carver was dressed in an all-American summer uniform of stone-coloured chinos, pale-blue Ralph Lauren shirt, and dark-blue, single-breasted Brooks Brothers blazer. He had padding on around his abdomen to give him a softer, fatter gut, and his normally clean-shaven chin and short, dark hair were now hidden beneath somewhat longer, wavy blond hair and a beard to match. Aviator shades covered his eyes. All the while that he kept Zorn under surveillance he kept turning the same questions over and over in his mind: asking himself what Zorn was really up to in London, and why someone wanted him dead so badly. He had nothing against Zorn, personally. In fact, he was impressed by Zorn’s disdain for the smart seats. It spoke well of him as a man. On the other hand, Carver had paid more than three thousand pounds for his Centre Court ticket. It seemed a pity to waste it.
Zorn seemed to feel the same way. After an hour on Court Two he relented and, to smiles of relief all round, led his party back to Centre Court. As he walked into the most famous tennis arena in the world, Carver was struck by its intimacy. The stands held fifteen thousand spectators, yet the players on court seemed almost close enough to touch. It was easy, too, to pick out individual spectators, Zorn included, in the crowd. From an assassin’s point of view, Centre Court was a gallery full of sitting ducks. That very intimacy, however, meant that it offered precious few positions where a marksman could lurk unseen and take his shot unobserved.
Another practical problem struck Carver the moment he walked into the stands. The gangways between the rows of seats were accessed by entrances, each of which was guarded by two armed forces personnel — one from the army and another from the navy — to make sure that spectators only entered or left the court during breaks in play. These guards were unarmed, but they were, nevertheless, trained fighting men, and their presence only added to the difficulties that Centre Court posed.
