by Tom Cain
Grantham frowned. ‘Why didn’t I know that already?’
‘Before your time. I’m sure you would have been informed if the issue had ever arisen again. Suffice it to say, for now, that the palace would not be happy to see Mr Zorn’s nefarious activities widely publicized. Which means, Mr Carver, that we will have to alter your plan somewhat.’
‘So what do you want?’ Carver asked.
‘In public, we must make sure that the show goes on. For the time being at least, Mr Drinkwater will have to maintain the fiction that he is Malachi Zorn. We need to create a believable media narrative that links the attack on Zorn today with yesterday’s events at Rosconway, but without any suggestion that Zorn himself was the perpetrator. As for the Zorn Global launch, it should go ahead, as you suggested, but there will be no public revelations, and the Prime Minister will, I think, be too busy to attend in person. The main aim has to be to keep Zorn’s investors — and the financial markets in general — happy. Meanwhile, with the help of the SIS, among other agencies, we will very discreetly take every possible measure to trace and recover as much of Mr Zorn’s stolen money as possible.’
‘But once Zorn knows that the launch is going ahead without him, he’s bound to react,’ Carver said.
‘Yes, which is why I don’t want the PM anywhere near tomorrow’s event. And why it will have a very high level of security around it.’
‘But then what? You can’t keep going for ever with two Malachi Zorns in the world.’
Young nodded. ‘I quite agree, Carver. That’s why I’m counting on you to make sure, as soon as humanly possible, that there’s only one of them.’
82
London and Cheapside
Shortly after 8.00 P.M. a brief announcement from the hospital to which Malachi Zorn had been taken revealed that Mr Zorn had made a remarkable escape. Though suffering from shock, concussion and multiple bruises and abrasions, he was alive and could be expected to make a full recovery. Mr Zorn was resting comfortably. Further statements would be made in due course. Until such time, no comment would be made by any of the hospital staff.
It was now 8.40 p.m. The banner strung up on the back wall of the abandoned warehouse had the ‘Forces of Gaia’ logo spray-painted on it big enough to be read on even the smallest YouTube screen. One of the three masked men in front of the camera had the same imposing bulk as Brynmor Gryffud, but when he spoke his voice was so heavily treated that he could have been Welsh or Watusi for all that anyone listening could tell. The words he had to say, however, were clear enough.
‘The Forces of Gaia claim full responsibility for two acts of war against the industrialists, speculators, politicians, armies and multinational conspirators whose actions threaten the survival of Gaia.
‘We believe that the planet and all the organisms on it are linked in a single entity. We call this entity Gaia. We believe that it is naturally self-regulating, naturally healthy and naturally beautiful. Only the actions of mankind can possibly threaten it, and so we fight back against the violence of global warming, the violence of environmental pollution, and the violent exploitation of the world’s natural resources for financial profit.
‘Our struggle began yesterday at the Rosconway oil refinery. This industrial installation was specifically designed to exploit a precious substance torn from the belly of the earth. Its products pollute and heat the atmosphere. It is therefore a totally legitimate target in our struggle. We regret the loss of life caused by this necessary act of war, but condemn the actions of the government which caused so many unnecessary extra casualties.
‘This afternoon, we passed sentence on the man whose provocative, ill-judged remarks provoked that government action, the American speculator Malachi Zorn. His warnings against so-called eco-terrorism were intended solely to inflame public opinion and influence financial markets so that he could profit. Gaia could not allow such obscenity to go unpunished. Accordingly, speculator Zorn was attacked this afternoon. Our only regret is that he somehow managed to survive. Other enemies of the planet will receive less mercy.
‘We are the Forces of Gaia. And we will defend the sanctity of this planet to the death.’
The man stopped speaking. He and the two silent figures on either side of him remained rock still. Then a voice from off-camera said, ‘Cut!’
The speaker pulled off his black balaclava to reveal the face of SBS Company Sergeant Major Mike ‘Snoopy’ Schultz. ‘What total fucking bollocks,’ he said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘I couldn’t hardly read half of it. What kind of a twat believes shit like that?’
‘The kind that bombs oil refineries,’ said Carver, who’d thrown away his balaclava and was scruffing his fingers through his hair.
‘The real Forces of bloody Gaia can count themselves lucky I never got to them. They were shot, right?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘Yeah, well I wouldn’t have been that quick about it. Ah, fuck it! At least we got Zorn, eh?’
‘Something like that…’
Schultz looked at Carver. ‘What are you saying, boss? We did get that fucker, didn’t we?’
Carver said nothing. Schultz looked at him with a mixture of disappointment and mounting anger. ‘Don’t say you were bullshitting me. You were never a bullshitter. Don’t start now. Seriously, boss. Don’t take the piss with me.’
‘I’m not taking the piss. It’s just that there were… complications. Things weren’t what they seemed.’
‘And you’re not going to tell me any more than that?’
‘Not now. Not yet. But I’ll promise you this: Malachi Zorn will get what’s coming to him. You have my word on that.’
‘You sound like a fucking politician, boss.’
Carver felt the sense of betrayal behind Schultz’s insult. ‘I’m anything but that,’ he said. ‘Listen, you and Cripps did a great job with the Krakatoa. You’ll probably get a medal for saving that woman at the refinery. I know how tough it is for you, losing Tyrrell. I know you want payback. But there’s nothing more you can do right now. So return to your unit. Get on with the day job. And take it from me, Malachi Zorn will not get away with what he’s done. All right?’
Schultz gave a reluctant nod of acceptance. ‘Yeah, fair enough, I s’pose.’
‘Good. Then I’ll buy you a beer before you go.’
Within an hour of being released on Twitter and YouTube, the Forces of Gaia statement had received more than three million hits and been picked up by all the major global news networks and agencies. Among the millions who watched it with interest was Malachi Zorn.
‘Very interesting,’ he said to Razzaq. ‘The British government knows who carried out the Rosconway attack. They know that I’ve been using a double. They must have made the connection between us and the Forces of Gaia. But they’re deliberately obscuring it. You know what that means?’
‘No, but I think you’re going to tell me.’
‘It means they’re not interested in due process. If they had any intention of getting me inside a courtroom they’d be getting all the evidence they could to put me next to those dumb bastards in Wales. But I don’t think they have that evidence. And even if they did, I don’t think they ever want to see me in a witness box. Which can only mean one thing…’
‘Which I am able to deduce also,’ said Razzaq.
‘Precisely. They want me dead.’
‘My conclusion, also.’
‘Well, they’re in for a helluva disappointment.’
83
Thursday, 30 June
Parkview Hospital
The media were informed that Malachi Zorn had rested well overnight. He was not yet well enough to give a full-scale press conference. He would, however, consent to a brief one-on-one interview with an ITN reporter, on condition that the resulting material was made freely available to any news outlet that wanted it. The lucky woman who got the job was sent on her way to what she and her jealous colleagues all considered a potentially career-making e
ncounter, with suggestions for questions ringing in her ears.
No one thought of asking Zorn, ‘How much are you being paid to do this?’ If they had, they might have caught Michael Abraham Drinkwater enough by surprise that he would have blurted out the truth: ‘One million dollars.’ He had sensed the Brits’ desperation, stuck to his guns, and insisted on receiving the second half of the money Zorn was due to pay him. In the end, Young had been forced to give in. And so Drinkwater had gone back into character again.
The interview took place in Drinkwater’s room. He spoke from his bed, sitting up, with a pile of pillows behind his back. To add to the drama of the occasion, a bandage had been wound round his head and he was wearing dark glasses to shield him from the glare of the TV lights. There were bruises, cuts and swellings on the left-hand side of his face. They had been put there by a make-up artist.
‘When the car was first attacked, it stopped very suddenly and I was thrown forward and hit my face against the seats in front,’ Drinkwater explained, as the interview began, using lines given to him in advance by Cameron Young’s top writers. ‘Guess I should have worn a seat belt, huh?’
He managed a weak, battered smile. ‘But you know, it might have saved me. I was right on the floor of the car, between the front and rear seats. So I was sheltered from the rest of the attack.’
‘Have you seen the statement released last night by the Forces of Gaia, the terrorists who claimed responsibility for the attack on you yesterday and for Tuesday’s atrocity at the Rosconway oil refinery?’
‘Uh, no… no I haven’t. But I heard about that. My doc told me about it.’
‘Do you have any message for those terrorists?’
‘Well, I guess I wish they hadn’t tried to shoot the messenger! And I hope that the police can arrest them, and that justice can take its course. But really I’m not the issue here, and nor are these terrorists. The important thing is that decent, hard-working people died on Tuesday, and they deserve to be remembered. Their sacrifice must be honoured. Their deaths must not be in vain. We need to take the whole issue of energy security much more seriously. I’ve been saying this for a long time, and it’s just terrible, to be honest, to be proved right in this way.’
The reporter put on her most soulful expression and nodded thoughtfully. ‘So how did it feel when some people suggested that you had been behind the refinery attack?’
‘Well, you know, it wasn’t easy hearing that. I lost a very dear friend in Nicholas Orwell at Rosconway. And it was a miracle that I didn’t die yesterday afternoon. You can take it from me, I didn’t order anything. I’m a trader. I make deals. I don’t kill people.’
‘Well, speaking of deals, you were planning to launch your Zorn Global fund here in London tomorrow with a gala reception in the City of London. Will that be going ahead now?’
‘Absolutely. I’m alive. I’m in one piece. And I will not give the terrorists the satisfaction of beating me. I’ll be there…’ Drinkwater leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘And I’ll tell you what, maybe I can fix you an invitation, too!’
Cameron Young was watching on a live feed to his office at 10 Downing Street. ‘Cheeky beggar!’ he said, to no one in particular. Still, there was no harm in a little humour. If they got through the next couple of days with the markets steady, Zorn Global’s investors happy, and the real Zorn satisfactorily dealt with, that million dollars would look like a positive bargain.
Malachi Zorn was watching, too. So far as he was concerned, the information that Drinkwater would be hosting the reception in his place was the best news that he could possibly have been given. He immediately contacted Razzaq.
‘The reception is going ahead as planned,’ he said.
‘I see,’ his security chief replied. ‘So can I take it that we will be proceeding exactly as we had originally planned?’
‘You certainly can,’ said Zorn. ‘We’re going to make a killing.’
84
Wax Chandlers’ Hall, City of London, and Cheapside
Malachi Zorn had never been interested in acquiring corporations as long-term investments. He left that kind of thing to Warren Buffett. But for the purposes of his current operation he had spent six months and more than a billion dollars buying controlling shares in a number of fast-growing Indian computer companies. In every case, he hid his presence behind a web of shell corporations, even if the decisions about which businesses to buy were entirely his. He then created a holding company named after its apparent major shareholder, a hitherto-unknown entrepreneur called Ashok Bandekar. Even if he personally remained a mystery to the Indian media — a mystery made all the more intriguing by titbits of gossip about his past and present activities that were released into the blogosphere on a regular basis, and invariably then picked up by the conventional print media — Bandekar’s company looked like a typical success story of the new, modern India.
So when the police and security service operatives assigned to cover the Zorn Global launch discovered that Bandekar Technologies had hired the Wax Chandlers’ Hall for three days they saw no obvious cause for alarm. The company itself checked out. The executives invited for interviews by the headhunting company all appeared to be genuine: UK citizens with no criminal records and impressive CVs. The security men who met the interviewees at the front door and checked their identities before letting them in all came from a reputable firm that only hired individuals with spotless records. The receptionist who then made sure that the new arrivals were comfortable while they waited to meet Mr Bandekar had an equally respectable background. And every one of those individuals sincerely believed that they were involved in legitimate business with Bandekar Technologies.
Two anti-terrorist officers, accompanied by a sniffer dog, arrived at the hall and were greeted by Bandekar’s aide Sanjay Sengupta and a member of the hall staff, both of whom were highly cooperative. The officers had no reason to know that Sengupta did not actually exist: his identity had only ever been a cover for Ahmad Razzaq. They were shown through the many areas of the building that were not in use. They saw the conference room where the interviewees waited before their appointments. A series of display panels had been set up there, presumably to impress the prospective executives with the scale and ambition of the company they were seeking to join. Each panel proclaimed a different aspect of Bandekar Technologies’ activities. A Perspex case in the middle of the room contained an architect’s model of the corporate campus planned for a site outside Milton Keynes — the symbol of Ashok Bandekar’s commitment to his European operations. A lighting rig on lightweight trusses illuminated the whole set-up. (The flight-cases in which the lights and all the display materials had been transported to the hall were neatly piled in one of the unused rooms.) At the end of the room a door led into a smaller office, suitable for private meetings like the ones Bandekar was currently conducting.
The officers were told they would have to wait for a few minutes before they could see Bandekar himself. He did not wish any of his interviews to be interrupted since that would be unfair to the candidate he was meeting at the time. But it was not long before the office door opened and a well-groomed young businessman in an expensive suit strode out, giving the small group waiting outside a confident, snowy-toothed smile as he passed. A few seconds later, Bandekar himself emerged. He was a large man, whose substantial girth was carried as elegantly as only the finest Savile Row tailoring can manage.
‘Come in, gentlemen, come in!’ he insisted. ‘Have you been offered drinks? Some snacks, perhaps? We have excellent chocolate biscuits.’ He patted his paunch. ‘Too excellent, perhaps, for my good. Now what can I do for you?’
The officers explained that this was purely a routine check. Their dog panted happily, far more interested in the chocolate biscuits that its nose had detected the moment it walked in the conference room, than in any explosives. It hadn’t had the faintest whiff of those. A couple of minutes later, the officers and their dog were gone, escorted out by the hall staff
er.
‘Well done,’ said Ahmad Razzaq to the semi-retired Bollywood actor playing the part of Ashok Bandekar. ‘You’re doing well.’
‘Maybe I should stay as Mr Bandekar,’ the actor replied. ‘I’ve spent so long talking about his business I actually think I could run it now.’
Razzaq laughed politely. ‘No, that won’t be necessary. Just another day, and then you’ll be done.’
He left the office and approached the receptionist at her desk. ‘You may show in the next candidate now.’
On the way out he could not resist making a detour to the room where the flight-cases were stored. At the very back of the room was a case that had a false bottom. In the secret compartment beneath it were two packages, covered and sealed in heavy-duty plastic wrap. The wrap had been washed in antiseptic bleach, as had the airtight boxes beneath it. The wrapping and washing of each layer had been done by different individuals, neither of whom had touched the contents of either box. And if the sniffer dog had ever smelled those contents, it would have been very interested indeed.
Ahmad Razzaq took the tube from the City to Waterloo, changing trains twice along the way. He was reasonably certain that he was not being followed, but he wanted to make absolutely sure. At Waterloo he caught a train to Sunningdale, losing himself among the commuters crammed into his carriage. From there he made his way to the modest house on the edge of Windsor Great Park where Malachi Zorn was staying. ‘It’s just me,’ he’d said when Razzaq had questioned why his boss had chosen such humble quarters. ‘Why the hell do I need anywhere bigger?’
