Dealer (A Tim Burr Thriller Book 3)

by Nicholas E Watkins

  Lesta had enough and was on the verge of leaving, or strangling a nodding Yerik, when Nikhil entered the club. He gestured them to follow as he went past the stage to the office at the rear of the club.

  Sitting in the relative quite of the office the conversation opened with Lesta. “What a fucking shit hole,” he said.

  “A successful shit hole though,” said Nikhil. “I apologise for the location, but I have been running round Moscow all day and still have stuff to do. But we do need to talk about the fucking balls up in Crete. What I can’t understand is why there has been no action from the Yanks. Surely they have the file linking us to all the money stashed overseas by now. Why haven’t they frozen the money?”

  “I may have the answer,” said Yerik. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Nikhil, who began to read.

  “What does it mean?” he asked as he passed the copy of an email to Lesta.

  “It means that the reason the Americans have not come down on us like a ton of bricks, is that they do not have the file, the Driver does, or says he does.” said Lesta.

  “How can he have the file?”

  “This may help.” Yerik passed a further piece of paper across the desk to Nikhil, This time a print out of a news item. “It doesn’t give much detail but the day after I was sent packing by the Navy, two people were murdered on Crete.”

  “And you think this has something to do with our file, how?”

  “Let’s suppose the deceased are the husband and wife and somehow the Driver killed them and took the file.”

  “He didn’t know anything about the file or the woman. It is not possible. How could he find them, let alone kill them and take the file? Its bollocks,” said Lesta.

  “He’s just trying to save his arse with a cock and bull story. Find the fuck and get him to pay up or kill him.”

  “What if he has the file? It is not important how he got it. We still don’t want the Yanks getting it or we will be the ones with our balls cut off.”

  “He says to phone, so phone, either way we get closer to finding him.”

  The Driver was still hiding out in the flat trying to stay off the radar. He had sent the email two days earlier. He had not been idle in the mean time. On his return from Crete he had travelled to the Isle of Man and visited every crook and money launderers’ favourite advocate, Graham Pelham. The lawyer was not in the least surprised to be given an envelope and issued with instructions to open it and follow the instructions contained therein, in the event the Driver failed to make contact on a monthly basis. Pelham’s only interest was in the regular payment of a grand a month for the service. The Driver had ensured that if the Russians killed him, the Americans, the British and the press would be in possession of the facts and proof of the involvement of the Oligarchs in the money laundering scheme.

  The phone rang, “Driver.”

  Lesta’s voice came onto the phone, “Where is my money?”

  “I never got paid because your fucking air force blew up the convoy first.”

  “That is your problem. Pay the fucking money or say goodbye to your cock. We will find you.”

  “I think you will find it has just become your problem. I have something of yours and if anything happens to me then I have ensured that you and your cronies will be shafted.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I thought you might say that. Are you near a computer, if so, just give me an email address?” The Driver typed in the address and pressed send.

  There was a few moments pause and then the phone was put on mute. Lesta, Nikhil and Yerik looked at the scan of the last page of the document with their signatures on it as it was displayed on Nikhil’s tablet.

  “How, the fuck did he get that?” said Nikhil.

  Lesta pressed the un-mute button on his phone. “How did you come into possession of this? How the fuck did you even know about it?”

  “Does it matter? The point is I have it and I will use it to fuck you the same way you fucked me, by telling the Russian where those Buks were so they could destroy the evidence of their involvement in shooting down that passenger jet. I am not stupid. I know you fuckers had a hand in it.”

  Lesta interrupted him protesting his innocence

  “Shut the fuck up. I wouldn’t believe a word you said, even if you had the Pope as a witness, just listen. Firstly, if anything happens to me the papers will be sent to the CIA. You had better hope that I don’t get run over or catch a virus, Have you got that?”

  “We could tracked you down and torture their location out of you.”

  “It is a plan, but I am not an idiot, if I told you their location, you would kill me anyway so there would be no point, Secondly I of course need you to write off the debt.”

  “I worked that bit out for myself. What else,” said Lesta?

  “A small payment by way of recompense, say one hundred million?”

  The mute button was pressed for a second time and a few moments elapsed before Lesta came back onto the phone. “You could continually come back and ask for more, blackmailing us on and on.”

  “There is that, but as I said I am not stupid, I want to live out my life naturally, if I did that, sooner or later you would have moved your operation or buried it deeper or the political situation may change. Who knows, but I just want to survive this and live to old age.”

  “We have no choice, but be careful, I am not the forgiving type.”

  The Driver pressed the send button and his bank details were sent. “Make the transfer,” he said into the phone and hung up.

  Three minutes later the balance on the account was up by one hundred million dollars. Not the two hundred he had hoped for, but at least he lived and was rich.

  The Driver had one final matter to clear up. He owed Hambros Benedict twenty five million for his part in funding the arms deal. He would phone him, pay him and remove the final danger to his health.

  What he did not know was that Benedict’s wife had been brutally murdered because of him. No amount of money would ever reverse that, Benedict now only lived for one thing, revenge.

  Chapter 29

  MI5 was coming to terms with the reality of cyber crime. The recruitment drive was beginning to produce results. The attacks by China, Russia and North Korea in the past months on the US and UK Governments, commercial and utilities such as electricity, computers was increasing. Tim was finding more and more of his time was being absorbed in dealing with the planning, strategy and placement of new technical staff.

  He, however, considered all this a distraction from his prime focus of tracking down his wife’s killer. He had gathered together all the information he could from every source on the three Russians and their operations. He plotted every transaction and loan he could, he had even involved the Icelandic Banking Authority, the home territory of the Baltic Bank, to aid him. They were naturally reluctant, but he played the ISIS link and terrorist threat card and they sent him all they had.

  It was clear that the biggest single transaction, other than the interactions with the Icelandic Banks, were loans to Hambros Benedict and Company. It was all he had, so he ran with it. Contact with the CIA and examination of the source documentation made available to the Parliamentary Committee, looking at British arms sales to the Saudis, soon revealed that the Company was strictly minor league and had, up until recently, dealt mostly in Latin America. It was pretty evident that Benedict himself was no longer active in the industry and had moved to Monaco to retire.

  Tim looked at the results from GCHQ, the UK eyes and ears on the net and telecommunications networks of the World. The problem he faced was the sheer volume of data collected. Comprising emails, phone calls, texts, major financial transactions and targeted individual information. Wood and trees and needles in haystacks went through Tim’s mind as he saw the size of the files. Banking transactions were so completely off any scale, that a human mind could not hope to analyse them. With computer algorithms, ban
ks could execute thousands of trades in nanoseconds, which they called high frequency trading. Hundreds of millions of dollars were traded to make a few hundred on each trade. The money could be turned thousands of times in a day. The overall volume was huge, but at the end of the day, perhaps the net position could be as low as a hundred million when they balanced at the end of the day.

  Tim had the man power though and he put it to work. He used the intake of new computer whiz kids to write some search algorithms to narrow the database down. He interacted so much with the technical guys that he drew praise from Elaine for his dedication in getting stuck into the threat of cyber attacks. She would not have been so impressed if she knew the amount of MI5’s resources that were being diverted for his own personal quest.

  “We may have something,” said Harriet Shaw, one of the new breed of technical savvy recruits, who had been helping him coordinate his investigation.

  She put the tablet down on his desk and turned it so he could see the screen. It meant nothing to him. The screen displayed what appeared to be a series of spiky graphs. “Tell me about it.”

  He gestured for her to pull a chair round to his side of the desk and sit so they could view the screen together. “This is a result of an app we wrote to search the data we had from GCHQ on banking transactions. Basically, during the referenced time frame you gave us, we looked at the probability of on a given day the Bank, or Banks, exceeding their exposure beyond their normal risk parameters.”

  He looked at her” Not a clue,” he said.

  She let out a sigh as though he was obviously a bit dim. “Look at it this way, if you are millionaire it would not be unusual to spend, say five thousand, but if you were a normal working person it would, Likewise banks need to assess risk based on their capital base. Too much exposure and if the market goes against you, you end up doing a Lehman Brothers. Now we don’t know what the risk profile is for any given bank, so we cannot with any accuracy see if there is an unusual trading pattern. So we wrote a little algorithm that looks at the past trading patterns of a bank and from that we work out if a bank exceeds its limits.”

  “So tell me the bottom line?”

  “The spikes show when the Baltic Bank pushed the envelope and then rather than rectify the position, as you would expect, it pushed it further.”

  “Specifically”

  “Specifically tracing the spikes, Baltic lent one of the Directors’ Companies, a Mr Lesta, ninety million. Then it lent another one hundred and seventy five million to an arms dealer, Hambros Benedict Limited, another then another fifty million just a week ago.”

  “So it made loans?” said Tim, “It is a bank after all.”

  “Not a very good one, it wrote the whole lot off two days after paying out the fifty million.”

  “Now that is what I call an unusual business transaction. Well done.”

  She left taking the tablet. Tim knew he was on the right track. The money and the timing fitted the events. He needed to know more about Hambros Benedict and his dealing with the Russians.

  He puulled what he had, from the data, which was very little. The file started by Stiles did however, point to a new boss, running the show, known as the Driver, he had taken over from Benedict. He had a name for the Driver, James Riddle. He could find no nationality, date of birth or passport on the data bases.

  “Oh bollocks,” he said aloud. “James Riddle, Jimmy Riddle, fuck it.” Cockney slang, to do a Jimmy was to take a piddle. Clearly he needed to delve deeper.

  The current focus on cyber crime at MI5 triggered a thought. He had seen that a law firm in Panama, that had set up bogus identities to cover tax evaders, had been hacked and leading figures, dodging tax, had been ousted. He checked the eleven million documents leaked, focussing on Riddle and Hambros. The law firm had been complacent in aiding many intentional figures hide their millions and many international accountancy firms were implicated. The two were there, but were such small fry that they had attracted little or no attention. They would now.

  Looking at the timing, the links from the Baltic Bank to the Russians and the link from the Bank to this Driver, Tim felt in his gut that he was onto something. He pulled up the airline passenger manifests sent to him by the Greek Police and looked for the name Riddle.

  There was no hit. He felt disappointed. He and Stiles had travelled within a day to Crete and arranged their accommodation hours before their arrival. They had travelled under false names, so even had someone had access to airline bookings without knowing their names, they could not have traced them using that method. The killer must have travelled within twenty four hours to have been in position to make the hit. The only way the killer could have achieved that was by flying. No other method of getting to the Island was feasible. There was a ferry, but it went once a day and was a full day’s itinerary from the mainland. He had to have flown.

  He called Harriet to come back up to his office. She entered and sat down, opposite him this time.

  “I need to know if you can do something. I have a list of names and passport holders and their numbers, place and date of issue. Some may be fake but most, if not all, will be genuine. I need to find the ones that are the odd ones out. Ones that spike, as you put it. I am looking in essence at what is most likely a normal passport, but is somehow not normal. I am not making sense am I?”

  “You are in a funny sort of way. What you are looking for is someone who has a passport, but may have fallen outside your expectations as to how, when or where it was obtained. Further you want, in reality, to check if that person or persons have an existence beyond that passport. Were they born or have they died? Do they work? Have they had medical treatment? Have they married or had children, and so on?”

  “Yes that’s it. Can you do it?”

  “I assume that the passports holders could be any Nationality, in that all they will have in common is that they were on a plane or planes going to a particular destination. That will make it very difficult and dependent on what information we can gather from their various Countries, where they live, were born or work.”

  “Concentrate on single males over thirty and under fifty.”

  “Easier”

  “Go to it,” said Tim.

  Chapter 30

  Hambros Benedict sat in the back of his chauffeur driven car as he was being driven from Monaco, along the Cote D’Azure to Marseilles. He was a broken man. The death of Mimi by the hands of randyjim6552 and tomcock85 had taken all that he loved and his reason for living away from. His wealth and his physical possessions now seemed to be nothing but a reminder of a former life, just garbage in a collection of lost hopes and dreams, meaningless.

  The trip to the oncologist had confirmed what he knew, that time was running out. It was a matter of, perhaps weeks, and he would be joining Mimi. But he was not quite finished with the World yet. He did not intend to go alone into the after life. Others would be joining him on his journey into oblivion.

  He had a list and sadness overtook him as he headed to the northern part of the city. He was sad because he knew he would be unable to take all those that deserved to die on their final journey. James Riddle, the Driver was on the list. Had he honoured his deal and paid back the Russians she would still be alive. The Russians were on the list, but out of his reach for the moment. Top of his list were the two scumbags that had used his beautiful Mimi, then casually beheaded her and cast her aside like a broken doll.

  Tracking down randyjim6552 and tomcock85 had been easier than he had thought. Money spent on a computer consultant had soon narrowed the location. They had been tracked by the servers and IP address by their communications with Mimi via the swinger’s site. A few more euros and helpful contacts in the French police yielded their whereabouts. He could virtually see them from his balcony in Monte Carlo. They were aboard the Lady Heloise. Yerik’s yacht moored in the marina.

  He wanted them all dead. He wanted to taste and feel their deaths up close. He needed to know that he had consign
ed them personally to hell. The idea of putting out a contract had occurred to him, but he knew that no one in their right mind would go against the three Russians. Only someone with a death wish and nothing to lose, or live for, would contemplate such a contract, He knew that he was the ideal candidate for the job. He had little life left and he had nothing left to lose.

  Benedict’s physical strength was failing as the cancer ate away at him and in a short time, he knew, he would be incapable of taking revenge. He had to act now. There was urgency and desperation in his actions and it was that urgency that had led him to the Bel Air area of Marseilles. This was the drug capital of France. The area was a virtual no go area for the police, controlled by the drug dealers. It was run down and poverty stricken. Unemployment was rife and the inhabitants, mostly Muslim, were devoid of hope, opportunity and were without a promise of a better future, like himself.

  There had been riots and the army had been used in the past when the police could no longer manage the area. Now it was virtually autonomous. Watchers observed all coming and goings into and from the area and phoned the information ahead to the gangs than run the estate.. Checkpoints had been set up to control entry and levies imposed on items brought in. There was a parking tax, but unlike the municipal scheme, where you were fined for non-compliance, here your car would be torched if you failed to pay.

  Benedict knew that he was at risk as he soon became aware of the eyes on him as he entered gangland. His driver was Arabic and helped him make the contacts he needed in order to make the purchase he wanted. He though, was very nervous as he approached the first unofficial checkpoint. The cheap AK47s were openly on display as they pulled up.

  The chauffeur spoke. There was a mobile call and they passed. This was repeated a further two times before they arrived at a low-rise block of flats. “I shall wait here.”

  Benedict alighted from the car and stood on the pavement waiting. He did not wait long. A young man of probable Turkish origin carrying a rifle appeared from the doorway and walked up to him. His French accent was worse than Benedict’s, “follow me.”