Target

by Simon Kernick

  'What are you going to do now, Rob?' asked Dom.

  'I don't know.' I sighed, unable to keep the sense of defeat out of my voice. 'Keep hassling my police contact, I guess. Get her to check the CCTV footage from Jenny's apartment block for any signs that it's been tampered with, because I know that it has been. Other than that, I don't know. I could try speaking to Maxwell, I suppose, see if he's got any ideas. You know, from a criminal's point of view.'

  'That sounds a bit desperate.'

  'It is,' I said wearily. 'But I'm beginning to run low on options.'

  'Are you OK, Rob? Maybe I should come back.'

  'Thanks, mate, but there's no point. Right now there's nothing you can do that I can't. You may as well stay where you are. I'll keep you posted.'

  He tried to insist but I could tell his heart wasn't really in it. I wondered whether he did actually believe my story or whether he thought I'd finally gone over the edge.

  Once I was off the phone I kept walking, enjoying being away from the city and its dangers, and it was gone six by the time I got back to the car. The shadows were lengthening as late afternoon turned into early evening, and the sunlight flickering through the beech trees took on a soft orange glow.

  The last time I was up here I'd been with Yvonne and Chloe. Chloe had only just started walking, and I'd held her hand most of the way. It had been a sunny day like this, but that was the only similarity. Things had been very different then. We'd been discussing our move to France. The house there had been bought, our flat in London had been sold for close to double what we'd paid for it five years earlier, and I was preparing to hand in my notice at work. We'd had money in the bank and a brilliant plan for security, success and happiness.

  I stood in silence for a long time, wondering how and why I'd let it all slip through my fingers, and wishing that I could have that time back again. I experienced a sudden, painful urge to phone and talk to Yvonne and Chloe. To chat to them about this and that and try to inject some semblance of normality back into my life. But they were on a walking holiday in northern Sweden with Nigel, out of mobile phone contact. Instead, I got back in the car and began the drive home, thinking I desperately needed something to cheer me up.

  Ramon might not have been everyone's cup of tea, but in the circumstances he'd do just fine.

  Twelve

  Agent Mike Bolt sat staring at the piles of paperwork on his desk, feeling a mixture of anger and frustration. His job at SOCA was disrupting the activities of the couple of hundred Mr Bigs who ran organized crime in the UK, an industry that was worth an almost unbelievable forty billion dollars a year, but he was pragmatic enough to know it was a war he and his colleagues were never going to win. The enemy was far too superior in numbers and resources for that. But the important thing was not to lose it entirely. You had to be patient and keep chipping away at their defences. Sometimes you had to wait months for a result. Sometimes you didn't even get one. A witness might suddenly retract his testimony, or a judge throw out the case, and all your hard work went up in smoke as the bad guys walked free with big grins on their faces and went back to making obscene amounts of money. But in Bolt's experience, there was always a chink in a target's armour somewhere, and if you kept going long enough, you'd eventually find it.

  But even he had to admit that if Paul Wise had a chink in his armour, it was incredibly well hidden. Wise might have left the UK more than three years earlier to avoid the attentions of the law, but a large proportion of his income still came from criminal activities within his home country.

  In the five months Bolt's team had been actively targeting him, they'd raided four brothels in which he had a controlling interest, freeing a total of sixty-seven trafficked women in the process. They'd also seized more than ten kilos of ninety per cent pure heroin belonging to him, most of it in a daring undercover operation during which two of his key operatives were arrested. All this activity had garnered plenty of positive press coverage, but unfortunately not a shred of evidence that could be used against Wise himself. The two operatives caught with the heroin weren't talking and had got themselves some seriously expensive legal representation (doubtless bankrolled by their boss). As for the people they'd arrested in the brothels, only two had been prepared to cooperate – a Turkish asylum seeker who managed one, and a local thug who ran security at another – and neither had met or even spoken to Wise, both having dealt with his middlemen.

  Now, for the first time, Bolt and his team had turned to SOCA's Financial Intelligence Unit for help. The FIU's task was to discover where all the huge profits from organized crime were hidden so they could be traced back to the Mr Bigs who were making them, and subsequently used as evidence in any criminal proceedings. Bolt didn't have a huge amount of interest in the complex world of financial crime – it felt too far away from the action for him – but since nothing else was working he'd agreed with his bosses that going after Wise's money represented their best chance of truly hurting him.

  However, after over a month of FIU involvement Bolt had only just received his first report from them in his email in-box that afternoon. It was forty-five pages long and read like absolute gobbledygook. So much so that he'd asked one of his team, Mo Khan, to take it away and decipher it for him in preparation for the meeting they were scheduled to have with the FIU representatives the next day. Bolt figured that with a B-grade A-level in applied economics Mo was probably the best qualified of all of them to make sense of it, but he'd been gone for more than two and a half hours now, so maybe he was having as much trouble as the rest of them.

  Evening was drawing in, but Bolt wasn't thinking about going home. As he stood looking out of his office window across the park opposite and the high-rise buildings beyond, he was thinking about Tina Boyd, as he had been for most of the afternoon. He'd felt a real frisson of excitement when she called, even though they hadn't spoken or seen each other in close to a year, but then she'd always been able to get under his skin. The initial excitement had quickly turned to disappointment, though, when it became clear that the reason for her call was professional, and he felt bad that he'd had to tell her about the Paul Wise investigation, knowing the part that Wise had played in the death of her former boyfriend.

  At least they'd agreed to stay in touch, and he knew that she'd want to hear about any developments on the Wise case, but he wished there was more to it than that. He'd pondered asking if she fancied meeting for a drink, but he knew it wouldn't work. He was still attracted to her, but the last time he'd followed his instincts when they were alone together, responding to signals he was sure had been there, had left him feeling embarrassed and depressed. It would be better simply to put her behind him completely.

  There was a knock on the door and he turned round as a short, stocky Asian guy with a round jolly face and a frizzy mop of hair that couldn't decide whether it was salt or pepper ambled into the room. Mo Khan looked tired, his big bloodhound eyes sporting heavy bags, and Bolt noticed he was putting on weight round the middle – a result, no doubt, of his latest effort to give up smoking.

  'Ah, the wanderer returns,' Bolt said with a smile, glad for the interruption. 'Any joy with that?'

  'Some. It seems that Paul Wise is good at cleaning his money.'

  'And it took them a month to work that out? He's been a criminal for thirty years. Of course he's good at cleaning his money.'

  'Well, they've found out a bit more than that,' said Mo, as the two of them took seats opposite each other. 'They've worked out that he's making a gross annual profit of at least twenty-five million dollars, just from prostitution and drug smuggling. Most of the cash gets smuggled out of the country. Some of it gets sunk into his construction and leisure businesses, particularly the restaurants, where it's difficult to differentiate it from the legitimate takings. The rest of it ends up going through the usual laundering routes and into bank accounts in places like Iceland, Panama, and of course northern Cyprus, before it finally makes its way into Wise's pocket. He lo
ses maybe thirty per cent of the total in turning it from dirty to clean, but he's still raking in huge quantities, and he's got some deal with the authorities over there where he's even managed to defer his tax payments.'

  Bolt had long ago given up getting worked up about the personal wealth of the Mr Bigs, but he still whistled through his teeth at the size of these particular figures. 'And who said crime doesn't pay? OK, so how does the report help us?'

  Mo shrugged. 'We might be able to disrupt the flow of the cash if we know how he's getting it out of the country and we can intercept it, but from what they say here, it's going to be a nightmare building a watertight money-laundering case against him. He spreads the stuff around too much for that, and the fact that he owns a lot of businesses where large sums of cash are used counts in his favour.'

  'So they've been able to find out all these clever statistics and write this big flashy report, but it basically makes no difference.' Bolt shook his head irritably.

  'That's about the size of it, boss. There is one piece of good news, though. The credit crunch is hitting Wise hard. Not only are all his legitimate businesses suffering, he's been putting millions into a hedge fund in the City run by some hotshot financier called Sir Henry Portman.'

  'Where do I know that name from?'

  Mo grinned. 'He was filmed by the News of the World dressed in stockings and suspenders snorting cocaine and cavorting with a succession of high-class prostitutes, one of whom was seen to spank his bare behind with a paddle.'

  Bolt raised his eyebrows. 'And that's in the report?'

  'No, I just Googled it now.'

  'Jesus. But why would I remember that? Those kind of scandals are two a penny.'

  'Well, one, he sued them successfully over it for breach of privacy, which made the news. Two, he's a big name in the City and his fund, HPP, has been one of the star performers of the last five years. Up until recently, that is. It's now down more than thirty-five per cent year on year. Which translates into losses in the millions for Wise.'

  'Good. At least there's some divine justice. But it still doesn't bring us any closer to getting him. Is there any personal link between Wise and Portman?' Wise had had some good contacts with senior figures in the establishment, which in Bolt's view was one of the key reasons he'd avoided justice so far.

  'Not that the report mentions,' said Mo. 'And even if there were, it wouldn't make any difference. The money Wise has been investing goes through a holding company of his, Ratten Holdings, and it's officially clean. According to him, he's just a businessman.'

  As Mo spoke, Bolt Googled Sir Henry Portman on his PC and came up with several hundred matches. He clicked the first one and a report of his court victory against the News of the World appeared.

  'Listen, boss, do you mind if I make a move? I wanted to take the kids swimming tonight, and time's getting on. I've written up a summary of the report for you to take a look at.'

  Bolt smiled. Mo Khan doted on his four kids, and with the long hours they worked at SOCA, time was precious. 'Sure. We're done here. Have fun.'

  For a fleeting moment he felt jealous of Mo having a family to go back to. His own wife, Mikaela, had died in a car accident seven years earlier, and he'd never remarried, or had kids.

  He pushed the thought aside and turned back to the computer screen, inspecting the colour photo of the distinguished-looking gentleman with the silver hair and the pinstripe suit. In the picture, Sir Henry Portman was standing outside the High Court addressing reporters, alongside his blonde female lawyer, who looked a damn sight better than most of the ones Bolt had to deal with. He wore a serious expression, as befitted the occasion, but there was something vaguely rakish about him, a twinkling in the eyes, and it didn't take that much to imagine him enjoying the attentions of good-looking call girls.

  Paul Wise was strongly suspected of being responsible for as many as twenty-five murders, including that of a teenage girl and at least one police officer, even though he used other people to do the actual dirty work, and Bolt wondered whether Portman knew where the money Wise was investing in his funds came from. Or whether he even cared.

  After all, in Bolt's experience, when large amounts of money are involved, people tend to forget their morals very, very quickly indeed.

  Thirteen

  'What she lacked in obvious beauty, she made up for both in talent and enthusiasm,' announced Ramon, describing his conquest of the previous night, a credit controller called Cheryl. 'And I've got to tell you, my man, that even the great Ramon's libido has been temporarily tamed. I am, how you say, fair shagged out.' He grinned and took a toke on his joint, sucking in the smoke and holding it there for a good ten seconds before blowing out a thin stream towards the ceiling.

  We were sitting in my bedroom cum living area, Ramon in the old armchair by my bed, me reclined on a couple of beanbags opposite him, a Peroni in my hand. An old Santana album (Ramon's choice) was playing on the iPod, and I was feeling relaxed for the first time in twenty-four hours. I was supposed to be cooking dinner for us both, but somehow I didn't think this was going to be happening any time soon.

  'How about you, my man?' he said. 'There were a lot of women in that place last night. Did you attract one with your lethal combination of wit and good looks?'

  'Incredible though it might seem, no.' I took a slug from the beer, surprised that I wasn't even tempted to tell him about what had happened to me. I guess at that moment I just wanted to forget about it.

  'Ach Roberto,' he said, pointing the joint at me accusingly. 'A good-looking guy like you and you're wasting your youth. One day you're going to sit back and wonder where the time went. Let me tell you something, my man. No one ever regretted that they didn't spend enough time in the office.'

  'I don't work in an office.'

  'I know you don't. But you've still got to loosen up, my man. Here, have a puff on this little number. It's prime weed. Not any of that skunk shit.' He leaned forward with the joint.

  Normally I'd have said no. I rarely smoked dope. It tended to make me both sleepy and incredibly horny at the same time, which was always a pointless combination, especially so when all I had for company was another man, but tonight I felt like throwing caution to the wind. I took it off him and inhaled deeply, enjoying the feeling of smoke in my lungs. I'd given up the cigarettes years back but, like most smokers, I still missed them.

  'Everything's all right with you, isn't it, Roberto?' he asked, looking at me seriously.

  I smiled. 'Sure, I'm good. It's quite a compliment to be told I'm wasting my youth when I'm thirty-four.'

  'Yeah, but the man telling you that's forty-two.'

  We both laughed, and I took another toke, beginning to get that lightheaded feeling.

  'I want you to be happy, man, you know? You've had a few hard times, but you've got to remember that life's short, and it's there to be enjoyed. That's my philosophy and it's always worked.' He sat back in his seat, making himself comfortable, and fiddled with his bandanna (red tonight).

  His philosophy had worked, too. Ramon might not have had a lot financially, but he was one of the happiest men I knew. He had his dope, his dancing, his conquests, and one way or another he always perked me up, however black my mood was.

  I drained my beer and pointed to his. 'Another one?'

  'Do bears defecate in forested terrain?'

  'Apparently so,' I said, and got up, handing him the joint.

  As I pulled two more Peronis from the fridge, I had a sudden rush of guilt. Here I was enjoying myself, drinking and smoking dope without a second thought for Jenny. I looked at my watch. It had just turned half eight. I knew I ought to phone Tina and chivvy her into action, but I told myself that I'd do it later. If I hassled her too much she'd end up ignoring my calls.

  'You know what I could do with?' I said, coming back into the room with the beers. 'A holiday. I've just realized I haven't been anywhere apart from France since before Chloe was born, and that was over four years ago.' I pu
t Ramon's bottle on the bedside table beside his chair, and collapsed back into the beanbags. 'I'm thinking somewhere like Costa Rica. Have you ever been there?' I remembered that he'd always claimed to have been a bit of a world traveller.

  Ramon didn't answer.

  He didn't even move.

  I tensed, experiencing a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. 'Ramon?' My voice cracked as I spoke his name.

  He was slumped forward a little in his seat, like he'd fallen asleep, and the joint was no longer in his hand.

  I put down my drink and got to my feet, moving too fast and getting a headrush as I walked over to him. 'Ramon? You all right, mate?'

  I crouched down. Still no movement. The hollow feeling was spreading to every part of me. I lifted his head, not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to.

  'Oh Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ.'

  There was a deep red hole where his left eye had been. It was pumping blood, a thick stripe of which ran slowly down his face and on to his neck, pooling in the fold there.

  Straight away I knew he was dead. There was no question about it. His head hung heavy and useless in my hands, but it was still almost impossible to believe because I'd only been gone a few moments – thirty seconds at most – and when I'd left him he'd been laughing and talking and toking. Unable to quite comprehend what I was seeing, even though the blood was now running freely down his face, I felt desperately for a pulse that wasn't there.

  A terrified panic ripped through me. 'Ramon! Ramon! Wake up! Stay with me!' I gave his face a gentle slap. 'Please,' I whispered. 'Stay with me. Don't go.'

  And then I heard movement.

  I froze.

  'Who's Chloe?' said a voice behind me in a harsh Northern Irish accent.

  Fourteen

  My mouth went dry. My stomach tightened so much it was painful. More than anything else in the world, I didn't want to turn round.