Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series)

by William Wield

  ‘Never, not a chance,’ replied Wheeler, ‘Nat Matthews is paranoid about anyone getting anywhere near his unique trading software, he’d never let that happen – besides, what could they offer him to make him agree to break that principle?’

  ‘Well, in that case, the whole thing’s quite extraordinary,’ said Struthers, ‘so we’d better get in touch with Matthews. I happen to know that Paul Finch was in New York this week and going down after that to Florida for the long weekend, so he’ll be virtually impossible to contact.’

  ‘I’ll try and get hold of Nat Matthews then,’ said Wheeler, ‘as usual around this time of year, he’s staying at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz for his annual skiing holiday.’

  ‘When you make contact with him, why not ask him about stopping this demonstration,’ said Struthers, ‘I mean shutting down the company’s trading at the time of this demonstration is due to start.’

  ‘Wouldn’t doing that look worse to his clients and the markets than allowing the demonstration to go ahead?’ said Wheeler, ‘Let’s face it, any major unscheduled interruption to trading is going to get people asking questions. Anyway, it’s getting hold of him that’s going to be the problem. From past experience, I know that he bans all communications with him whilst he’s on holiday. Still, leave that with me – I’ll get hold of him somehow.’

  * * * * *

  Wheeler knew that Matthews did not spend that much of his now very substantial earnings on himself – unless, that is, you were to include his Turbo Bentley, his Quattroporte Maserati and his house in Wilton Crescent. His only other personal extravagances were his two holidays each year. On these, he always went alone – St Moritz usually around Easter, and Italy – usually Tuscany followed by Rome in the late summer. The cognoscenti might not consider the skiing facilities in St Moritz as being the best in Switzerland, but it had the Cresta Run, the horse racing on the lake, and, above all, the cachet of being one of the oldest and grandest ski resorts in the world. It was that aspect of it that appealed the most to Nat Matthews. When possible, he always stayed in the same room at the Palace Hotel. He liked familiarity and had come to regard it, with its wonderful views out over the lake and across the mountains the far side of the valley, as though he owned it.

  Wheeler considered himself to be outside Matthews’s embargo on communications from the office, since he was neither a partner nor staff. He also considered that he had a special relationship with Matthews. As his PR advisor, he had managed to extricate Matthews more than once from one indiscretion or another – he had even once managed to put his errant client in a good light after a tawdry tale involving a lady of the night and a nightclub of poor repute. For these ‘extra’ services, Matthews was always genuinely grateful.

  Having done his duty by briefing his partner, Wheeler got back to his own office and set about contacting Matthews. Naturally he tried the obvious first. He telephoned him at the Palace Hotel. As he had anticipated, Matthews was out skiing and not expected back till after dark. He was also told that Mr Matthews usually left skiing back down to the last safe moments, just as the pistes were beginning to ice up and that, on getting back down into St. Moritz, before returning to the Palace Hotel, he nearly always went to Hanselmann’s for its ridiculously rich but delicious cakes and tea.

  Failing the easy approach, Wheeler then sent him a text message “ring Wheeler immediately, business threatening situation”. From reports of his previous holidays in St Moritz, Wheeler also knew that Gustave, the concierge, was the epitome of a great fixer and looked after Matthews every outlandish whim – so he also sent a message to Gustave, urging him to get Matthews to contact Mr Wheeler urgently.

  This second message eventually had the desired effect, and Matthews rang him back shortly after three. Gustave had managed to track him down to the Corviglia Club half way up the mountain behind St. Moritz and Matthews had responded immediately, taking the funicular down to St Moritz rather that skiing back down.

  ‘This had better be bloody important,’ said Matthews as soon as he spoke to Wheeler from his Palace Hotel room, ‘I’ve cut short my usual afternoon programme to respond to the text message you sent to Gustave – so what’s this all about?’

  Wheeler recounted the whole thing, Mina’s emails, what she had told him she had overheard from telephone conversations – even including the connection between Athena, Sir Jeremy Towneley and his nephew now running the team that had hacked into his company.

  Wheeler finished by saying, ‘John Struthers and I didn’t do anything to stop the demonstration, because we felt sure that either you or Paul must have agreed to it – I mean we assumed that …’

  ‘Of course I didn’t bloody agree to it,’ shouted Matthews, ‘do you think I’d suddenly go mad enough to agree to such a hare-brained idea? Christ, you weren’t joking when you texted the words “business threatening”. Don’t you realise that if we aren’t trading completely normally on Tuesday morning when the Stock Exchange reopens, we could lose all our bloody clients – millions draining out of the company like a severed bloody artery.’

  ‘Look, as soon as we’ve finished this conversation,’ he continued, his voice calmer, ‘I’m going to get myself back to London the fastest way that Gustave can arrange it for me. As soon as I am away from St Moritz, I’ll have him to text you the time I’m expected to get home – by then I’ll probably be in an effing helicopter arriving in Zurich. But, here’s the important bit, by the time I get back home, I want you, Struthers, the office, my lawyers, the wholly bloody lot of you to have started on a plan to get me free of bloody computer clutches of Jeremy Towneley and his effing nephew. I also expect you to have found a way which allows me to tell all our clients, first thing Easter Tuesday morning, that whatever happened this afternoon was just a hiccup. They need to hear that our trading is entirely under our complete control again. Is all of that crystal clear?’

  ‘Crystal clear,’ repeated Wheeler as he heard the telephone click dead the other end of the line.

  The message was stark. Get the company shot of the influence of Macrae’s lot or there would be no company – legal redress or recompense could wait for another day, but no one could postpone the arrival of Tuesday.

  Wheeler bit his lower lip and for just a few seconds wrestled with his duty to tell Struthers of a plan that was forming in his mind. A moment’s further thought persuaded him that Struthers’s innate caution would scupper his emerging plan. There would be time enough to inform him later; right now he decided to get on with what he needed to do. His excuse for not telling Struthers everything right now, would be to tell a white lie and use the excuse that he was still having difficulty reaching Matthews.

  He looked up a number on his mobile phone, having decided there was just one person ideally suited to meet Matthews’s demands; he rang, but his man was out.

  He left a message, ‘Max Wheeler calling, need you and your unusual contact’s special skills urgently. Ring me back on this mobile as soon as you can, thanks’. Whether or not the recipient of this message would come up with a legal way of helping mattered far less than that he should be available. It would be a difficult wait till he got an answer to this.

  There was little doubt in his mind, however that he was going to have to step outside the strict confines of the law if he was going to solve Nat Matthews’s problem by Tuesday morning’s trading.

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, evening

  Nikol’skaya Street, Moscow

  Igor Komarov had spent an uncomfortable afternoon. He had been kept waiting by the President for several hours and although there was an apology of sorts when they eventually met, Komarov had a dread feeling that his standing with the President was slipping. His recent few years as an indispensable ‘fixer’ had allowed him to amass a considerable fortune, so, becoming dispensable might leave him with that fortune, but losing his source of power was not something he wanted even to contemplate. Moreover, it was the reason he had decided on the risky business o
f pursuing Bazarov’s investigations knowing that the wretched man had been murdered on the President’s orders for failing to deliver.

  On arriving back at the office just as everyone was leaving made matters worse, there would be no one on whom to vent his frustration and his fears for his future. His heart lifted, however, when the last remaining office junior told him there was an urgent message for him from Morozov at the SVR.

  He felt a tickle of sweat at the back of his neck as he hurried through the office. Morozov only ever sent reports, not messages. He read the email and then almost tore the paper as he snatched up the printed out attachments. As he read these, he loosened his tie and reached for the remains of a cup of cold coffee from lunchtime which no one had yet bothered to clear away. As soon as he had finished reading, he looked at his watch and calculated the time difference. It was 3.32pm in London and he immediately realised that the UK TV programme had already started.

  Fumbling, he picked up the telephone and dialled a number he would not like the President know was on his quick-dial list.

  Anton Silayev had done up his apartment in Tverskaya Street in a manner that would have done just fine as a high class brothel in Paris in the nineteen-thirties. A mass of heavy red brocade curtains swathed the windows, gold fittings glinted on the doors, the curtain stays and on much of the heavy rococo furniture. Silayev for all his amassed fortune, had not yet acquired a degree of modesty in either his manners or his style of living. Still, being an important direct link between Komarov and what the outside world refer to as the Russian Mafia, Silayev’s appalling appetites were tolerated – it was his contacts that Komarov needed and over the years they had built between them profitable businesses converting Komarov’s close connection to the seat of power into profits and capital for onward investment.

  As the telephone rang, Silayev was sprawled in a comfortable chair behind a massive, ornate desk. A half empty bottle of vodka stood near the telephone and when it rang out, he topped up his glass even before he reached for the handset. Having spent the afternoon commiserating with a couple of friends on a dubious business deal that had gone wrong, when he did pick up the telephone, he was about to dismiss the caller with some rude excuse, until he realised that it was Komarov ringing him.

  Instantly he sat up in the chair, and waved at his two companions to leave the room and shut the door.

  ‘Igor, sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said, sobering up with the shock of a call from his vital link to real power as opposed to his own brute variety. ‘Just getting rid of some old friends who had been commiserating with me …’ he added.

  ‘Business friends?’ asked Komarov.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ lied Silayev, ‘death in the family of one of them, known them for years…’

  ‘This is important and time is of the essence,’ said Komarov, ‘if you haven’t been drinking too much at the wake, are you in good enough shape to do something important for me?’

  ‘I am fine, what’s up?’

  Komarov told him of the SVR’s surveillance report – how it had picked up Mina’s email to Wheeler and enough of what it contained to give Silayev a good idea of how important this was.

  ‘Do you have RT TV?’ said Komarov as he finished.

  ‘I do,’ replied Silayev.

  ‘And can you get hold of your top IT people right away, I mean right now?’

  ‘Yes, I could,’ said Silayev, ‘but as you know I’m pretty clued up myself on most …’

  ‘I know that Anton,’ said Komarov, ‘but we need someone highly technical to watch a UK television programme that’s already started.’

  ‘One of the people with me before you rang was my IT technical director, Ivolgin, a friend of the deceased,’ replied Silayev, ‘he’s just in the next room.’

  ‘Get him back right away, I need you to watch this UK programme called “A day on the London Stock Exchange”. At precisely 3.50 GMT – that’s 6.50 here of course,’ said Komarov. ‘I need you to be watching some trading on a Bloomberg screen on that TV programme. There is going to be one minute of trading that is supposedly going to show what happens when the trading algorithms of the hedge fund have been re-engineered. Do you understand what I’m saying? We might be looking at the work of elusive cyber warfare programme we’ve been searching for.’

  Silayev slammed his glass down on the desk, stretched out and grabbed a small pad, at the same time he pressed a button on his intercom and held it down. On the pad he then wrote the name of the programme and the timings. The intercom answered.

  ‘Get Ivolgin back in here, now,’ he shouted into the machine.

  Moments later Ivolgin and a girl who looked more like a call-girl than a secretary came back into the room.

  ‘I’ll get onto this right away,’ he said back down the phone to Komarov, ’I’ll watch it with my IT man and ring you back after the programme.’ He replaced the receiver and gave the instructions to Ivolgin and the girl. Despite her inappropriate dress, she acted with efficiency, pulling a large widescreen television in front of some chairs near the fireplace, switching the machine on and finding the foreign programme on RT TV.

  Silayev and Ivolgin moved to the chairs in front of the television in time to catch the last twenty minutes of ITV’s “A Day on the London Stock Exchange”. Just after 3.45 London time, Ivolgin sat forward and pressed ‘record’ on the TV remote. They then watched in complete silence. At 3.49 precisely, the programme presenter turned to the TV audience.

  ‘And now we’re going to see a typical Bloomberg trading screen. On it you will be able to see how the graph moves as trades are done,’ he said.

  As the television camera focused on a trading screen viewers could see the graph fluctuating up and down gently with small boxes round the main central picture showing numbers and symbols incomprehensible to a layman but which Ivolgin watched closely. At 3.50, as though someone had pressed a ‘fast forward’ button on a recording, the graph seemed to go out of control, fluctuating wildly from top to bottom of the screen whilst the figures in the small boxes also went into the same fast forward mode. Exactly one minute later the graph returned to the way it had been running earlier. The ITV presenter moved the programme onto other matters and Silayev turned the television off.

  Silayev turned to Ivolgin.

  ‘Apparently, that the wild trading we just saw was the result of someone hacking into the hedge fund over the internet and re-engineering its trading algorithms, what did you think of that?’ he said as he watched Ivolgin’s reactions closely. Ivolgin switched the television on again, re-wound the recording and watched the demonstration a second time. When it was finished, he shook his head slowly from side to side.

  ‘Not possible with any technology that I know of,’ he said; ‘quite apart from hacking into the company itself and presumably getting past some quite sophisticated defences …’ He paused for a moment working things out in his mind as he spoke. Then went on, ‘having got past the defences – no mean feat with today’s encrypted versions – you say they re-engineered the trading algorithms? As I said before, and I’ll repeat it with complete confidence, that’s not possible with any technology I know of. My guess is that those watching that TV programme have been subjected to a very clever hoax – very clever, but a hoax nevertheless,’

  Silayev immediately rang Komarov back, and passed on Ivolgin’s views.

  ‘And you’re sure Ivolgin is as good as we’ve got anywhere in the whole of the Russian Federation?’ asked Komarov.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ replied Silayev, ‘you know that, Igor, how the hell could we do what we do without him being the best? He does all our special IT stuff, legal and illegal.’

  ‘Okay, that’s fine, I believe you,’ said Komarov, ‘it’s just that the people who did what your man is calling a hoax, are the same people who will be defending the bank in London against our attack tomorrow.’

  This was met with complete silence as the implications of what he was saying sank in.

&n
bsp; ‘So, as you’ve probably worked out by now,’ continued Komarov, ‘it looks as though we have indeed found the software and though we weren’t ready to believe him, our contact in London was right after all. We’d better meet even earlier than planned – tomorrow morning – so that we can discuss how we might use our attack on the bank to get our hands on this Athena software.’

  How much simpler it would all have been if Mina’s tiny usb stick’s slow and circuitous journey had been that much faster. When it did arrive a couple of days later it had, at least, the benefit of confirming everything independently. It was also the final blow to the carefully constructed secrecy around Athena’s location.

  Chapter 10

  Thursday early afternoon

  The lawns of the Towneley Vassilov Bank

  The Agusta helicopter was on time arriving on the lawns of the Towneley Vassilov Bank. Kim and Angus were ready and as soon as bank staff had stowed their luggage, they climbed aboard. On take-off, the helicopter rose swiftly and swung right, north, for Glasgow International Airport. Depending on air traffic control, they should touch down on the charter company’s apron in about an hour’s time. As the helicopter climbed, so did their spirits. For Angus, there was the imminent prospect of the long weekend with the family and, for Kim there was the excitement of a trip up to the remote island she had only been to once before and knew only from photographs and what she had learned talking to the members of the Craithe team.

  The agreed rendezvous for all the family was the airport’s main concourse and the first to arrive was the helicopter with Angus and Kim aboard. His Uncle, Sir Jeremy Towneley, who had chartered a Cessna TTX from the City of London Airport arrived less than twenty minutes later. As the two of them met up and greeted each other it was with an emotional embrace, for it was evident to Angus from his uncle’s appearance, that his illness was having a serious effect on him and that he maybe had not long left with them all. Until recently still well over six-foot tall, with an abundance of white hair, he now had a slight stoop and had clearly lost yet more weight since Angus had seen him last, only a month earlier.