Waging War To Shake The Cold

by Wild Wolf Publishing

  “Davie... but...”

  “But fuck all Kats. Yer in nae position tae argue. You’ve made a few enemies up here now. DJ and Boots are not the kind of people you should have pissed off never mind the hassle you’ve cause me, but I’m prepared to forgive and forget son if you get this done for me. Remember this; I’m the only one that is keeping you and yours breathing. For now. Of course, you could always hand over the three hundred in cash. That would even us up.”

  Kats sighed in resignation. “Okay Davie. But if I set this up, get you the supply line running, we’re even.”

  “Ye’ve got balls son. Ye want tae hang onto them?”

  “Fair do’s Davie. The price for the contact number was half; surely the price for the whole supply chain up and running should be the whole three hundred?”

  There was a silence on the line.

  “Awrite Kats. I can live with that.”

  “Okay. If we’ve got a deal I’ll get onto it then.”

  “Aye son, you get onto it then. Keep me posted,” and with that Davie hung up.

  “No fun in being right about this Kats,” said Badger after breakfast. “So, what are you going to do now then?”

  “There’s no way I am setting up a drug supply line up Badge, no fuckin’ way!”

  “Yes, I understand that. But you need to do something, see. You’re committed one way or another now.”

  “Aye, I am that. Look Badger, there’s something else, perhaps another angle. Remember I told you about the motorway smash and the old doll that died? Well, I didn’t tell you about this...” he produced the journal from his pack. “This is some sort of diary she kept. It’s mostly old lady shite, but at the back of it there is a sort of ledger, like accounts of some kind. I can’t follow all of it to be honest, but there seems to be a pattern based around her old boss. I think the guy had his hand in the till, or maybe several tills. I’m thinkin’ that if I can put some pressure on the guy then maybe I can get him to part with a wee donation.”

  “That’s a helluva long shot Kats.”

  “I know I know. But long shots are all I have left.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  “Sure.” He handed to journal over and Badger flicked through it to the rear, sitting down to study the numbers in detail. There was silence and Kats decided to leave him to it and make some tea in the kitchen.

  As the kettle came to the boil Badger wandered in. “Yep, you’re right mate, he’s been a very naughty boy. See this and this,” his fingers pointed out two sets of numbers. “That looks to me like he’s taking a skim off some sort of policy or investment. He’s in finance I take it?”

  “I assume so. The old girl worked in some sort of Insurance or Investment Company as far as I can gather.”

  “Yep. Looks like it might be a Ponzi scheme then. There’s a name that comes up a few times, MorSecure is what it says, see? That will be the scheme name I reckon.”

  “Whit the fuck is a Ponzi scheme Badger?”

  “It’s where they take an investment from someone promising huge returns, or to cover an insured liability, then they pay the return from the next guy’s investment and promise him the same, paying him from the next guy’s and so on down the chain.”

  “So?”

  “So, they never invest the money or cover the liability and just pocket the lot. They only pay out so-called interest or dividends, and many of the investors don’t even take that but re-invest it. In effect the profits are only on paper and the person who sets up the scheme in the first place stands to make millions. Until they get caught that is, or bugger off out of the country, whichever comes first.”

  “How the fuck do you know all this stuff Badger?”

  “I read the FT mate. Amazing what you can pick up.”

  Kats shook his head in wonder.

  “So what do we do with the info then?”

  “Well, you could expose him to the authorities but that won’t really help you personally. The only thing you can do is try and blackmail the tit. See if you can get him to swing for the £300k you owe, and maybe a little more besides. From what I can tell he’s squirrelled away over five million so far, and it’s bound to be rising still. Tea ready is it?”

  Chapter 27

  What a bloody week.

  He was in a foul temper, and as he was wont to do when he was in such a mood, he was having a series of internal rants. The week had started with hassle from Sophie and had finished with that letter from the FSA.

  Before he even opened it, he knew what it was about. He knew, also, that the meeting they requested later in the week, an “informal meeting to discuss certain irregularities and issues concerning MorSecure policies”, was just the first step in their procedure. The game, it seemed, was drawing to its conclusion.

  In between times, the entire commercial banking system of the USA had gone into meltdown, and if it was happening there it was surely going to happen here. President Bush had already called Obama and McCain, the two Presidential hopefuls, to an emergency meeting at the White House to discuss it all; fat lot of good those arseholes could do.

  They were the ones who had caused it all anyway, the bloody Americans and their stupid sub-prime securities. All the big investment banks in the US were in serious trouble – most of them issuing warnings just in the last week, with the mighty, and most people thought unassailable, Lehman Brothers even going bust.

  Bust! It was unthinkable!

  Now it was the turn of the high street banks. The US housing market was broken beyond repair and a torrent of bad debt was about to surge through the world economy, sweeping everything in our old Prudent Chancellor’s Handbook before it.

  Nick had thanked his stars all week that he wasn’t still in banking, but since most of his business relied on housing sales and investments the future looked unrelentingly bleak.

  The crash of Northern Rock earlier in the year had shocked everyone and he now felt sure they wouldn’t be the last to go; their business model wasn’t any different from the other UK high street banks after all, it’s just that they had a smaller capital base and so couldn’t paper over the cracks so easily.

  There would be more to come, there were already rumours Lloyds were trying to take over HBOS because they were as good as bust, and since the top ten employers in Edinburgh were in Financial Services, things were going to get very sticky indeed in the next few months. RBS, at least, were still issuing bullish statements.

  Several Icelandic banks had already gone into liquidation however, leaving their savers and investors either completely without redress or subject to the compensation schemes managed by governments.

  Daily calls to his bank in the Caymans weren’t having the calming effect he hoped. If that was to go down, it would all be well and truly over, and he was in a constant state of nervous tension at the thought of his hard earned cash disappearing into the black hole of bankruptcy.

  He’d thought about moving his cash somewhere else, just in case, but where the hell was truly safe these days? Choices of safe havens were further limited by the fact that in most developed nations there was traceability and transparency between banks, which meant that a man like him, in his position, moving large sums of money about between accounts, would definitely raise suspicions with the authorities.

  Anyway, he’d been told repeatedly that his money was safe; that the First Commercial Bank did not invest in the US property market; that they had no bad debts… but still… he couldn’t help being jittery.

  And this sodding recession the media had been talking everyone into for months was becoming the self-fulfilling prophesy business journalists everywhere had hoped for.

  People were starting to lose their jobs already because of it, and from experience of previous recessions, he understood perfectly well the real surge in job losses would come after Christmas when the decline really stared to bite and employers panicked.

  More and more claims would come in for MorSecure and although he’d been able t
o fudge the odd one or two that had bounced so far by saying the paperwork had been lost and so on, it was only a matter of time before a pattern developed and that would be that. The letter from the FSA was an early indicator they were looking at the whole thing more closely. Somebody up there was trying to tell him something: it was time to do a runner.

  Pity he would be on his own, but he was philosophical about that now; nothing ever works out the way you think in affairs of the heart after all.

  He’d already booked his flights and if he’d been able to he would have gone immediately, that day, that very hour, but he had to be there at the meeting with the FSA to put them off the scent a little, make sure there were no loose ends.

  So he’d given himself ten days to cover his tracks, start a few false hares running and generally erase himself from the various computer systems in the firm. He was due to leave next Saturday morning and good riddance to this cold, depressing, wet, dreary, backward bloody country.

  He stopped at a petrol station to fill the car up.

  And that’s another thing; look at the sodding price of petrol. £119.9 a litre. And what the bloody hell is the point of the .9p in the price anyway? No-one could spend less than 1p, how could it even be measured? It’s all just a racket by the bloody oil companies. The whole system in this country is going to the dogs.

  Dropping two Mars bars on the counter, he paid for the fuel, the cashier wondering idly why he looked so sour, and got back in the car.

  He pulled into the crawling traffic and drove on auto-pilot whilst stuffing the chocolate into his face, drifting back into his reverie.

  It was a beautiful scam though; so simple, so elegant, so safe. He’d taken a cash investment from a variety of wealthy figures that had come by their money in ways that it was best not to ask too many questions about, set up a mortgage security fund to cover mortgage defaults due to unemployment, paid the dividends to the investors from the policy charges he took in from other investors, and pocketed everything else.

  He placed the third party account that was necessary to handle the monies from all the policies in an offshore bank, using the argument that since a key part of the offering was to use a variety of worldwide insurers to spread the risks, he needed an international banking presence.

  Once that was accomplished, it was simple to control the handful of policies that were laid off to legitimate insurers as a cover and how many were laid off to his own, entirely bogus, insurance company.

  He’d called that company Plan A Mortgage Insurance, it had seemed apt at the time, and registered it in the Caymans using the same offshore bank to hold all the accounts. No point in making life complicated after all.

  Initially he’d only held back one in ten policies but, as always happens, after a short period the temptation and lure of easy money started to gnaw at him.

  He persuaded himself he would never be caught, and so he’d increased the number to almost half – one for you and one for me as it were.

  As the pressure from Sophie and her team of ambulance-chasers intensified, he’d acquired a sense of justification. After all, a man has to have some quality of life when he retires. Where was the point in working your nuts off just to give it all to some bloody woman who’d never done a day’s work in her life and her only achievement was to marry well.

  And then he’d met Georgie and started to entertain dreams of a new life with her, all of which would definitely take a fair piece of change.

  So pretty soon he’d ‘insured’ all new policies through Plan A and at the rate these things were being sold he now had a sizeable chunk of cash in The Caymans just waiting for him. Plus there were the initial investments from the sources that had gotten him up and going in the first place.

  They weren’t the kind of guys to be messed with, but when he skipped the country he would have more than enough dosh to decide whether to refund some or all of it, or just tough it out hoping for anonymity.

  That was the beauty of The Caymans; no industry, no other commercial ventures aside from banking, never a question asked about where the cash came from nor what you did with it, and no limit or trace on any transactions. The perfect place to set up a dodgy business and the perfect place to squirrel away funds for a rainy day.

  Nick made sure any commission payments for underwriting the policies that were due back to his own firm from Plan A were always made on time so there was nothing untoward which could alert his fellow Partners.

  He was also very careful not to transfer any funds back to his personal UK bank account as that would ring alarm bells with the FSA. It left him tight for cash here but it was safer. Besides, he could always borrow more from Davie when he needed a top-up, he was good for it. After all, Davie was also one of his prime investors and had been collecting dividends for some time, blissfully unaware that not a penny of his fund was actually invested in anything more complex than Nick’s Cayman Islands bank account.

  Of course, Sophie had an inkling he had more money than he was declaring stashed away somewhere, but so what; she’d never find it, and when he did his disappearing act she’d still be none the wiser.

  That was the great thing about being an only child whose parents were dead. No family to track him down or to care where he went – just a bitter ex-wife who realised too late she’d been done out of her share, but didn’t understand quite how it happened.

  Now that thought really cheered him up and he was positively whistling as he slid the Porsche into the health club car park and found a vacant slot.

  He got changed in the locker-room and did his normal workout. He’d had a personal trainer for years but recently he’d been cutting costs and now just did the basics of what he’d been shown. He wasn’t exactly a natural athlete anyway. He loved his grub a little too much, and in the rare moments when he was being honest, he would admit to himself that the workouts at the gym were just an excuse to eat that extra slab of cheesecake.

  When he was younger his vanity and the desire to get laid had made him try to at least look reasonably toned, but marriage soon took the edge off that goal, and as he gained in personal wealth he found that some women, particularly the shallow but tarty ones that he was drawn to, were more impressed by brass than brawn.

  The gym was tokenism therefore, but he had found when he was on the treadmill or step machine, or whatever other instrument of torture was available, his mind would become a little clearer and his mood would lift. So it wasn’t a complete waste of his time he reasoned, and of course there was always the extra calories to look forward to as a reward for having been a good boy.

  After the usual thirty minutes, a light sweat on his brow, he wound it up and had a shower. He passed the time of day for five minutes with Crystal, the pretty young receptionist with the improbable name, and headed out to the car park.

  Originally, he planned on going for lunch with some friends, but he wanted to go back home first to pick up some paperwork and get changed, so he’d called them and suggested a drink later.

  He noticed the jogger at the very last moment, just as he was knocked clear off his feet, hitting the deck completely winded.

  Chapter 28

  As soon as he saw him leave the gym Kats pulled the hoodie down to eye level, hit the play button on his mp3 player, and started to jog towards him.

  The intro to “Black Thumbnail” by The Kings of Leon seared through his head as he paced his jog and adopted a spaced out in-the-zone look.

  He watched, covertly, as he approached his target; everything was normal, Nick was studying his own footsteps as he walked towards the car park, oblivious to the lone jogger headed towards him.

  Just as he was about to pass, Kats forced a trip and stumbled wildly into Nick’s path. He’d timed the move to perfection so when he hit Nick he did so just above the waistline, just at the right height to look like an accident yet guaranteed to bring both of them down in a heap of confusion.

  As they fell, Kats expertly slid his hand into Nick’s trou
ser pocket and removed the bunch of keys he knew would be there. He knew this because he’d watched Nick arrive at the gym an hour ago. He’d noted which pocket Nick put his keys into when he got out of the car and locked it, and reasoned correctly that since most men are creatures of habit he would always use that pocket for his keys.

  “Bloody hell!” exclaimed Nick. “Look out!” and then “Oof…” as he hit the deck.

  “Aw man, I’m really sorry,” said Kats, leaping up and pulling the headphones of his mp3 player from his ears. “Ah just tripped. I’m really sorry man.”

  He offered Nick a helping hand to get up, but kept his head low so he couldn’t get a good look at his face because of the hoodie.

  “Are ye awrite man?”

  “Yeah… yeah.. Think so,” said Nick. “You just gimme a bit of a fright that’s all.” He brushed the dust from his clothes and both men waited for the other to speak next.

  “Ah’m really sorry – did I hurt ye?” said Kats eventually.

  “Nah… you’re alright,” said Nick. “No harm done.”

  “If yer sure then.”

  Kats gave him a quick smile, turned, and jogged off.

  That was pure candy.

  He could feel the bunch of keys in his pocket and he held them to stop them jangling. It would take Nick until he got to his car to realise he didn’t have them with any luck.

  First he’d go back to the gym and rake about in the locker room. Then he’d remember the collision with the jogger and start searching round where it happened. He wouldn’t suspect he’d been robbed, why would he? He’d simply think he’d lost them in the confusion.