The Shadow Artist

by James Grayson

  Instead, Gabriel calmly replied, “I said I’ve been here all day. And it was safe.”

  “Well, you’re lucky. My son’s gift is in this.” He raised the briefcase chest high. “And he won’t have a proper Christmas without it.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have left it in the elevator, then.” Gabriel said.

  “Are you getting cheeky? I’m a part owner of this building!”

  Gabriel stood tall and quiet.

  Shit.

  “Damn idiot.” The man shook his phone in the air. “You’ll be out of a job by day’s end.” He tightened his scarf and stomped off. “Happy fucking Christmas.”

  Watching the man fumble with a pair of gloves at the doors, Alex shook her head. “Was he being serious?”

  “I hope not.” Gabriel shuffled behind the reception desk.

  “Ok, a couple more questions and I’ll be on my way, promise.” Alex pulled another drawing from her stack, this one of Lockard. “What about this man? Seen him here?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Still can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” She asked.

  He sighed and said, “Both.”

  OK. Alex was getting nowhere and didn’t have the time or patience for Gabriel’s stonewalling. She was about to show him the drawing of Pachai Randeep when Gabriel’s phone rang.

  He said to Alex, “I better do my job, while I still have one,” and turned around to answer it.

  Meanwhile, the pin-prick behind her had finally managed to get both gloves over his fingers and was exiting the building.

  Fine. We’ll do this the messy way today.

  Alex took long but unhurried strides to the same exit and followed the man out. He walked straight to the Bentley and, unlocking it remotely, pulled open the driver’s door a moment before she caught up.

  Alex glanced around, hastened her last few steps, and moved directly behind him, snow dampening her footfalls into silence.

  Alex grabbed the back of his head and slammed it against the frame of the door. Striking above the temple but not crushing it, the blow knocked him out. His body slumped into her arms and she dished him into the passenger seat, tossing his briefcase in his lap. Picking the keys off the ground, she shook the snow off them. She climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Bentley, and drove the first leg of a K-turn, lining up the car so it was perpendicular to the curb and facing the plaza.

  Alex looked around again, climbed out, pulled the man to the driver’s seat, and buckled him in. Then she wedged his briefcase between the seat and the gas pedal. The engine roared and whined in a squeal, like it was caged and fighting, ready to explode with unbridled energy.

  The poor guy was about to wake up to an air bag exploding in his face. A bad day for Mr. Wall Street.

  Alex reached across and—careful to keep her injured shoulder clear—jammed the gearshift into Drive. She jumped back as the Bentley lunged.

  The thick white car ripped across the courtyard and crashed into the double glass doors, glass and metal exploding to spray over the stone plaza. Gabriel dove aside as the car tore across the lobby and pummeled the security desk in a cloud of crushed marble. The air bags swallowed the unconscious man whole.

  Alarms sounded, the sprinklers activated, and people flooded into the lobby. Alex entered the building through the handy new entrance and walked straight to the elevators.

  Alex rode the lift to the penthouse on the fiftieth floor and exited into a narrow entrance hall with commercial-style carpeting and beige walls. Draganic had done little to alter the appearance of the space. A frosted glass door with a black magnetic card reader stood at one end, and a dark gray steel door sat at the other.

  She’d learned in Talonstrike training that most security systems were flawed in predictable ways. For instance, civilian house systems might have sensors to signal when a door or window was opened, yet no glass-break sensors to indicate if the glass has been removed or shattered. Break the glass, or cut a hole, and one could slip through undetected. Another common deficiency: motion sensors arranged to monitor entries and exits and stairwells, but nothing else. Avoiding those spots allows one to roam a space without detection.

  In an office setting, the security system would most likely be set to detect a breach from the main entrance, but not the exit. The back door, then, would be locked but not alarmed. Especially if the door had no magnetic sensor pad.

  A guess, of course, but one she would bet money on.

  Ignoring the frosted-glass entry, Alex tested the handle of the metal door, just in case. As ridiculous as it sounds, she’d found unlocked exits during operations before. Human error is the most common of all security system flaws.

  Not this time, though, so Alex listened to the hollow sounds echoing from the other side of the door. A television played loudly, but there were no voices. She also noticed that the door was significantly colder than the lobby.

  Damn.

  Alex knocked on the door, drew the SIG, then stepped aside and waited. Maybe Randeep would think it was the cleaning crew and stick his head out to check. An easy entry for her. After a minute, she knocked again, louder this time.

  Nothing. But she wasn’t expecting an answer by now, anyway.

  Alex looked around, double-checking for cameras, then took a deep breath and shot the deadbolt mechanism twice. Louder than she’d hoped in the small space. She lowered the aim and shot the handle lock twice as well. Not perfect hits on either, but when she yanked the handle, the door wrenched open, pieces of metal falling to the carpet. Frigid air from the penthouse mixed with sulfurous gun smoke from the lobby as Alex pulled the door open wide.

  It must have been forty degrees in there.

  Alex stepped inside and moved nice and slow—no mad rush like in the movies. She crept close to the wall, SIG trained on the unlit space ahead of her. One beige hallway turned into another, and then she was in the floor’s main room.

  The space was enormous and housed one area for work, and one incredible view.

  A television tuned to BBC News blared from a ceiling mount at the center of the room, and a half-moon, trading-style desk sat underneath it. There must have been a dozen computer monitors, one on top of another in a semicircle, facing away.

  The rest of the space sat empty. No other offices, no other furniture.

  Keeping low, Alex called out, “Mr. Randeep? Are you here?” But no one responded. Nothing moved at all.

  She eased across the room, keeping the main entrance hall in her view, and paused behind the monitors. The flat-screen wires were all pulled together into a huge, twisted rope and entered the floor under the desk. Beyond them was a pair of legs, bony knees in blue jeans and a pair of green suede running shoes.

  Alex also made out a faint, and familiar, odor. She stood up and took a step to the side.

  Sure enough, a man sat slumped in his seat. He had clearly taken a shot to the head, as half of it was on the floor next to him. Even so, Alex could tell from the undamaged features that it was Randeep. Behind him, snow swirled into the office through a shattered window, dusting the floor.

  Not too worried about disturbing the crime scene, she turned off the television, walked to the body, and picked up the wrist. Rigid and unyielding. It appeared he had been dead for at least a day, probably not longer, though it was hard to tell with the cold air keeping decomposition at bay.

  Anyone with enough experience or even simple deterrence training could have had the peace of mind to leave the television blaring and set the air to the lowest temperature—or opening a window, in this case. Still, it appeared Randeep had been sitting in his seat when he was shot, not moved there afterward. The front entry had not been disturbed, the shattered window was the top pane, and the hole was too small for an adult to fit through. So, whoever had been there was either cleared to enter the offices or let inside by Randeep. Her guess was Lockard or Draganic.

  The things people will do for money.

  Alex turned her attention to th
e computers, and noticed every screen was in save mode. When she touched the mouse, the computers all woke, as if startled. Half the screens showed charts, and the other half had scrolling news headlines, mostly reports on the Swiss franc.

  But one showed a financial model labeled JONAH, and that screen was filled with a list of market trades.

  Alex studied the numbers and charts, ignoring the faint odor behind her. It took a little while to figure out what it all meant. First, all the trades were in options, and in Swiss francs. And all long calls or short puts. In other words, Randeep was expecting the Swiss franc to go up, to get stronger against the euro. He had used options and futures to create leverage on his trades and make huge money bets. After calculating the foreign exchange rates, she figured the trades were well over a billion dollars’ worth.

  And they all expired tomorrow.

  Jesus.

  Alex picked up a stack of papers, articles Randeep had printed and piled on the desk before him. Each of the articles was about the Swiss franc. All but one of them. That one was about the Swiss finance minister, Stefan Lory. He was making an announcement later today about the Swiss Federal Council’s program to keep the franc “affordable” for EU-based consumers. The correspondent went on to speculate that the special press conference was for the council to announce it was contemplating joining the Euro currency. A move that was, according to the correspondent, “a surefire way to make the franc fall in value by over twenty percent.”

  She turned back to the screens and looked at the trades. Specifically at the strike prices, or where they would make money if the franc went high enough. Then she looked at the current value of the franc and where the paper thought it would go. Alex checked, and double-checked. Then she set down the papers and took a step back.

  Now she knew why someone had shot Randeep in the face. An emotional statement. She also concluded her hunch was right: Lockard and Draganic were not working together on this anymore. Because Draganic had bet every penny of the billion. Plus more.

  And when that announcement was made today, he would lose all of it.

  Looks like JONAH swallowed the Whale this time.

  Alex looked back at the article. The press conference was set to take place this afternoon in Bern, Switzerland, where the Swiss council was headquartered.

  And Draganic kept a house in Gstaad.

  She reached for the mouse, pulled up the web browser, and searched for directions from Gstaad to Bern. Less than an hour on main roads or highways.

  So, what? Tell the Swiss authorities, have them call off the announcement as a precaution against sabotage, and let the trades end up in the money? Draganic makes an extra billion dollars? Maybe more?

  But there was no doubt in her mind. If she didn’t tell them, people would die. No way could Alex get there in time to stop Dragonic.

  Only one thing to do, thought Alex. Straightening, she pulled out her cell phone, turned it on, and dialed the number.

  Denise answered on the third ring. Alex noted she did so in a whisper. “What’s going on?”

  “Bloody hell, Alex, you’re in quite the mess now, aren’t you?”

  She pictured a billion dollars in a great big pile with bodies strewn around it. “You’re telling me.”

  “I’ve heard your name two times in the past day and neither of them was in flattery.”

  “And yet I’m flattered.”

  “You took a Metro badge from someone named Wainscott? What on earth, Alex? You’re lucky they haven’t initiated a public sweep for you.”

  “Right. What else?”

  Denise whispered louder, “The director. G himself.”

  Alex startled. What the hell did Peter Grant want with her? “In what context?”

  “Well, I couldn’t hear. The door was closing just as he brought you up. But it seems your own CIA is on the hunt for you.”

  Of course they were. Moss had been in bed with Lockard. God knew what he’d told the home office.

  “Have they issued a sweep through MI, then? Going after me?”

  “That’s the oddity of it. I haven’t heard peep otherwise, just your name.”

  “OK, listen, forget about all that. I’ll deal with it. I have intelligence and it’s urgent.”

  Alex told Denise about the hedge fund, the trades, and the Swiss finance minister. Then she told her about Lockard and Draganic, Randeep, and the stakes.

  “My days, that is a problem. Look, we have plenty of eyes in Bern. It’ll be taken care of straightaway.”

  “I think it’ll be a bomb, something very large and likely disruptive to demonstrate violent protest to the idea of Switzerland joining the Euro. It will have to be big to save these trades. Maybe a straight assassination.”

  “Got it, Alex. Now let me go run it down.”

  Denise hung up and Alex switched off her phone, hoping that MI6 had enough Swiss assets to act within the next two hours.

  In the meantime, she had to locate the money. That would lead her to Lockard and hopefully Jack, but her time was running out, too.

  Alex turned back to the computer, clicked on the hard drive, and searched for legal documents, financing agreements, anything that showed how Prince Alexander was sourcing its capital. In other words, where the hell had the fund stashed all this cash? The Caymans? Serbia? It must have been laundered somehow and sent to a custodian, a name to back up the trades. Randeep’s trading sheet listed a DTC—Depository Trust Company—number, but there was no name listed for the custodian itself. Every hedge fund had to have a custodian. If Alex found this one, she would find the offshore bank where the cash was stashed.

  Alex clicked on folder after folder, looking at everything Randeep had been working on in the past month, searching for words like Cayman or phrases like prime broker. As she searched, she realized something basic about the whole theory was driving her mad. How the hell could a guy like Draganic still be operating in high finance? How could he have had an account with the banker from Isle of Man to even enter the money into the system in the first place? You don’t just secretly deposit a billion dollars cash into a bank. It isn’t possible with international disclosure laws. It didn’t matter what country you operated in. Unless he was specially approved by the authorities.

  No way.

  Sure, the governor of Mann had been involved somehow, but he couldn’t have hidden the deposit from international bodies of oversight. Not across multiple countries.

  So where to start?

  Draganic’s offices were in the UK, but he couldn’t be headquartered here. He had to be offshore somewhere and he needed a major bank, one with sufficient capital and trustworthiness, to back up his trades.

  Alex stared at the screens and thought of the banking articles in her father’s house. What if Draganic wasn’t a client of the Mann banker, but they were partners instead? What if he didn’t deposit the money into a bank…

  What if?

  Alex reached for the keyboard and entered the banker’s name. Nothing came up. On the hunch, she entered the name of the Mann governor. Sure enough, a single document appeared in the search window, titled Isle of Man Bank Charter.

  He didn’t transfer the funds to a bank. Draganic opened a whole new one.

  Alex clicked on the file and began to read. That’s when she heard the rack of a pistol slide.

  “Pity about Bill Moss,” Director Grant said. Standing in the doorway to the office’s back hall, where Alex had entered, he tapped his Walther P99 against the palm of his hand while aiming it at her.

  “Which part?”

  Grant met Alex’s eye then waved the barrel of the Walther. “I’ve always liked you, Alex. Maybe even felt a sense of custodial duty to you, you know, since Edgar went offline, dedicated himself to the field. So I’ve been watching you. We all have.”

  “I’m flattered. Really.”

  “You should be proud. You’ve been quite an asset to the Company. I’ve seen your two-oh-one.”

  “Now I’m touched.�
� Alex took a half step to move behind the computer monitors, away from his view. Maybe she could draw her SIG.

  “Careful now,” he said. “Come back out here.”

  This time he trained the gun on her chest.

  She eased her way back out. Stood still. Stared at him.

  “What do you want?” She asked, trying to stall and maybe distract him.

  “Same as you.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  He laughed, a good hearty laugh, and said, “But I do.” He stopped and stared at her. “Now where’s that damn attaché?”

  Alex contemplated going for her SIG, knowing she could beat the old man to the trigger—but just as she had the thought, another person entered from the front hall.

  Valerie Wainscott wore her police vest and a puffy, long Metropolitan Police jacket. She held a matching brown and black Walther P99, also pointed at Alex. She’d only seen Wainscott from afar before, but now could see Wainscott had a hard yet attractive face, like a former athlete who had joined the force. Maybe she ran triathlons or something.

  “Nice to see you again, Inspector,” Alex said, smiling.

  “Remove your weapon with two fingers and lay it on the ground. You are under arrest by order of the Metropolitan Police.”

  Alex looked back and forth between them. “Funny, I thought Met agents didn’t carry guns.”

  “They do to take a murderer,” Grant said.

  Alex glanced back at Randeep, and then at Wainscott. “This guy has been dead for a day. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “We’re not talking about him,” Wainscott said.

  Grant finished for her. “You’re on the hook for Moss.”

  “Bullshit,” Alex said. “I wasn’t even there.”

  “But someone’s got to be pinned with it, and since your father has disappeared again, it’ll have to be you. Unless…” He stepped forward and continued, “You cooperate. You give us the attaché. Then all charges will be…erased.”