by Andy McNab
I got another elongated ‘Okaaaay.’ She was hooked. The favour involved investigation and checking details, making copies of everything said, read or done. Of course she was interested. It was what she did. I’d been making fun of her geekiness since we were kids.
‘You’ll send me the links? You’re definitely okay, are you?’
Clearly, as always, she could hear behind the smile.
‘Yeah, just tired. It’s been a long day. I need an early night – I’ve been driving myself mad trying to find this stuff, and it’ll take you about five minutes.’
The Brit jumped into my head.
‘Your bag. You okay? Your cards cancelled? Bank account still good? All safe?’
‘Yes, all good. The gym called last night – they found it behind the lockers. Money, cards, everything still there – well, apart from my brush, but who cares, right?’
‘Maybe someone’s got a hair fetish. Anyway, as long as you got your stuff back.’
‘’Kay, then, go get your head down. Send me the stuff first and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Perfect. One more thing.’
‘Okaaay?’
‘You need to update your WhatsApp. My mobile’s telling me you’re using an old version.’
‘Thank you, Mr Zuckerberg. I’ll get on it!’
She shouted to the dogs again and cut off.
My smile lasted a millisecond before it dropped. I’d done it again. Even more lies, and she knew it. But this time it wasn’t just lies. There was danger attached.
19
Thursday, 29 November 2018
The next seven or eight hours passed very much like the last ones. Still in all my clothes, I tossed and turned, but this time all my worry was about Charlotte.
I tried watching TV, but all I could find was shopping channels selling stair-steppers and ab-crunchers. I finally gave up and went online to see what Eduardo Castro was all about. He turned out not to look at all how I’d expected. Maybe I’d been watching too many drug Mafia movies, where the leaders all seemed to have exotic names and looked like axe murderers. Eduardo was in his early sixties, with wavy silver hair brushed back. The face staring at me from the screen looked well fed and benign. His life was a steady stream of private jets, yachts, mansions and beautiful women. If the web was to be believed, he’d started life in the family furniture business in Pasadena. It seemed he didn’t make real money from the family business, though. He used the business to make money for himself. Castro was arrested in the early 1980s for drug-running, using the business’s delivery fleet to smuggle cocaine from Mexico. The family had a factory down there. But he was acquitted, and by the late eighties he had met the founders of Silicon Valley as they designed hardware and the software to go with it.
He was an early drug-money investor in a bunch of twenty-somethings and had been reaping the rewards ever since. But the money just hadn’t been enough. He wanted to know people in high places and had worked hard to insert himself into the Washington political circus. He had backed politicians and funded initiatives to reduce state tax and ease employment laws. He had funded the anti-minimal wage lobby, and the campaign against California’s same-sex marriage laws.
He was still involved in the tech world and was very angry when Toronto’s residents rebelled against plans to create a city zone that was 100 per cent connected. It would have had robots collecting rubbish, self-driving buses, and public services powered online. Castro couldn’t see a problem in a tech giant influencing the zone’s residents and its workers’ behaviour.
I had to agree with Toronto. The residents were against a plan that involved them handing over sensitive personal data to a private company. Castro liked the idea that the zone’s humans might suddenly find that their whole life was being engineered. He called it ‘just a Fitbit for your whole life’. Maybe as pope his dream would come true.
Castro liked power, had the cash to help him to grab more and more. He might be a husk, but he was a husk who had whatever it was that Parmesh wanted.
Daylight broke through the blinds and the thrill-seekers’ whoops and screams wouldn’t be far behind.
I’d been wearing the same clothes for a couple of days and I needed to clean up. My normal gear would be fine – it wasn’t like I’d need to blend in any more.
As the hot water hit my head and sluiced down my body I felt like all my problems were being washed away. The only thing I needed was a shave, but that could wait a little longer. Five minutes of peace, that was all I wanted. Then I would work out what I needed to do – and how. I’d thought about going to the town hall and physically searching for the records, but had abandoned that idea. Leaving an electronic search trail was bad enough, let alone popping up on CCTV.
I was about two minutes into soaping myself when the mobile rang. I grabbed a towel and went through. No point checking who was calling, might as well just get on with it.
I put it to my ear. ‘Hello?’
‘Morning. Or evening, I suppose.’
She was bubbly. I couldn’t hear any background noise. She was probably at home, sitting in the kitchen with her laptop on the pine table. That room always stank of Simon’s oil paints. The fumes gave me a headache, just like his paintings did.
‘It’s a very good morning for you, Parker. I’ve found something.’
I perched on the bed, the towel collapsing onto the duvet. ‘Oh, have you now?’ I tried not to sound too enthusiastic, tried to settle into the lie. All I was doing was earning some brownie points from my boss. No biggie.
‘Something very interesting. There were five contractors on that build, but never on-site at the same time. What on earth was going on? And there were no applications or any building regs signed off on an outbuilding or a tunnel.
‘Everything was in order on the main build. All the regs were signed off at all stages. Everything was correct. No retrospective planning, no restrictions, no appeals. It was as if someone was just building a three-bed, not that monster. Nothing untoward. But one weird thing jumped out at me when I was checking the companies. One was incorporated the day after planning consent was granted, and then it ceased trading six months after completion. Don’t you find that strange?’
‘Maybe.’
I wanted to know the company’s name but I let her carry on. This was her moment. She liked dragging everything out and explaining all the ins and outs, whether it was something like this or how she’d found the coat I’d left at her house the weekend before.
‘Maybe? What? So … New Zealand law is based on UK law, right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Okay. I checked the company’s online revenue records and there’s nothing fancy, just a clean close-down of a limited company. So … that must be the outbuilding firm, right?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Of course it is, and maybe they dug your mystery tunnel.’
I could imagine her grinning from ear to ear, waiting for me to congratulate her. It made sense to me. But she wasn’t about to get what she wanted – not yet, anyway.
‘What about the company? Who owns it – owned it?’
‘Haven’t had time to find out yet. I do have a life, you know – well, the dogs do.’
I bent down, picked up the laptop, and placed it beside me on the bed. I logged in to the New Zealand Companies Register website.
‘What’s the name?’
‘Paracoast Constructions Limited.’
The details came up with the headers that Charlotte had already explained. They’d ceased trading in September last year.
‘So, I have a Richard Rayner as, or who was, the director, right?’
She went into very smug mode, like she always did. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do, and the company’s registered address is the same as the director’s. It’s a place called Para something or other. Para-para-umu.’
She waited. No doubt she could hear me tapping away.
‘I think you found him.’
&nb
sp; ‘Yes, of course I found him.’
‘Well done, Lady P. And thank you.’
While she had a moan about how much time and effort she had put into bailing out her brother yet again, I quickly checked Richard’s company history. ‘Hey, little worker bee, I bet you don’t know the name of the last company Richard was director of?’
‘No. I didn’t need to look, did I?’
‘Lightweight. Steadfast Civil Engineering LLC. A limited liability company that traded for almost twenty-five years in Auckland. He’s a civil engineer. He closed the company down at the same time as Paracoast. So, what I’m thinking is maybe he did this no-planning job with the newco and it was worth so much to him because he would have enough money to retire on.’
Charlotte was impressed. ‘Quite the detective, aren’t you? I’ve taught the geekiness in you well – welcome to the dark side. And even better – you’ve got brownie points for the boss.’
‘Yep. All is good.’
Her tone changed suddenly, as I’d been sure it eventually would. She knew me so well.
‘I don’t believe you, James. I know you won’t tell me, but I’m going to ask you anyway. And then I’m going to say, if you need help, call, and please be careful. You ready?’
‘Yep.’
‘All right, then. Is everything okay?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Good. If you need anything, you will call, won’t you?’
‘I already have, haven’t I?’
At least we both ended on a laugh. Sort of.
I forced myself into the bathroom and got back under the hot water. What was a big civil-engineering firm doing on a residential build? Rayner’s website showed pictures of government contracts for schools and sports centres. But maybe I had the answer. If not, at least it was a start.
I squeezed soap from a container attached to the tiles. But the start of what?
Part Four
* * *
20
Paraparaumu
Friday, 30 November 2018
The flight to the island’s capital last night had been uneventful, and so had the picking up of another Toyota at the airport. Hertz had a great deal going at Wellington, though why I was trying to save a Silicon Valley billionaire a few dollars, I wasn’t sure. I’d driven straight to Paraparaumu, about fifty-five kilometres north, and checked into a mid-range tourist hotel. I’d woken up in another sun-drenched corner of Paradise.
I had to find out for myself if my theory about him and what he had built was right. Richard didn’t need to go through the pain the Filipino had.
What was I going to do when I found him? Watch him for a while? Talk to him straight away? I didn’t have a clue. First and foremost, I wanted to see the kind of man I was dealing with, or hoped I was going to be dealing with, then work out how to find out what I needed to know. For all I knew, he might want to help me. Maybe his company had closed six months after completion because Castro had defaulted on payment, putting Richard out of business. If nothing else, doing this made it feel like there was movement, and I might at least find out if there was a tunnel.
Kapiti Coast District was a dormitory settlement for daily commuters into Wellington, or so I’d read in the in-flight magazine, and Paraparaumu was its main town. It was a magnet for young families who wanted a better life for their kids and better schools, and for retired people who wanted to put their feet up with a sea view. Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings director, and Dane Coles, the All Blacks rugby player, had been educated there, and the first thing I discovered as I drove along in the Toyota was that any visitor would be taking those two pieces of information to their graves. You couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a tribute to the famous sons.
The less famous inhabitant I was more interested in lived on Country Ridge Close, a road about two kilometres in from Raumati Beach and on the ridgeline paralleling the coast. Google Earth showed me Richard had a fantastic view of the sea from up there, and Street View showed he’d done incredibly well in life. None of the civil engineers I’d ever come across had made the kind of money he obviously had, but good luck to him. I felt I could have been right: one secret build and the rest of his life was going to be easy.
I’d finally got to shave and that completed my nerd look of shorts, boots and daysack, with socks to cover the lily-white calves. I couldn’t help thinking that, being so borderline boring, the next step for my wardrobe was going to be socks with sandals. I wandered uphill, hoping to get a better view of Kapiti Island, about six kilometres off the coast. The ridgeline was green and lush, and each of the large houses poking out above the treeline was surrounded by its own little bit of New Zealand. The place I was looking for was Palm House.
He was fifty-nine years old, I knew from the register’s record of directors’ dates of birth, and unless his online pictures had been Photoshopped, I knew what he looked like. He was a lot bigger than me, maybe just over six feet tall, and certainly wider, with well-groomed salt-and-pepper hair and Hollywood teeth. He was an all-round picture of health and beauty, and that was probably just one of the many boxes you had to tick to live in this neighbourhood. The 4x4 in every driveway was immaculately shiny. The yummy-mummies power-walking past me could have starred in the infomercials I’d been watching.
I finally got onto the flat and took a breather. Down to my left, towards the sea, was the town, and beyond that the longness of Kapiti Island. At night the view would have been just like those Hollywood movies where the hero is on the high ground overlooking LA and the lights seem to go on for ever.
Palm House was coming up on my right, and nothing had changed in the years since the Google van had driven past. It was very white, with lots of glass-and-steel balconies, and flat roofs to ensure it didn’t cut into the natural high ground behind.
I stopped every few paces, turning away from the house to take in the views, as if I couldn’t believe the beauty I was seeing. I didn’t have to try too hard. As I came nearly level with the driveway, I could see the triple garage shutters were up and a Lexus hybrid 4x4 sparkled on the drive next to an equally gleaming Ford people-carrier. There was one other vehicle in the garage: a motorbike, a Harley that had everything on it apart from a kettle. I wasn’t big on bikes, but I knew one like that wouldn’t have come cheap.
I started to worry: against one of the walls was a line of small kids’ bikes with wheel stabilizers, and a big basket full of different-coloured balls. I hoped he’d started a family late in life, maybe with a new wife.
The house eventually disappeared behind me and I continued to play the tourist until I came to the turnaround circle of tarmac for the end of the close. Tracks led off in all directions, some by design, with little signs pointing along the ridgeline, and some because the dog-walkers and yummy-mummies cut corners. They all led down to a track that paralleled the road, with wooden benches sunk into the ground for people like me to sit and enjoy the view.
I followed it and turned back the way I’d come, trying to work out exactly where Palm House would be above me. Three benches along, a quick jump up showed I was just short of the house. I was looking at a forty-five-degree angle, but I could see the driveway, and the top floor over the perimeter hedge of the garden that backed onto the road.
Sitting on the bench, I did what all walkers do. I got out a flask of coffee and sandwiches and took in the view, trying to look contented and happy for anyone passing.
21
An hour, maybe an hour and fifteen, went by, with the odd vehicle moving above or someone shouting for their dog to come back, before there was the sound of young children and a woman telling them to jump into their seats because Daddy would be at the station very soon.
I quickly packed away my Tupperware and flask, got the daysack back on, and moved swiftly back along the track before popping up onto the turnaround and instantly changing pace. I sauntered along towards the house, just as the Ford came out of the driveway on the left. The kids – two girls – were i
n booster seats in the back with a yummy-mummy in her mid-thirties at the wheel. She sort of semi-stopped, glanced right, saw me, but didn’t give the nerd a second look as she turned left.
There was a quick double tap on a horn. I quickened my pace and came level with the driveway to see Richard, and the middle-aged woman I guessed was his wife, both on the driveway as a set of garage shutters started to wind down.
His hair was much greyer than it was in his online photo, but still brushed back. He looked just as fit, in jeans, a polo shirt and trainers. She was a perfect match, dark-haired and just as immaculately turned out as her husband. She inspected a pristine flowerbed as Richard closed down their perfect garage, beside their perfect car, at their perfect house.
I felt my face turn red and burn, overheating as I walked past and the shutters slowly rolled out and down, imagining that the couple were staring at me, wondering who I was, why I was there. I couldn’t help myself. I heard the shutter motors grind to a halt and had to look left, up the drive. I had to know he wasn’t on his mobile, telling whatever to whoever about me.
Both of them were now heading for the front door.
I stared.
My eyes caught Richard’s, and it was he who gave the smile and friendly wave. ‘Morning!’
I nodded and cracked a smile, as his wife looked to see who he was talking to and gave a smile back. I was sure I wasn’t genuine-looking, but turned back to face the road, soon, with luck, to be out of his sight – and, with luck, he would have gone inside. Or was he up on a balcony checking out the nerd in the shorts and long socks, and wondering?
I wasn’t going to look behind me. I carried on, face still burning, sweat coming through my shirt.
I reached the Toyota and sat with the air-conditioning going full blast and even felt a bit cocky. I’d found him.
