The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1)

by Norrie Sinclair

  The door swung open towards him, narrowly missing his face. Tereza flew out of the open doorway and hadn’t made it more than a meter before she was lifted from the ground, her legs gathered in the arms of the colossal Russian killer. He heard her gasp as she hit the ground. Before Michael could move, the man was sitting astride her, hands clasped around her neck, throttling her. Michael took one step forward, lifted the gun and held it to the back of the man’s head. He pulled the trigger. No hesitation. Click. Again. Click. Jammed.

  The killer turned to him. Michael, holding the barrel, slammed the steel butt of the pistol into the man’s face. The killer’s hands fell from her throat. He looked bewildered as Michael smashed the gun into the side of his head. He fell backwards off Tereza, sat on the grass, a monstrous, black clothed Buddha, blood running down his oversized face, drops splattering onto the path. The man keeled over, backwards, eyes eerily open, head tilted, staring straight through Michael.

  Chapter 82

  He laid his backpack on the ground and threw his jacket over it. She didn’t move. He felt for a pulse. If there was one, it was so weak that it may as well not have been there. He couldn’t let this happen, couldn’t let her die. Not after all she’d been through. He held Tereza’s nose, placed his mouth over hers and breathed into her. Her lips were cold. He could feel her chest rise, but only with the burst of air from his own lungs. He tried again. Waited. Not a breath. He needed to be fast or she’d die. If she wasn’t already dead. He was lost.

  Michael had absolutely no idea how to get someone’s heart beating again. There was only one thing to do. He jumped up and ran into the boathouse. One man lay in a pool of blood, unmoving and most likely dead. Another sat against the wall, alive but by the look of him only just. No time. Michael’s eyes swept the room. He saw what he was looking for and dashed to the other side of the pontoon. He grabbed the bucket and leant over the edge filling it with ice cold water. A few moments later, he stood over Tereza. He emptied the bucket over her head.

  He flinched as her eyes and mouth sprang open, inhaling a huge gulp of air. Thank God. She snapped upright and started slamming him with her fists, screaming in fear, or anger, probably both.

  “Tereza. Tereza.” He wrapped his arms around her and fought to pull her to him, “Stop. Tereza. It’s me, Michael.” Her fists lost momentum. He cupped the back of her head in his right hand. She looked up into his face and put her arms around his waist.

  “You’re dead,” a whisper.

  “No talking. Just as well for you I’m not. You were pretty close though.”

  “Who was the woman?” wincing as she spoke.

  “I don’t know. She saved my life, yesterday, then vanished. I saw her next when she fired into the boathouse. We have a hell of a lot to thank her for. She dead?”

  Tereza nodded her head.

  “We can’t waste time. Rivello drove out of here. There was someone with him, an older man. Too far away for me to make him out. Anyway, let’s get into the boathouse. There’s someone barely alive in there. He doesn’t look like one of the bad guys.”

  “István.”

  He could barely make her out. “The guy in the boathouse is István?”

  She shook her head. “The man in the car was István. Pisti.”

  Michael held still for a moment, his mind and body too exhausted to contemplate the implications of what she’d just said.

  “Let’s go.” He lifted her from the path, careful not to hold her too tightly, and carried her inside.

  Chapter 83

  “We need to get him to a hospital.”

  She’d finished dressing Ralph’s hand. The wound was festering so badly that she’d been close to vomiting when she removed the remains of the original bandage. The new one was not much better, a towel she had found in the kitchen and cut into strips. At least it was clean.

  “The wound’s gangrenous. He could be dead within hours. Look, his wrist’s already red and swollen. He needs antibiotics,” she said as she hit the keys.

  Ralph was asleep, although breathing shallowly.

  Michael had carried Ralph to the house. They hadn’t needed the keys that he’d found in the Russian’s pocket. The door had been unlocked. Tereza had led them into the sizeable living room where she’d previously been ambushed by her brother and István. Ralph was spread across a couch, alongside the far wall. Michael stood behind her, peering over her shoulder. She was trying to find a password that would give her access to the laptop that lay open on the desk in front of her.

  “Listen, as soon as we get out of here I’ll call the American embassy and tell them where to find Ralph,” Michael said, “but in the meantime, we need to find a way to track Rivello or he’s gone for good.”

  Tereza’s fingers froze on the keyboard.

  “He’s my brother. Or rather, my step-brother.”

  Michael’s mind snapped back to the remark she had made outside the boathouse.

  “Tereza, I don’t understand. Who’s your brother? Before, when you said Pisti was in the car, what did you mean?”

  Tereza hesitated. She turned to face him. When she took his hand, he felt his skin tingling. Before he could say anything, she smiled, open, unguarded.

  “Bring over that chair,” she pointed to a straight-backed wooden chair sitting close to the bookcase. “You’re going to need it.”

  Michael let her talk. She was right about the chair.

  ---

  “Rivello killed your father because it was the only way he could be certain of getting hold of Vass Holdings.”

  “That’s what he told me,” Tereza said. “Rivello, Gusztav, whatever his name is. I don’t believe him. I think that’s only part of the truth. He wanted vengeance. To hurt Papa. To kill him. Pay my father back for deserting him, forcing him out of our home. To leave his family. It wasn’t until later that he found out István was his real father.”

  “And you? What about you?”

  “I haven’t taken it all in. After the last few days, for this to come out … it’s too much.”

  Now it’s time. She’s going to cry, break down. Let it all go.

  She surprised him.

  “I’m going to kill him, Michael. I don’t care what it takes. Pisti is a fool. A greedy old fool trying to protect his only son. I’ll never forgive him. But Rivello, he deserves to die.”

  Chapter 84

  “I’ll understand if you don’t want to continue. Ralph needs someone to take him to a hospital. Now. You take him. I’ll use Pisti to find Rivello.”

  She had another stab at the password request from Rivello’s laptop, but was rejected for the second time.

  “You’re joking,” he grinned, “you think that after all I’ve been through to find you I’m going to let you out of my sight? As soon as we leave here I’ll call the embassy and let them know where they can find Ralph. If we take him to them or call the police, we’ll end up in a Russian jail until we can prove what really happened here. Rivello and István have gone. It’s us and three dead bodies. By the way, did you try his name?”

  “What do you mean his name?”

  “The password. You told me Rivello’s real name is Gusztav. If the name’s been dead for over thirty years …”

  Tereza keyed in the name. Password Incorrect. A thought struck her.

  “After Papa died, Mamma and I spoke once about him. For the first and only time. They’d always refused to speak about Gusztav, no matter how much I pestered them. I gave up, eventually. Until one day, we were sitting in the garden, she mentioned him out of the blue. She told me that she’d made a mess of everything. I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I do. She was talking about Gusztav’s real father. She used a nickname. Guszti, not Gusztav.”

  Tereza keyed in her brother’s nickname and hit enter. The screen went from blue to black while the software loaded up. Colored icons lit the screen in front of them.

  “Open the calendar,” suggested Michael.

  She opened Outlook.<
br />
  “He’s heading for New York.”

  Michael looked at the entry for September eighteenth: 19.00 Hardcastle. Old Hemingway. NYC.

  “What does it mean?” said Tereza.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I’ve heard of the Hemingway. A grand old hotel close to Wall Street. He’s meeting someone. This evening at seven.”

  “Can we make it?”

  “Let’s see,” said Michael. “New York’s seven or eight hours behind us.”

  He went from Outlook to Google and found a Delta flight that left St. Petersburg at three p.m. and got into JFK at five.

  “We can be in downtown New York by seven, seven thirty if the flight arrives on time.”

  “We should leave now.”

  “Okay, let’s go. There’s a BMW around here somewhere.”

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “The keys I took from the guy at the boathouse. Wait, don’t turn it off.”

  Tereza had the cursor hovering over the “shut down” icon.

  “Back to the desktop.”

  “What is it?” she said.

  Michael had seen something that at one time he’d been very familiar with.

  “Can we swap?”

  They switched seats. Michael moved the cursor to the Bloomberg Professional icon and hit Enter.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Hang on.” He hit Log On, typed in jayrivello where the system asked for a username and keyed in Guszti when prompted for the password.

  The screen buzzed with a dazzling display of numbers and headings in blue, green, red and yellow. He went to the bottom of the screen and hit the Portfolio icon display.

  “It’s a Bloomberg online trading system. Traders working for investment banks, and day traders who can afford it, use Bloomberg to monitor the markets in anything from company shares to commodities like oil or even frozen orange juice. The system is linked to Bloomberg’s online brokerage operation allowing you to buy and sell anything that’s traded on a stock market, currency or commodity exchange. In better days, when I had a bit of free time on my hands, I’d spend some of it on one of these.

  “My guess, from what you said, is that he’s shorted the banks through a broker. They’d have placed the orders in smaller bundles through other brokers. That way Rivello wouldn’t draw attention to himself or tip the market that there was one big short seller out there.”

  “We should go,” she said.

  “Don’t you get it? We can control his portfolio through the system. We can reverse all the gains he’s made.”

  “How?”

  “By turning him into the only buyer in the market. The banks are falling like dominoes. Some countries are talking about nationalizing their biggest banks. Stocks are going through the floor. They’re going to keep falling for a long time. Some banks will end up being worth next to nothing.”

  The screen displaying Rivello’s portfolio flashed in front of him.

  “Bloody hell, this can’t be right. Rivello’s holding position’s worth more than forty-five billion euros.”

  Michael watched, with incredulity, the bright red indices glowing alongside a list of close to forty banks, most of whom he knew by name. To the right of each indice a number indicated the percentile by which Rivello had gained on that particular trade to date. The numbers were truly mind-blowing.

  “His account is registered to a New York address,” Michael said, taking a pen from the desktop and writing it down on a scrap of paper. Apartment 1012, number Two, West Seventy-Third Street.

  It took him two minutes to work through and close off each existing trade. Another two and each trade was reversed. Except one. Jay Rivello had just gone into the open market with forty-five billion euros to buy downward spiraling banking stocks during the fiercest bear market the financial world had ever seen. Financial suicide. Michael watched as the green percentiles simultaneously flickered to red, with the exception of the last.

  “I’m impressed,” said Tereza, “you weren’t joking when you said you spent time on that thing.”

  Michael smiled. “Someone’s going to get a nasty surprise the next time he logs in. My guess is he’s leveraged whatever he had by more than ten times his original stake. If these stocks go all the way, he’ll go down as the most indebted man in the world, not the wealthiest.”

  “Why did you leave the last one?” she said.

  “I can get your father’s money back for you. And mine.

  Everything your step-brother stole from both of us.”

  “How?”

  “I’m in his account. The system believes I’m Jay Rivello. I can close off this last trade and forward the money to my bank in Switzerland. If I settle now, we’ll net three hundred million euros.”

  He looked sideways at her. She was speechless, but her face didn’t break into the broad grin that he had assumed it would.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  She hesitated for a moment more.

  “I don’t want it,” she softly said.

  “You’re kidding me?”

  Her jaw set determinedly.

  “The money never brought me anything but misery. Mama also. Papa was never at home. He died because of the money. I don’t need it, I don’t want it. It’s a curse. You want it that badly, take it. Take everything, for all I care.”

  She stood and moved across to Ralph, lying listlessly on the couch.

  No way would Michael start at the beginning again. He didn’t know if he could. It had taken so much time, effort, luck. She would thank him for it. After all, she had to eat. He netted of the last account and sent an execution order for three hundred twenty-four million euros, his Swiss account the beneficiary.

  “Get down,” she cried out.

  He threw himself to the floor, Tereza the same.

  “Outside. By the window. A man with a gun. He was going to shoot.”

  “Stay here. Stay down. You still have a gun?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, get Ralph onto the floor. Don’t move until I get back.”

  Michael, crouching, lifted the Stechkin from the surface of the desk then sprinted for the door across the open floor.

  Chapter 85

  The body lay, unmoving, slumped in a rattan chair which itself sat in a trellis-covered alcove upon faded terracotta tiles. The water in the pool, only a few meters away, glowed a deep turquoise in the early morning sun. The man’s barrel of a chest rose and fell slowly, the brightening sky not yet having roused him. A dark, well-cut jacket lay badly folded on the tiles beside the chair. Alongside the jacket lay an empty bottle of champagne. Another bottle, empty, had precariously nestled itself between the man’s ribs and the chair’s arm. He stirred, his subconscious mind attempting to shield his face from the brightening light of the day. The bottle teetered on the edge of the seat before tumbling to the ground.

  His eyes opened, before he fully realized that he was awake, then snapped shut as the sun’s rays blinded him. Rick Delaney peered through slits as he began the recollection process.

  Something had woken him. He had no idea what. He groggily scanned the immediate vicinity until he noticed the pieces of broken glass on the ground, at his feet.

  Delaney and his wife had bought the summerhouse in Martha’s Vineyard five years before. The house stood on ten acres of its own land and pointed out over Nantucket Sound, one of the most incredible views to be had on the Eastern seaboard. Delaney seldom had time to make the trip, but when he did it more than made up for the twelve-million-dollar price tag. His wife hadn’t made it down.

  Theirs had been a marriage of convenience for years. She turned up to the gala balls, the benefits, corporate shin digs and client dinners and in return spent whatever she wanted on what she wanted within unreasonable limits. The couple were childless, neither keen on having children.

  She’d told him she was leaving the morning after Beirsdorf Klein was declared insolvent. It was nothing personal, she explained,
but if they were to stay married she’d go down with him. No point in them both losing everything. By suing him for divorce, she would at least have some rights over his creditors, particularly regarding the houses.

  His wife had kissed him on the cheek and walked out through the front door, bags waiting for her in the trunk of a limo outside. Apparently, if he needed to get in touch with her, he could do so through her lawyer. He found out which law firm she had engaged when the divorce papers arrived the following morning.

  Later that same day, he had received a call from a fellow board member to confirm the inevitable. He had been stripped of his role as CEO and chairman of the bank and an official administrator put in his place. In response, Delaney had packed a case of champagne into the back of his Mercedes and headed out of the city to the house on Nantucket Sound.

  The previous evening, while he’d worked his way through the first bottle in the house while he ate, only one thing had been on his mind. Elisabeth Kennedy had cost him his bank, his wife, his houses and probably at some future date, once the DA’s office got started on him, his freedom. The one thought burning over and over again in his mind, the thought that continued to keep him awake until he passed out in the chair at four o’clock in the morning, was how he was going to kill her.

  Chapter 86

  Whoever she’d seen at the window had gone. Michael walked round the building twice, gun in hand, safety off. Tereza contacted the US consulate in St. Petersburg. Ralph was deteriorating rapidly. The receptionist wouldn’t take the details of Ralph Kennedy’s situation directly and instead insisted on putting Tereza through to the American Citizen Services Unit. The lady she’d spoken to, eventually, had assured Tereza that they’d get an ambulance and a consular representative out to Ralph soon as possible. She begged them to hurry.