White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  ‘Tell him I’ll need to speak to him, because this all seems to be connected with his business dealings. What I want from you now is a detailed briefing on everything.’ He turned to Macy. ‘And, for that, we’ll need a room.’

  ‘We can do that on the plane, sir. It’ll save time.’

  Samson thought for a moment. ‘Yes, but I need to check a few things here before I leave. I’ll meet you at the airport at four. That’s Blackbushe, right?’

  She nodded.

  An hour later, Samson had packed a rucksack and was on his way to meet Detective Inspector Jo Hayes of the Metropolitan Police in a Mayfair Italian coffee bar that had recently upgraded from a basic greasy spoon to offer a breakfast menu with avocado toast and chia seeds. Hayes, who had served in MI5 but was now back at Counter-terror with the Met, arrived ten minutes after him, by which time Samson had read an email from Zillah Dee. The kidnappers had been identified, with ninety per cent certainty by the Carabinieri, as two mid-ranking figures in the Neapolitan underworld. Their names were Salvatore Bucco and Niccolo Scorza. They had served prison sentences for drug offences and fraud. Scorza owned a soccer bar and Bucco was in the vegetable business. They worked as a team yet there was no suspicion that they’d ever been involved in kidnapping before. A nationwide alert for the two men was in place.

  Hayes, a vivid redhead with a wide grin which she deployed as an amateur nightclub singer in her spare time, dumped her shoulder bag on the table and said, with her usual breeziness, ‘Hello, handsome! Shit, you look awful, what’s happened?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Samson. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘I owe you, we both know that.’ Three months before, Samson, while investigating the disappearance of a young princess from the Gulf States, had put Jo on to a group that were using artworks to launder money destined for terror groups.

  ‘You heard about the murder of a man named Ray Shepherd in Knightsbridge?’ he started. ‘Your people had me in because I was involved in tracing this man, who was until recently living in the US under another alias – Adam Crane.’

  ‘I didn’t know about the American alias but I’m pretty much up to speed. The victim was tortured at an unknown location then dumped on the balcony of his flat.’

  Samson nodded. ‘Can you get me into the flat?’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said incredulously. ‘It’s a crime scene. It’s still crawling with Forensics. There’s no way I can do it.’

  ‘What can I offer you in exchange?’

  ‘It’s not a question of that, Paul. If I were on the team investigating the murder, I might be able to help, but this isn’t even my beat.’ She smiled at him. ‘What’s the problem? You traced your man. He’s dead. You move on.’ She shrugged at the simple logic of the situation.

  Samson glanced out of the window and breathed in. ‘Well, it’s about a kidnap in Italy, and this man held the key to it. The thing is, your people and the Security Service know a lot more than I do about Shepherd/Crane, which is the reason they let me go so quickly. They just wanted to find out who I was working for, but I didn’t have the first idea.’ He thought for a few seconds. ‘How about I give you everything I learn about the victim – that’s everything from the American side? What your people don’t know about is the money. Looks like a huge money-laundering operation.’

  ‘No,’ she said definitely. ‘No, I am not bloody well doing this – okay?’

  ‘Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars being washed through London, and Crane was at the centre of it all.’

  ‘No, no, no! Get it into your fucking head – I can’t do it. Please don’t go on asking me.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m going to tell you everything. A woman, a woman I once loved very much, was kidnapped in Italy two days ago, just when Crane was being tortured and killed. It looks like she was taken hostage to deter anyone from investigating Crane’s affairs. I have to get into that apartment to check on something. I won’t be more than a minute or two.’ He saw she was thinking hard whether she could get him in.

  ‘Who is this lucky woman?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t have you down as the falling-in-love type.’

  ‘She’s an aid worker. We met a few years ago. She’s with someone else now. Married.’

  ‘And you still love her?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s history.’

  ‘You poor sod!’ Her leg started jiggling and she looked away. ‘Fuck it. I’ll do it, but on the condition that anything you find out you pass to me and that will be over dinner in your mum’s place. Always wanted to go there.’

  She went out and made a couple of calls in the street, pacing up and down with her finger pressed to her ear. He could tell she was calling in some favours. She came back. ‘We’re on, but not until half twelve. I’ll meet you there.’

  The apartment was enormous and anonymous, like a very expensive hotel suite, with several large rooms, most of which faced the park and accessed the balcony where Shepherd/Crane was left for all to see. The forensics officer who let them in said, ‘We’re pretty much finished, but you must wear these.’ He handed them blue shoe covers and latex gloves. ‘I’m going for a smoke and coffee. You’ve got ten minutes.’

  Samson moved quickly, searching for signs of a computer or laptop. He found nothing, which didn’t surprise him. These items would be the first to be removed by the police. Then he went to the bedroom suite and entered the huge white alabaster bathroom and examined a pair of sinks below a bronze-tinted mirror. There were no personal items to be seen, and nothing in the cabinets under the sinks. He searched the wardrobes but found no clothes and nothing in the chests of drawers either. He looked around and noticed right-angle marks on the wall. ‘Someone’s removed the pictures from the wall!’ he called out. ‘Looks like they were pretty big. They would need two people to take them down. Have they checked with the concierge when these things were moved? Unless the police moved them.’

  Hayes was at the door. ‘That’s not something our lot would do.’

  ‘Might be important,’ he said, going back to the bathroom.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ she asked.

  ‘Just looking,’ he said, taking out one of the labelled zip-lock plastic bags he’d brought with him. He crouched down in the shower and prised off the drain-cover cap and saw what he was looking for. With a pair of tweezers, he pulled out several strands of hair caught in the grille and carefully placed them in the bag. He slipped it in the pocket of his rucksack and joined her in the bedroom.

  He then strode across the living room, which also showed no signs of individual taste or of any actual person living in the flat, and opened the door on to the balcony. Hayes’s phone was ringing. She answered at the same time as trying to signal that he shouldn’t go out. Samson seemingly did not see and went out nevertheless.

  It was obvious where the body had been propped up. There was blood on the tiled floor. He knelt as if to check something and, using a small craft knife he’d brought, along with the plastic bags, scraped a dried flake of blood into a bag so quickly that when Hayes joined him on the balcony she had no idea what he had done.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said, straightening up. ‘They say he was tortured at another location and then brought here to be killed. Did you see the security in the lobby? How are they going to bring a tortured man into this building – huh? How are they going to avoid the CCTV downstairs and in the lifts? It had to have all happened here, but there are no signs in the bathroom.’ He looked at her. ‘How badly was he tortured? What were the signs?’

  She shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, does it?’ This was true. There were some anomalies in the story that he had been told, but they were unimportant to him. Samson had got what he had come for and he wasn’t going to press the point with Hayes, who was already looking impatient.

  As they travelled down in the lift, she said, ‘I’d like to know what this was all about, Paul.’

&n
bsp; ‘The paintings. There were no paintings anywhere to be seen. Crane collected art and he had a good eye. That was one of the ways I tracked him down, a bill of sale from one of the galleries in New Bond Street. So, where are the paintings? Were they stolen, or did someone remove them before the murder, knowing that the murder was going to take place?’

  ‘You’re saying the motive was theft?’

  Hayes, usually so shrewd, was missing the point. ‘Not exactly, but you guys really need to go over the CCTV and find out what was removed from the flat and when.’ He raised his eyebrows on the last word.

  ‘I’ll mention it,’ she said, still looking puzzled. ‘Was that all you wanted to see?’

  ‘It was a really useful visit in many ways. I am eternally grateful to you, Jo. We’ll do that dinner in a couple of weeks.’

  Outside, he grabbed her hand hurriedly and gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Thanks, you’re a star,’ he said before hailing a cab to go to Battersea heliport.

  Five minutes after Hisami’s jet took off from Blackbushe, Zillah Dee undid her seatbelt and reached over to tug a broad attaché case towards her. ‘These were sent over by Mr Hisami’s office just this afternoon. I had them printed at Hendricks Harp. They show that a total of $271.5 million has passed through TangKi in the last year, and all of it was bound for London. This is the aggregate from all four bank accounts Mr Hisami traced. There may be more, but we will never know, because five people were fired following Mr Hisami’s meeting with the board members a couple of days ago. He didn’t say as much, but I’m guessing that his source was among them. The company was taking no chances and fired the whole department, and with good pay-outs and NDAs, so that’s the end of his information from inside TangKi.’

  She looked at him with those remote grey eyes. ‘What do you make of it, Mr Samson? By the way, what should I call you – Paul, or Mr Samson?’ He caught a glimmer of a smile.

  ‘Paul’s fine, but most people call me Samson. Have you analysed these figures? Is there any pattern to the transactions?’

  ‘No, my people are looking at them now, but the interesting thing is where the money’s coming from. As far as we can tell, it’s all inside the States and that’s important. It’s really hard to work out whether it’s been stolen from TangKi or the company is being used as a channel.’

  ‘Tell me about the TangKi board.’

  ‘You mean, which one of them helped Crane?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There was a meeting two days ago. I guessed that Mr Hisami asked those particular four board members for a particular purpose. My company is looking into their lives, so I wanted to see them for myself. That’s one of the reasons I was at hand when he got the calls from his wife. All but one could be involved, and that’s Larry Valentine – he has problems with a love child of sixteen that his wife is about to find out about, and, besides, this is not his kind of thing. Of the others, Martin Reid is the most likely because he shared Crane’s right-wing agenda and has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, which was always Crane’s schtick. Micky Gehrig is Jewish and wrapped up in his space kick but he does have a Russian wife, and that may be important. We’re looking into her. Gil Leppo is Denis Hisami’s friend, and Denis and he have worked together on several investments. So, I guess it would be Martin Reid, because he also has the power to turn the heat on Denis through the government and the banks. Everyone fears him.’

  ‘So whoever it is gave shelter to Crane while he moved money out of the company and ordered and coordinated Anastasia’s kidnap to coincide with the meeting. Does that sound like Reid?’

  She looked out of the window. ‘You’re right, it would be a new departure for him. He’s a bastard, but a really conventional one.’

  They ate sandwiches and drank diet Coke. She dozed for twenty minutes and Samson’s mind wandered to Anastasia. He hoped she’d know that he would do everything to find her. When Zillah opened her eyes and reached for the can of Coke again, he asked, ‘What was Crane’s life like in California?’

  She looked out of the window at the Alps, which glowed pink below them in the late-afternoon light. ‘You ski, Samson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Crane did. He was a good downhill skier, cross-country, too – Squaw Valley mostly, Aspen also. He made some serious contacts on the slopes and that’s how he entered the world of tech finance and start-ups. He had the money and the talk. He also had a charming wife, who wasn’t his wife, and two kids that came with her. She literally brought her entire family and loaned it to this operation. That’s a remarkable investment of time, money and effort by someone or other to put their man at the heart of Silicon Valley.’ She stopped and looked out of the window.

  ‘Do the board members know he’s dead?’ asked Samson.

  ‘No – the London police are still talking about Ray Shepherd.’

  ‘What’s going to be their reaction when they learn?’

  ‘Mr Hisami is waiting for that. He thinks that the people who are in on this – whatever the heck this is – will show their hand. It’s like Crane is his own little Russian sleeper cell, but then he buys into this company, which is actually a very good idea, and it’s now making real money. It’s a success, as start-ups go, so you ask yourself, why did Crane go illegal? Why didn’t he just stay and run the company and make himself a billion dollars?’

  ‘A higher calling?’

  ‘Yes, but if he’d been something as simple as a Russian spy, they would have kept him in place.’

  ‘How much do you know about the Russian connection?’

  ‘Crane was born Aleksis Chumak in 1973 to a Russian mother and a father who was half Russian, half Ukrainian, in a town fifty miles north of Odessa. There were three boys. His father was a manager in a heavy-engineering works. And get this! He built cranes. The boy was a grade A student at Mechnikov National University in Odessa and was spotted by the embryonic Ukrainian intelligence service, although he was intrinsically part of the Russian culture that Ukrainians rejected. Maybe his Ukrainian second name helped in that. Then the trail goes dead, and the next we hear of him he’s in seriously bad company and setting up all sorts of schemes for defrauding his own government as well as Western investors. Turns out he had a gift for criminality.’

  They fell silent. At some point the pilot came on the intercom. ‘We’re just approaching the Adriatic, so we’re less than an hour from Brindisi. You might want to look out on the starboard side of the aircraft, folks. There’s a wonderful view of Venice in the twilight.’ Samson didn’t look out and Zillah’s eyes were focused on her tablet.

  He watched her for a few seconds. He had been struck by how young she looked yet how pragmatic her view of life was. She talked like someone with thirty years’ experience of power and politics, yet she couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, certainly not older than Samson, who was now pushing forty.

  He noticed a trace of satisfaction in her expression – the first sign of anything approaching warmth in her sternly beautiful features – and saw in the window reflection that she was watching a film. He asked what it was.

  ‘Sail boats,’ she said. ‘They’re my new passion. I started my company in a decommissioned naval vessel on the Potomac that was like a houseboat and I took to watching the sail boats going by and realised it was a good way of leaving DC and having some fun on the weekend without getting in the car.’ She stopped the film and searched for something, then turned the device towards him. He saw a yacht with a dark blue hull, sails filled and a crew waving at the camera. ‘This is Ariel. I bought her eighteen months ago. She’s a Bjarne AAS fifty-three-foot sloop built in 1952. We all sail it.’

  ‘Who’s all?’

  ‘Five members of my staff – we learned together in the spring. We’re a pretty good crew now. She’s moored alongside the old wreck.’

  He swiped through the photographs. ‘You have a lot of electronics on board.’

  ‘Can’t be out of contact. Actually, we can handle pretty much any
communications challenge when we’re out on the ocean.’

  ‘Do you still work out of the old boat?’

  ‘No, we have offices in DC. But I kept it on. It can be useful for meetings.’

  Samson smiled. ‘I have no experience of the sea, but the one trip I took across the Adriatic made me think I’d like to sail.’

  ‘You would,’ she said, as though he had no choice, and took the tablet back.

  ‘How did you get into this business?’

  ‘Advertising,’ she said.

  ‘That seems like an odd route.’

  ‘I was running a web advertising company in Manhattan and we were playing around with the steganography – hiding code and messages in images – and someone at the NSA got in contact, though I didn’t know it was the Agency at the time. They were impressed and a little concerned about what we were doing. They asked for help. I gave it and, eventually, I joined the Agency.’

  ‘But then you left.’

  She snorted a laugh. ‘Right – the Agency is fine, but I saw an opportunity. And there were maybe too many procedures and a lot of middle-aged guys who weren’t the sharpest. We started the company knowing that we were only going to use our generation and younger. I guess one day I’ll be made obsolete by a new generation, but then I’ll have my boat and money.’

  ‘Where did you grow up?’

  ‘What’s this – a background check?’ A brief glimmer of a smile. ‘I was raised in Kentucky by parents who in their twenties read a book about self-sufficiency – The Good Life, by Helen and Scott Nearing. Have you heard of this book, Samson?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Right, my childhood and teen years were spent planting peas and hoeing and plucking chickens and stacking cords of wood and weaving blankets with my mom’s faux-I designs of goddam apple trees and doves, and going to a school with kids that were all strictly the end of the gene pool. I guess most of them are now on opioids and giving birth out in the woods. Get the picture? My upbringing was a tedious fucking idyll. Is that enough?’ He nodded. ‘I know all about you, so no need to reciprocate.’ With that she closed the picture of her boat and tried to get on to the plane’s wifi again. Samson studied her for a few seconds. He couldn’t work out whether she was straight, gay or asexual. Zillah Dee gave out no signals whatsoever: she was, in this respect, an utterly neutral presence.