Billionaire

by Peter James

  ‘Food poisoning?’ said Hoos.

  ‘Could be,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Looks like it. I’m no expert on corpses, but I’d say they’ve been dead for a good day or so.’

  ‘Where’s this boat registered?’ said Hoos.

  ‘There’s a sea-worthiness certificate and fishing licence in the cabin – issued in Umm Al Amnah.’

  ‘Umm Al Amnah?’ said Hoos, with surprise. ‘They’ve drifted one hell of a way to be down here.’

  ‘Storm probably blew them down.’

  ‘Umm Al Amnah,’ repeated Hoos, to himself. ‘Search the boat from top to bottom; turn it inside out.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Hoos began to walk around the boat, carefully, slowly, methodically; he felt uneasy. Umm Al Amnah had been a province within one of the Trucial states which comprised the United Arab Emirates; although, many years before the formation of the UAE, it had been a state in its own right. Umm Al Amnah was ruled by an eccentric despot, Sheik Hyyad bin Bakkrah al Quozzohok, who had been at loggerheads with the Government of the United Arab Emirates ever since their formation, in 1971. It was Quozzohok’s view that the United Arab Emirates had been formed for the sole purpose of squeezing Umm Al Amnah into oblivion, and he wasn’t having any of it. Anti-British, anti-American, anti-Israeli and apparently pro-Libya, his tiny province of one thousand, five hundred square miles and a population of seventeen thousand had been a continuing embarrassment to the United Arab Emirates. When, finally, in a bloodless military coup in 1975, he had declared Umm Al Amnah’s independence, he found he met with no resistance from the UAE at all and – if anything – a hint of relief.

  The Western World, however, viewed Amnah’s independence less happily: over half of the West’s entire oil supply had to pass down the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz. With an unstable Iran, and a Russian-occupied Afghanistan controlling one whole side of the Gulf, the West needed all the friends it could get down the other side. Oman, which occupied the land one side of the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was openly friendly to the West, allowing both British and US forces to maintain bases in the country. The United Arab Emirates, which covered the area of coast on one side of the Gulf that ran up to the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was also friendly with the West, if less openly. Umm Al Amnah occupied forty miles of that coast within the UAE.

  Nasir Hoos knew that if anyone blocked the Strait of Hormuz, they would be turning off half the world’s oil supply. It was for that reason that the West poured all the aid into the Oman that it would accept. In return for the aid, the Oman policed the Strait. In eight years of gunboat patrol, Hoos had developed a policeman’s nose for what was right and wrong: for the lights of a friendly tanker, or a local fishing dhow; the occasional dark hulk of a Soviet sub coming up for a sniff of air. Some vessels smelt fine, others stank. Right now, he was standing in a fishing dhow; it had been at sea for several days. The stink of putrefying fish should have been overpowering, but there was no smell of fish at all.

  ‘Commander, Commander, come here!’ a voice shouted from the stern. He walked quickly down the boat. The Petty Officer was standing beside the open fish hatch. ‘Look down there,’ he said, shining his torch.

  Hoos looked, and a cold prickle began to run the length of his back: the beam of the torch lit up one oval metal object after the next: the hatch was packed full of mines.

  Three hours later they were berthed at the naval base on Goat Island, and the US bomb disposal experts were opening up the first mine. Hoos, some distance away, paced up and down the quay. Dawn was breaking now, but he did not feel tired. He saw one of the Americans climb out of the hatch, get off the boat, and walk up towards him. The American pulled a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes out of his pocket, and pulled a cigarette out of the pack.

  ‘Reckon you’ve got yourself a nice can of worms there, Commander.’

  Hoos nodded.

  The American lit the cigarette and blew the smoke out of his mouth; the breeze carried it away. ‘They’re not ordinary mines, Commander. Fact is, they’re the first I ever came across. I’ve heard about them – but never seen one before. He dragged hard on the cigarette, then pulled some tobacco strands off his tongue. He stared out towards the Gulf, and pursed his lips.

  ‘What precisely are they?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what they ain’t, Commander: they ain’t just your old Second World War surplus flogged off by some two-bit back-street arms dealer. Those are nuclear mines; they’re stuffed damned full of uranium. First damned nuke mines I ever saw.’

  There was a long pause before the American continued. ‘Whole new breed, those, Commander; must be Russian-made. One of those would take a supertanker out, and you wouldn’t be able to find any bits left over big enough to cover the end of a matchstick.’

  Hoos looked at the sky; it was going to be a fine, blistering-hot day. He looked out across the Strait at the shadow of Iran, at the red tip of the sun that was rising above it; he was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. After thirty years of waiting, he had a hideous feeling that the worst fears of the Western World might be coming true.

  One of the first men outside Umm Al Amnah to learn of the discovery was General Isser Aaron Ephraim, head of the Mossad, Israel’s overseas secret intelligence service. He sat up with a start as one of the two telephones beside his bed in his Tel Aviv apartment began to ring, and answered it in a quiet voice so as not to wake his wife. It was Chaim Weiszman, Director of Israeli Military Intelligence; he explained what had happened. ‘This anything to do with you, Isser?’

  ‘No, Chaim.’ Ephraim thought hard for some moments. ‘Four sailors disappeared off Haifa last week – Monday, I think. Patrol boat vanished; no one’s found any wreckage or any bodies so far.’

  ‘The Prime Minister’s going crazy. Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is going to be to the Government if this gets out?’

  ‘I can imagine. It doesn’t make any sense, Chaim – I’m stunned. Who knows about this so far?’

  ‘So far, the Commander of the gunboat, the US military in the Oman, and ourselves. They need to find out fast if any other dhows have been out there dropping mines into the Strait. If there have been, then they have to stop all shipping, at once. But equally, if this is some weird hoax, they don’t want to cause a panic; once any shipping crews get word someone may have been dumping nuclear mines in their path, the Persian Gulf – and half the world’s oceans and ports – are going to be knee-deep in abandoned tankers.’

  ‘Four dead sailors and fifteen nuclear mines doesn’t sound like a hoax to me, Chaim,’ said Ephraim.

  ‘Nor to me. I think we’d better have an early start; meet me in my office at eight.’

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ agreed Ephraim. He replaced the receiver, sat up in his bed in the warm dark room, and thought for a long time. He had a sick feeling that ran from the pit of his stomach to the top of his throat, and a sweat began to break out over his body, increasing in intensity, until he felt he was engulfed in a flowing river. After a while it subsided and as it slowly dried, he began to feel very cold. He had a sense of apprehension deeper than he had ever felt before. All his life he had faced trouble; when it hadn’t come to him, he had gone to search it out and, if not always conquer it, at least somehow come to terms with it. Something in the night air carried vibrations of a new kind of trouble through him; his brain turned itself inside out trying to make sense of it, and failed. The General lapsed into an exhausted doze.

  3

  From the time Baenhaker’s Volvo had slewed into the deep ditch beside the motorway to the time the ambulance arrived, a mere thirty minutes had elapsed. During that time, the police had halted all traffic, put up accident warning signs, cleared glass and metal off the carriageway, re-started the traffic, and given Baenhaker, who appeared to have stopped breathing, the kiss of life.

  ‘Forget it, he’s a goner.’

  Police Constable Harris looked up at the ambulanceman despairingly; it was the second
bad smash he’d been to this morning. ‘He’s got a pulse!’

  The ambulanceman took Baenhaker’s wrist; after a couple of moments he nodded, and the team went into action. Twice, during the process of separating the wreckage of Baenhaker from the wreckage of his car, his heart stopped. Twice, the team restarted it.

  ‘Don’t know why we’re bothering,’ said Jim Connelly, the ambulance driver. ‘There’s no way he’s going to make it through.’

  The rest of the crew agreed with him. Probable fractured skull, femur and ribs, probable ruptured spleen, possible fractured spine, massive blood loss from internal haemorrhage, punctured lung and massive lacerations; and that was without looking too closely. But they kept on trying; less bits than were left of Baenhaker had been reassembled into perfectly acceptable human beings in the past; not often, perhaps, but enough times to make their efforts with every accident victim worthwhile. Eventually, they hoisted him into the ambulance and, with fluid pouring into his veins, pumping oxygen via a breathing machine and giving him a cardiac massage every time his pulse faded, raced him, with little optimism, to the West Middlesex Hospital.

  Three years earlier, Alex Rocq had also been smashed to pieces, when his life had collapsed. Although his wounds had not required the surgeon’s knife, the scars that remained were deeper than any surgeon’s knife could have inflicted. The first disaster had been when his wife of less than two years had walked out, accusing him, not entirely inaccurately, of being more in love with his work than with her; the second disaster, within weeks of her leaving, was when the stockbroking firm, for which he had slaved for five years, and which had just made him their youngest-ever partner, went to the wall.

  As the partners themselves were personally liable for the debts of the firm, Rocq lost everything he owned: his Paddington mews house, his car, and all his savings. He also lost his Membership of the London Stock Exchange, with little chance of regaining it for a long while, if ever.

  So at the age of twenty-eight, after ten years of training, experience and dedication, he was out of a job, out of a marriage, out of a home, out of money and fresh out of prospects. As Amanda pulled his fly zipper back up, he thought back about all the turbulence, all the knocks and blows, and the despair; Amanda looked up at him and smiled, and he smiled back. He thought about how, now, three years on, the pieces all seemed to be slotting back together very nicely.

  She leaned up and kissed him; he kissed her back, looking over the bridge of her nose at the road ahead. The Volvo that had been on his tail seemed to have vanished. He wondered idly for a brief second where it had gone, because he hadn’t seen any turn-offs; then it went completely from his mind. He slid his hand up inside her skirt, pushed his fingers down inside the top of her tights, and slid them deep down into her silk panties; she breathed in sharply, and ran her tongue over his nose.

  He was already starting to feel horny again; it was a long time, he reflected, since he had felt horny so often, a long time since he could remember feeling almost permanently horny, the way he did now. Too damned long. He didn’t ever want to have bad times again, didn’t ever want to be poor again, didn’t ever again want to go through the hell of the last three years.

  Amanda began to blow a sweet warm hurricane into his ear. He saw a patrol car racing up the westbound carriageway, blue lights flashing, headlights on. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance, siren screaming, was tearing up the road; somewhere back there there must have been an accident, he figured.

  Rocq pulled the Porsche up at the high kerb in Knightsbridge, and Amanda opened her door. He looked at her. ‘Would you consider me forward if I asked if you’d like to come out and have a drink tonight?’

  She grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My mother always warned me about strange men.’ She hoisted her soft Enny overnight bag from the rear seat.

  ‘Maybe if I write and ask nicely?’

  ‘Maybe!’ She grinned again, blew him a kiss, shut the door and stepped, with the careless abandon that only a very pretty girl can get away with, out into the thick lunch-time traffic.

  Rocq turned to watch her; she had already reached the safety of the traffic island in the middle of the road. She turned, saw he was still there, and smiled again.

  Rocq put the Porsche into gear and pulled back out into the traffic. He drove slowly, in a contemplative mood. He went around Hyde Park Corner, down Constitution Hill, the Mall, then along the Embankment, heading towards the City. At the end of Lower Thames Street, he cut through Mark Lane, into Fenchurch Street, and turned left into Mincing Lane. For the first time in two years, there was an empty parking bay in the street; not only that, it was slap outside the front entrance to Number 88. Right now, he decided, he really did not have a lot to grumble about.

  The man standing on guard outside the front door was wearing a uniform that would have made the full battle-dress of a Brigadier look like a boiler suit. It was a tribute to his physical strength that under the full weight of the several yards of braid, the tonnage of glistening brass buttons, the acreage of immaculately blancoed webbing and the battery of medals, he was able to remain upright.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sarge,’ said Rocq to Retired Sergeant-Major Horace Bantram, the security guard and live-in caretaker.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sir, nice one today, Sir,’ he said to Rocq. Then, as he always did, with the knuckle of his index finger he pushed his nostrils sideways and sniffed loudly. ‘Smells like rain later, though, Sir,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t,’ said Rocq, walking swiftly past him. He had learned, a long time ago, the folly of engaging Sarge in a conversation about the weather: it had cost him an entire morning. He walked past the discreet sign, in the shape of a gold ingot, with the words GLOBALEX LTD engraved on it in small block capitals, through the revolving door, and down the white marble corridor, past the receptionist, Mrs Deale, a smart woman in her early forties. She gave him a brief smile of recognition whilst struggling hard, with considerable dignity, to hold her grip on a switchboard which sounded as if it had gone berserk.

  He took one of the four elevators up to the fourth floor, and stepped out into a carpeted corridor. Opposite was another sign on the wall, again in the shape of an ingot; it read: GLOBALEX METALS DIVISION. Rocq looked at his watch; it was just on two o’clock.

  He walked down the corridor and turned left into his office. It was an extremely large room, in the centre of which was a massive oval console around which sat twenty people, each with two telephones, an intercom, a computer terminal and a small flat work-top containing a switchboard with one hundred telephone lines, known as a Dealer Board.

  Globalex Limited was one of the largest commodity broking firms in Britain, with additional branch offices in Zurich, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and New York. The company dealt in all types of commodities, from foods, such as soyabean, grain, barley, sugar, cocoa, coffee and frozen pork bellies to materials, such as plywood, rubber, cotton and wool; to minerals, such as tin, copper, lead, zinc and precious metals, such as silver and gold.

  Commodities are basically just raw materials, and the world commodity markets began life simply as places where raw materials in wholesale quantities could be bought and sold. From these, developed futures markets. With massive price fluctuations in raw materials – depending on supply and demand in any given year, or part of a year – and international currency swings, users of commodities, in planning their end products, need to insure against massive rises in the price of their raw materials; similarly, producers of commodities need to insure against massive price drops. Out of these two needs came the practice of ‘buying long’ – agreeing to buy a commodity on a specific date in the future, often three months, for a specific price. If the commodity then rose in price, the vendor would still be obliged to sell the product at the price agreed upon three months before. The purchaser is protected against a price rise, but loses out if the price has in fact dropped in the meantime. Also out of the two needs came the practice of �
�selling short’ – agreeing to sell a commodity on a specific date in the future, for a specific price. This protects the producer against a drop in price; however much the price of the commodity may have dropped by the delivery date, he is covered by having sold it at a prearranged price.

  Whilst the producers of raw materials and the manufacturers who use the raw materials make up an important part of the world commodity markets’ clientele, there are also numerous speculators, who invest in commodity futures but have no interest whatsoever in the end products themselves. They trade purely in paper, and have almost always sold on the paper before the delivery dates are due. Not many punters want to have twenty thousand tons of soya-bean meal delivered to their back yards.

  The attraction of the commodity market to the speculator, both institutional and private, is the ability to make far higher profits in a short space of time than are usually attainable on the stock exchanges. This is for two reasons. The first is the high rate of fluctuation of the price of commodities. The second, and more important, reason is the gearing: in buying commodities, the purchaser is only required to pay a deposit, normally ten per cent of the total price; if the purchaser does not take delivery of the goods, but sells them on or prior to the delivery date, he is not required to pay up the balance of the price. In effect, this means that he is able to gamble with ten times more money than he actually has. If the commodity rises in value ten per cent, he ends up doubling his money; but the risk is in proportion. If the commodity drops ten per cent, he will have to find and put up ten times his original stake. Fortunes are made every day in the world’s commodity markets; equally, many men are bankrupted every day.

  Most of the twenty people in Rocq’s office were, like Rocq, account executives; their job was to act for the clients of Globalex, buying and selling for them according to their clients’ instructions and, equally, advising and keeping their clients up to date on all conditions which might affect the commodities that interested them. Six of the brokers were girls, two of them Japanese. At the head of the oval console was a fiery red-headed girl order clerk who was firing questions out across the console in a broad cockney accent and firing answers back down the telephone receiver that she brandished about as if it were a dagger.