Billionaire

by Peter James

  Throughout the ride in the armour-plated Lincoln, back to the palace, and throughout the nightly ritual of dinner with his father, he remained in almost complete silence. After dinner he went to his quarters, occupying the sixtieth to seventy-fifth floors of the Palace, and sat awake, on his own, throughout the long night. There was revolution in the air, he knew; an idiot could have sensed it. He thought back to 1979, to Iran – the evening of that year when he had sat with his father and with the Shah of Iran, one of his father’s greatest friends, and the man in the world that his father had always said he admired the most. He remembered the Shah talking about unrest, and his father poo-pooing it as nonsense and telling the Shah not to be concerned. And yet his father had learned nothing from all this. He was right, thought Missh, the man who said, ‘The lesson of history is that man does not learn the lesson of history.’

  Iran was many hundreds of times the size of his own country but the policies were much the same, the people much the same, and now the signs were much the same. He needed help, a lot of help, and quickly – and he did not know where to turn. The Umm Al Amnah army was strong, but small; and although, because of the size of their pay packets, most of the soldiers were undoubtedly loyal to his family, he was equally certain that when the crunch came, there were many who would not turn their guns onto their own people, just as he knew there were many who disobeyed their instructions to fill in waterholes. They needed help from the West, but he knew the West wouldn’t help. When his father had declared Independence and broken away from the Emirates, he had upset just about the entire Western World.

  At that time, he had drawn help from the Libyans and the Russians, a fact which more than anything had prompted the pro-West United Arab Emirates to disown Amnah. Ever since then, relationships with the UAE Government had been strained at the best of times, with frequent border skirmishes, on Quozzohoks’s instructions, at the slightest hint of territorial infringement. The West would now not dare lift one finger to help them for fear of upsetting the UAE, with whom the West now had major economic ties.

  It had taken Amnah eight years to throw off the claws of Libya and Russia. Neither country was pleased with the way it had been treated by Quozzohok after helping Amnah to gain Independence, and it was unlikely either would be willing to help again, on anything other than complete takeover terms.

  He wished he could discuss the situation rationally with his father, but he knew his father would not listen. His father would not believe that his people, whom his family had led for eleven hundred years, could even contemplate rising up against him. If he told his father about the incident with his Mercedes, it would only lead to even more water-holes being filled in, and create more misery and greater resentment still.

  At dawn, Missh came to a decision: he would have to bring in a private army, one whose loyalties were to money and money only, one which would not be influenced by political or religious views. He needed someone thoroughly experienced in the field of mercenaries to advise him on the numbers and types of mercenaries he needed, and to set the whole thing up for him. There was one man, he knew, who might be able to help. He was the man through whom they had bought most of their military equipment during the last eight years – a man who was able to produce gunboats, tanks, aeroplanes, with the ease of a village shop delivering a weekend grocery order. He lifted the telephone receiver and started dialling an Athens telephone number. The phone rang three times, and then a voice answered.

  ‘Jimmy Culundis?’ said Missh.

  ‘Speaking’, said the Greek arms dealer.

  ‘This is Abby Missh. I have some business to talk.’

  8

  The white golf ball climbed gracefully through the air, high above the manicured fairway, and seemingly high above the peaks of the mountains that surrounded the course at Crans Montana, in the Swiss Alps. The man who stood on the eleventh tee, peering over the top of the lacquered head of his three wood at his ball’s flight, was short and plump. He wore a bright red Lacoste T-shirt, green tartan trousers, white shoes, a yellow peaked cap, and was festooned with heavy, vulgar jewellery. As his ball dipped down towards the fairway, it was momentarily obscured from his vision by a cloud of Bolivar smoke that belched out of his mouth and out of the damp stump he held clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth.

  The ball bounced onto the green, ran forwards towards the pin and stopped what appeared, from where they were standing, to be only inches from a hole in one. Jimmy Culundis, the multi-millionaire Greek arms dealer, chuckled, removed the stump from his mouth and spat onto the ground. His companion, a tall man with a handsome, if slightly weak face, dressed in a cream silk shirt, paisley cravat, yellow cashmere V-neck cardigan and well-cut beige trousers, frowned at the perfect shot, and then glared down at the puddle of spittle on the ground. Slightly embarrassed, he looked behind him; the Moroccan Ambassador to Switzerland, the French Foreign Secretary, the French Commercial Attaché to Switzerland and the Couve de Meurville stood behind them with their battery of caddies, patiently waiting for them to move on, and with expressions of undisguised disgust on their faces.

  Claude Louis Santenay Jarré du Charnevrau Ducarme de Louçelle, fifteenth Viscomte Lasserre, beamed a crushing aristocratic expression at the Greek, which, without words, told Culundis that the Viscomte approved neither of the shot nor the spitting.

  ‘Shot!’ said the Viscomte in a curt, grudging tone.

  ‘Good, hey!’ said the Greek, twiddling his finger in his ear.

  The Viscomte placed his ball, and took his four wood. He cracked the ball high and hard over to the right, and it dropped neatly between the roots of a fir tree about eighty yards to the right of the green. He pushed his club back into his bag and, pulling their trolleys, the two men set off. They had no caddies because they wanted to talk, and did not want an audience; for it was here at Crans Montana, home of the Swiss Open Championship, that the two men met once a month during the summer months, to discuss their business.

  Neither of them stood out particularly from any of the other rich people who hacked and bashed their way around some of the most exclusive kilometres of cultivated grass in the world, neither in appearance nor in standard of play. The Greek’s handicap was nine, the Viscomte’s twelve. The backgrounds of the two men could not have been more dissimilar. The Greek was the son of a twelfth generation lobster fisherman; when he was born, his family owned a single-storey cottage with no running water and no electricity. When the Viscomte Lasserre was born, his family owned Chateau Lasserre, a massive grey and white stone chateau, set in front of a two hundred acre lake, in a seventeen thousand acre estate which included fifty-five acres of cinquième cru vines. To most people, Chateau Lasserre was possibly the most beautiful of all the chateaux in the Médoc region of France. To all Frenchmen, its claret was, without doubt, one of the worst. The current Viscomte’s grandfather had, some sixty years previously, upon discovering that fewer and fewer people in France would buy his wine, succeeded in selling the entire output for one hundred years to an English shipper who knew that with a smart name, an old year and a cheap price, there would be no shortage of punters in the English restaurant trade.

  The Greek, like many sons of fishermen, had gone into shipping. But whereas that other man from his country, Stavros Niarchos, had gone in for tankers, Jimmy Culundis had gone in for vessels for gun running. At first it had been on a local scale, providing boats to carry guns into Turkey, but soon he built it up into an international business, illegally shipping at first guns and ammunition, then graduating to all types of warmongering hardware, from armoured vehicles to jet fighters. His clientele comprised mainly terrorist organizations and guerilla outfits which legally no one was allowed to supply, or which were politically sensitive. He shipped guns to the IRA, gunboats to Israel, uranium to Libya.

  It took him a mere five years to graduate from being the carrier to arranging the entire deals from start to finish. By the time he was thirty-three years old, he had completely equipped
the armed forces of nine African countries, three Arab countries, and six South American countries. There was scarcely a terrorist in the world that had not at some time carried a weapon purloined from Jimmy Culundis.

  Right from the very start, Culundis had always taken great pains to conceal his clandestine activities behind a carefully-maintained respectable front, although now it was a front that was in the process of crumbling fast. For over twenty years he had been one of the world’s leading bona fide arms dealers, and had been trusted widely by many governments. But stories of the murkier side of his business had been coming to the surface in many parts of the globe. The British Sunday Times Insight columns had plucked truckloads of skeletons from his closets, as had the Washington Post. So that at the age of fifty-three, he had been blacklisted by most of his major clients; and whilst there was still plenty of business for him in supplying the more dubious of customers, the massive empire he had constructed had lost the support of his biggest punters, and was in grave danger of collapsing.

  Culundis walked onto the eleventh green, and smiled with satisfaction when he saw his ball was a mere six inches from the hole. He stood and watched the Viscomte take three shots to extricate his ball from between the roots of the fir tree and then, with his next shot, drop it neatly onto the green, about eight feet from the pin. He walked up to Culundis.

  ‘I give you the hole.’

  The Greek grinned and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. ‘Two up!’ he said.

  ‘You’re playing well, Jimmy,’ said the Viscomte. ‘You don’t give me a chance.’

  ‘I can’t make any profit out of doing business with you, Claude – this is the only way I get to eat!’

  ‘If you can’t make a profit out of the prices I let you have goods at,’ grinned the Viscomte, ‘then you are in the wrong business.’

  The Greek shrugged his shoulders, and stopped by the twelfth tee. He looked with more than a little envy at the Viscomte, the chief executive of Lasserre Mondiale, one of the largest private companies in the world. Claude Lasserre had it cushy, he thought. Straight in at the top. Not for him those early days of battling to build up a business from scratch. Sailing blacked-out boats into pitch dark bays in the middle of the night, never knowing when a battery of searchlights might blaze into life, floodlighting them in the empty sea as the guns pounded at them until they had sunk. Lasserre had never had to do a bloody thing, he thought. Ever since the Fourth Viscomte had bought his family’s safety through the French Revolution by supplying arms to the revolutionaries, the Lasserre empire had flourished without a hiccup. Today it had many tentacles, all to do with the business of killing: Lasserre Aerospatiale, which manufactured military specification jet helicopters and short-range strike jets; Lasserre Nautique, which manufactured gunboats and navy-specification submersibles; and Lasserre Industriel, which manufactured a vast range of pistols, machine guns, mortars and artillery guns, bullets, shells, grenades, land and sea mines, and also was one of the French Government’s principal nuclear weapons contractors.

  In spite of the vast amounts of money the Lasserre empire earned him, the Viscomte was not a man for stashing his bundle idly away in the coffers. He liked to see his money work; he liked to see it multiply. Lasserre was a great believer in commodities as a way to make money grow, and there was one commodity-broking firm in whose abilities he had particular confidence, both in the boss and the calibre of those beneath him. The man was Sir Monty Elleck, and the firm was Globalex. Although based in London, he had always found that the performance of the firm more than made up for the nuisance of having always to deal at a distance.

  ‘I received a telephone call last night,’ said Culundis, bending down to push his tee into the grass and lay his Titleist ball on top; he grunted as he stood up again. ‘From no less than Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh of Uram Al Amnah.’

  The Viscomte froze for a moment, and his face went white. He stared at Culundis. ‘From Umm Al Amnah?’

  Culundis nodded. He stepped back, removed his driver, took one short practice swing, then hit the ball badly; it travelled only a short distance, hooking sharply to the left, and fell into the rough.

  ‘What was he calling about? The mines? Jimmy – was he calling about the mines?’

  ‘No, no. Relax, Claude, it wasn’t the mines.’

  The Viscomte played a two-hundred-and-forty-yard drive straight down the centre of the fairway; it went over the centre marker pin and fell down, out of sight in the dip, into the perfect text-book position. He put his club head on the ground, and leaned on it. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He thinks there is trouble brewing; he wants to make sure his family stays in power.’

  ‘What sort of trouble? A coup?’ Lasserre went even paler.

  ‘He seems to think so.’

  ‘That would destroy everything.’

  ‘So we have to make sure there is no coup.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘I’m flying there tomorrow for the weekend.’

  ‘I can think of places I’d prefer to spend my weekends.’

  Culundis shook his head. ‘You’d be hard pushed. That man has got the best crumpet in the world, and I mean that. In the world!’

  ‘Maybe he should spend more time thinking about his neck and less about his genitals.’

  ‘That’s what I am going to discuss with him.’

  ‘Well, I hope you remember to.’

  9

  Rocq arrived at work on the Monday morning late and exhausted, having dropped Theo Barbiero-Ruche at Heathrow airport at eight and subsequently been stuck two hours in a jam on the Hammersmith Flyover behind a jack-knifed lorry. His weekend had been spent playing golf with Theo, drinking and discussing coffee into the small hours of each night and lying awake, trying to avoid listening to the fat Italian copulating with the sparrow-like Deirdre until dawn.

  He put his briefcase down under his desk, nodded at Henry Mozer and Gary Slivitz who were busy trying to extricate a large number of their clients out of a £20 drop in zinc over the weekend and into a rapidly improving silver market, ignored the frantically flashing lights on his own switchboard and went out, and down to the next floor, the Soft Commodities department.

  From the way the brokers and other staff were sitting, idly chatting,it had been a quiet weekend for their business. He sat down in an empty chair next to his one chum in this department, the Honourable James Rice. ‘Morning Jimbo,’ he said.

  ‘Well, well, Rocky,’ said Rice. ‘What’s up? Metals finally gone through the floor?’ He guffawed at his own joke.

  ‘Might have you a client, Jimbo.’

  ‘Sensible, Rocky. This is the best place for any client – I mean, who the hell wants metal? Can’t eat the bloody stuff.’

  In spite of his frivolous conversation, Rice was the most successful soft commodities broker in Globalex. He was the only other broker in the entire firm whose commissions nearly rivalled Rocq’s and, accordingly, just about the only other broker who was ever genuinely friendly towards Rocq.

  ‘What do you reckon on coffee at the moment, Jimbo?’

  Rice looked at him. ‘Want a cup?’

  Rocq grinned. ‘Bit more than that.’

  Rice shrugged. ‘I’d go sugar at the moment. You can buy it at £160 – it’ll be £180 by the end of the week.’

  Rocq shook his head. ‘I’ve heard that there might be a coffee shortage – coffee rust?’

  Rice seemed cagey to Rocq. ‘Who’s your source?’

  ‘The man who punches the holes in tea bags.’

  ‘Maybe I should meet him; he’s got his snout in the right trough. There is talk of serious coffee rust in South America – could hit the crops badly in the next few weeks – but it’s very closely guarded talk. Problem is, coffee’s already very high – been high for two years now, and the high prices have hit the consumers. Result – demand’s gone down – and is still falling. I think the prices are due for a major tumble, and the rust’ll hold them upr
ight – but no more.’

  ‘I think you’re bullshitting, Rice.’

  Rice grinned.

  ‘I think you’ve got a fat one you’re keeping for your favourites, and you don’t want Uncle Rocky to get a look-in and set the market stampeding.’

  ‘Tell me your source, and I’ll flog you some beans.’

  ‘Up yours.’ Rocq stood up. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ He began to walk out of the room.

  ‘Hey Rocky,’ shouted Rice, ‘cash only – no cheques.’

  ‘Relax – I’ve got American Express.’

  ‘I’m sure that will do nicely.’

  Rocq had a 12.30 appointment with his own personal bank manager. The appointment was not in the bank, but in the Halls’ Well Dining Club. Somewhere between his fourth glass of Chateau Palmer ’62, and his third snifter of Hine ’47, the bank manager agreed to loan Alexander Rocq £110,000 for three months, at fifteen and one quarter per cent. This was to be secured by a charge on Rocq’s cottage at Clayton and on that part of his apartment in Redcliffe Square that the Bradford and Bingley Building Society did not own; and by a lien on his £32,000 worth of Porsche, and custody of the certificates for £10,000 worth of ordinary shares spread between Great Universal Stores, Valor, British National Oil Company, Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust, Moss Bros and Conrans, together with stock transfer forms. With the exception of two white gold crowns in his teeth, £300 of Piaget watch, five pairs of Gucci shoes, an assortment of Louis Feraud and Yves Saint Laurent suits, jackets and trousers, several dozen Turnbull and Asser shirts, twenty-six pairs of Henry Burton of Glasgow socks and a motley assortment of furniture, artefacts and inessential trappings, Alex Rocq had hocked his entire worldly goods.