Billionaire

by Peter James

  He passed a garage, but decided not to risk stopping; with all its dents, the car looked much too conspicuous.

  He drove out of Riddes; a number of people, mainly children, shouted to each other and pointed at the smashed-in side of the car. He decided it would not be wise to stay in the car longer than was absolutely necessary and, when he came down into Martigny, he abandoned it in the first empty parking bay he saw, and took a taxi to Geneva Airport.

  It was not until the Caravelle was airborne that Rocq began to unwind a little. He was still trembling, and wasn’t sure whether it was fear or rage. He ordered a Bloody Mary from the stewardess and then sat back to try and think clearly.

  It was possible that it had been mistaken identity, but he discounted that. Four people knew he was going to Verbier: Elleck, Theo, Amanda and the avocat. Amanda he could discount. Which left three. Had he perhaps been conned into signing his life away to Theo and the avocat? Possibly, but he couldn’t believe his Italian friend was ruthless enough to have anyone murdered. There was only one person that he knew who he believed could be capable of murdering, or of having people murdered: Elleck. And yet, that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t even begun the buying yet for Elleck’s syndicate, and Elleck could hardly think it worthwhile having him bumped off just for his signatures – unless there was some immensely clever stunt Elleck had pulled; but he doubted it. He thought about the syndicate. Elleck had said little to him about his partners, but in Rocq’s view, any syndicate that was capable of setting off a chain of events that could, as Elleck had said, bring the world to the brink of war, was more than capable of ordering the bumping off of one solitary metal broker.

  Rocq’s drink arrived; he put it down on the table and stirred it slowly, then took a large sip. There was something going on with this syndicate, he decided, that Elleck hadn’t mentioned. There were three reasons, he decided, why he might not have mentioned it: because he didn’t want Rocq to know; because he had forgotten; or because he himself did not know.

  No one had ever tried to kill Rocq before, and he didn’t like the feeling one bit. Warning bells were ringing inside him, based on a cross between a hunch and the influence of many books he had read and films he had seen, that, having tried once and failed, whoever it was would almost certainly be going to try again. The two men in the Range Rover were almost certainly dead. News of their deaths would not filter back to whoever had given them their instructions for several hours, at the very earliest. During that time, it would be presumed that they had succeeded and that Rocq was dead. He decided it would be tomorrow, at the earliest, before they came looking for him again. By then, he intended to have wrung the truth out of Monty Elleck’s fat little neck.

  28

  The Monday following Rocq’s trip to Geneva was a blazing hot summer’s day, without exception right across Europe. There was plenty to do for the estate workers at Chateau Lasserre and it was this, coupled with the general feeling of lethargy that the heat brought about, combined with the thick summer foliage, that enabled the two men at the edge of the dense L-shaped forest, to work quietly and unspotted.

  The men had in the woods two large reels, around which were wound lengths of wire flex and to which were attached, at twenty-foot intervals, light bulb sockets. Alongside the edge of the trees, so close that many of the sockets almost nestled against the roots, they laid one wire, 600 metres long and coming to a halt just in front of the L-part of the forest. As they unwound the wire, they placed a 150-watt light bulb into each socket.

  When they had laid the full length, they repeated the process with the second wire, laying the trail of lights parallel, twenty feet apart. Then they connected the ends of the two wires into a junction box and connected that into the mains electricity supply of Chateau Lasserre, via a power cable that traversed the estate. When they had finished, it was seven o’clock in the evening.

  Eight hundred kilometres away, in Switzerland, Viscomte Lasserre and Jimmy Culundis waited their turn on the Eighteenth green at Crans Montana Golf Club. The Viscomte was looking grim. He had lost the game at the Eleventh, and he was now one down on the bye; the best he could hope for was to halve it. The foursome in front of them appeared to be inspecting the borrow of every blade of grass. Lasserre was anxious to finish as he had a long flight back home, and unlike the Greek, he did not have the luxury of a personal private pilot.

  ‘Tell me, Claude,’ said Culundis, ‘you are really sure you trust that man Elleck?’

  ‘Jimmy – I am not going to risk 500 million francs of my own money on someone I don’t trust. He knows best – because he is the best.’ He leaned over towards Culundis conspiratorially. ‘I am reliably informed that he has investment portfolios for many of the English Royal Family.’

  ‘So what does that signify?’

  ‘It signifies, Jimmy, that he is a man who can be trusted.’

  Culundis grunted. ‘I wonder what’s happened to the gold price this afternoon? He told you it was going down today; well, by lunch time it was up to $650 – it closed Friday at $625. In my language that’s up, not down.’

  Lasserre nodded. ‘Look at those people,’ he said, almost exasperated. The four players had placed ball-markers down, and were now cleaning their balls and arguing about something at the same time. He turned to Culundis. ‘He assured me he would buy today – regardless of what happened.’

  ‘If he had bought last week, at four hundred and ninety-four, do you realize how much we would have made? We wouldn’t have needed this whole damned business with Amnah.’

  ‘If we could foretell what was going to happen in the markets, we’d be playing with gold golf balls, Jimmy.’

  ‘It doesn’t look good, Claude; I don’t like it. I think it’s Elleck who has caused this price rise. Look, it’s just too much coincidence: except in the Osirak crisis, the gold price does not move for eighteen months; then, the week we talk with him about doing something about it – bang – it goes through the roof. Surely to God, that is a little strange?’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Jimmy – you want to pull out?’

  ‘I think we’re crazy to stay in – we’re being taken for the biggest ride of our lives.’

  ‘Look at him,’ shouted Lasserre in frustration. ‘A ten-centimetre putt – how can anyone miss a ten-centimetre putt? I shall have him thrown out of this club!’

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Claude?’

  ‘Sure, I heard. What are you going to do with your 100 Israeli sailors that are sitting this moment in the docks at Al Suttoh?’

  ‘Who gives a shit about them? Take them out and drown them – or give them back. What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters a lot, Jimmy. I need that money; we have planned this carefully, it is all going according to plan. Why the hell should we pull out now?’

  ‘The plan was to force up the price of gold and make a killing. Someone – or something – has already forced the price up, and you and I are not on that boat – although I’ll bet your friend, Mr Elleck, is.’

  ‘I think you have something personal against Monty.’

  Culundis glared at him.

  ‘So gold has risen $156. When Israel announces she is going to block the Persian Gulf, you think it’s not going to rise any more? The world has gone gold-mad this week – Mon Dieu, Jimmy, are you going senile? When Israel announces her intentions, you know what is going to happen? I’ll tell you: Gold is going to go not to one thousand, but to two thousand!’

  The foursome finally plopped their last ball into the hole and moved off the green. Culundis took his nine-iron and bent over his ball. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he said. He swung at the ball and it dropped to a halt less than six inches from the hole. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Shot,’ said Lasserre, grudgingly.

  Lasserre took his own nine-iron, and swung; the ball dropped short of the green into a bunker. Culundis looked at him quizzically: ‘Want to bother to putt out?’

  Lasserre shook h
is head. ‘I concede – well played.’

  They walked to the green and collected their balls and then walked towards the Clubhouse. ‘You played very well today – better than ever.’

  The Greek shrugged his shoulders, and spat out a mouthful of phlegm in full view of the Club Secretariat and about ten other members. Lasserre winced as a battery of dubious frowns greeted them at the Nineteenth hole.

  ‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ said the Greek.

  Lasserre looked at his Tissot watch. ‘Just a Perrier and a coffee.’

  ‘You really have to get back tonight? Why don’t we have dinner and both leave in the morning?’

  ‘I have to be in Limoges tomorrow at nine – and I don’t want to have to get up at five. You’re okay, you have your own pilot. You can go to sleep in your plane – I have to fly myself.’

  ‘Claude,’ said Culundis, ‘you know – you are so poor, I feel so sorry for you. Seventeen generations of Lasserres, and what you got to show for it? A few acres of piss and a lousy golf swing.’

  Lasserre grinned. ‘Just you better watch out next month when we play – you’d better bring plenty of money.’

  ‘Why – you going to have golf lessons?’

  ‘No – I’m going to give you one.’

  At ten o’clock, Viscomte Lasserre looked down from the cockpit of his Piper Navajo at the lights of Bergerac, cut back the throttle and began his descent. It was a crystal clear night, and he had navigated visually the whole way from Sion Airport – it was a route he knew almost with his eyes shut. He stared at a point in the darkness about ten miles beyond Bergerac, leaned forward and pushed a button at the top of the instrument panel; within a fraction of a second, the lights of a runway appeared in the darkness. He smiled to himself; his new radio-controlled switch system worked well.

  There was no wind tonight, so he could go straight down from this direction. Ahead of him, he could make out some of the rooms of the chateau. His height dropped to 1,000 feet, then 900; he checked the airspeed, lowered a little more flap, corrected a yaw. Funny, he thought, the runway seemed a fraction further from the house than usual. He decided he must be more tired than he realized. He pressed the undercarriage button and felt the clunk of the three wheels locking; the three green lights on the instrument panel showed him they had locked safely into place.

  He lined the aircraft up exactly on the centre of the runway and pushed the throttle lever further in; he gave a little more flap and eased the throttle a fraction further, until he was happy with his approach.

  The altimeter read 200, 150, 100; he was almost onto the runway, still perhaps a fraction high. He pulled the nose up and gave still more flap, and they began to drop a fraction faster. Now he was completely satisfied. The altimeter read fifty, then something, something he knew was not right: the huge shadows to his right. ‘It couldn’t be! – impossible –’ Before he had time to think further, the right-hand wing of the Piper ripped into the pine trees, and snapped off halfway down. The plane dropped onto its starboard side, hit the grass with the stump of the wing tip from which petrol was gushing, and cartwheeled at eighty miles an hour towards the trees. It slammed into a clump of six trees close together and exploded on impact, setting the whole forest on fire. Somewhere, still strapped in his seat in the midst of the blazing mess, remained the seventeenth Viscomte Lasserre.

  29

  At about the same time as the forest on the Chateau Lasserre estate began to burn, Jimmy Culundis’s DC-8 touched down at Athens Airport. Thirty minutes later, his helicopter landed on the lawn of his house, in the hills, overlooking the fishing village where he was born.

  The children had gone to bed, but his wife, Ariane, was up and had dinner prepared for him. She poured him a glass of wine and sat down at the table with him, but he wasn’t talkative.

  ‘How was your game?’ she asked.

  ‘It was good – I won – how about that, hey?’

  She smiled. She had met Lasserre when he had been to her house. Such an impressive man. She still could not get used to the fact that her husband lived all his working life, and much of his private life, in the company of the rich and, frequently, the famous. Lasserre was a Viscomte: she wasn’t clear what a Viscomte was, but she was profoundly impressed that a Viscomte had deigned to visit her home. Now she was even more impressed that her husband, a simple Greek fisherman, had managed to beat a Viscomte at golf.

  Culundis lapsed into silence and munched his way through his salad, occasionally stopping to swill down a mouthful of the cold wine.

  ‘You must be tired,’ she said.

  ‘No – not really – I have some problems on my mind. I’m okay.’ He smiled reassuringly and she sat for the rest of the time in silence, while he ate.

  Culundis churned over in his mind the events of the past few weeks. Something was worrying him a lot, and he wasn’t sure what it was. He was certain they were being screwed by Elleck and if he found that was the case, then Elleck would be a sorry man, a very sorry man indeed.

  He went through the operation in his mind: everything was in place. The 100 Israeli sailors there, in secret. They were happy. They had been briefed by Ephraim that they were on a top-secret mission and had to follow orders either from him or from Hamid Assan, Culundis’s chief of staff in Amnah. Culundis had picked an Arab as his chief of staff for many reasons, the most important of which was in order to be sure of a rapport with the Emir’s own armed forces. The nuclear mines were all in place too, in the warehouse, ready to be loaded. Steaming towards the Gulf, under remote control, at this very moment, was the SS Arctic Sundance, with a twenty-kiloton nuclear explosive charge taped to the inside of her oil-storage tank. On Thursday night, as she started the run up towards the Strait of Hormuz, her crew would leave by helicopter; Friday morning, as she entered the Strait, in full view of the Omani coastguard, and programmed by her computerized auto-pilot not to be within ten miles of any other ship, the charge would detonate, reducing the SS Arctic Sundance into tiny slivers of metal and glass.

  Within ten minutes of the detonation, a message would be sent, direct from the Knesset, to every Head of State in the world. The message would state that Israel had taken command of Umm Al Amnah, and from Amnah it had organized the mining, with nuclear mines, of the Strait of Hormuz. The mines would be difficult to locate, and impossible to defuse if found. No mention of the quantity of mines would be given. The message would continue that only Israel knew the position of the mines and the signal that could defuse them; it would not make the Strait of Hormuz safe for shipping until new borders for Israel were agreed between Syria, Jordan and Egypt. These would be ratified by the signatures of the Governments of every major power in the world and, as security against a future break, all export oil revenues to every Arab country must be paid for a period of ten years, through the Israeli government. Culundis twiddled with his ear. After that, there would be no further demands by the syndicate on General Ephraim. Culundis wondered what kind of rumpus there would be in the Knesset when the Prime Minister learned of what had happened – that, unbeknown to him, the head of the Mossad had invaded and conquered another country and had blockaded the Persian Gulf. Israel would have egg on her face for months while the Prime Minister issued denials – which would not be believed, because of the actual presence of the Israeli sailors in Amnah. Maybe Lasserre was right, he thought. Regardless of what it was now, gold would go straight up through the heavens.

  Culundis smiled to himself at the thought of Emir Missh – that he had conquered the man’s country without his even knowing it. He would be mad, mad as hell, for no one would ever believe that he was not in complicity with the Israelis. All the Arab countries would turn against him, as would all the Western World. He was a weak man, thought Culundis, a feeble and weak man; his father, old Quozzohok, was better, he reflected – a tyrant, yes, but at least he had gumption. Culundis knew he could never have walked all over Umm Al Amnah if the old man had still been at the helm. He downed his wine glass,
smiled at his wife, and rose from the table.

  At four o’clock in the morning, the telephone by the bed rang; Culundis was awake in a second, apprehensive.

  ‘Culundis,’ he said.

  ‘It’s Hamid. I’m sorry to call you at this hour.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Culundis to Hamid Assan, his Chief of Staff in Amnah. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We’ve been flung out of Amnah.’

  ‘What?’ Culundis sat bolt upright in bed. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Every one of your soldiers has been rounded up, their weapons removed, and they have been put on a plane out of the country. I have to leave in one hour’s time myself.’

  ‘This is an outrage. What is Missh playing at?’

  ‘He has instructed me to telephone you to say that the services of you and your men are no longer required, and where would you like them delivered to?’

  Culundis sat in the bed, speechless, for nearly a minute. When he next spoke, he was nearly shouting: ‘Is Missh there? I must speak to him myself, at once.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is; I’m in Tunquit prison.’

  ‘Give me the number. I’m going to call you right back.’

  ‘Hold on – I will ask for it.’

  There was a pause and then Assan’s voice came back: ‘It’s Tunquit 448 – the Tunquit code is 62 – and the international code for Amnah is 010971.’

  ‘I must speak to Missh – then I will call you right back.’ Culundis hung up. Throughout the conversation, his wife hardly stirred. She was used to his telephone calls at strange hours of the night.

  He began to dial Missh’s private number at the Royal Palace in Tunquit, when the doorbell rang. Puzzled, he put the receiver down. After a few minutes, it rang again, a long positive ring. He wondered who on earth it could be, and looked at his gold Cartier: it was five past four. There was a night security guard on the gate – he would never let anyone past at this hour, and if he needed to speak to Culundis, there was an intercom system by which he could buzz the house. But this was the doorbell. Culundis was baffled; the telephone call from Hamid, followed by the doorbell ringing, was too much for him at this hour. Maybe the security guard needed to speak to him and the intercom was broken, he wondered.