Sam smiled again at the thought of how well his little assignment was going. Of course, he didn’t know the big picture of the whole plan — he never did — but he knew the operation was going well. That’s the way things usually worked. No one in their ad hoc organization ever explained exactly what was going down to him. He was a bit player and he knew it, but his post at MI6 was critical, and he enjoyed his little part in the larger plan. The money wasn’t bad either.
Hesam Sagar, or Sam as he went by now, had been recruited online months ago in a chatroom for Muslim singles for his current job. Although he was Muslim by birth, he didn’t care much for religion. He adhered to most Muslim customs for his family’s sake, but he wasn’t a true believer. The only thing he believed in was money. The man who recruited him for his current double life had promised him 20,000 English Pounds in exchange for some simple tasks. Nothing too strenuous, nothing too difficult. He simply had to follow directions, orchestrate a few situations, and coordinate some unfortunate deaths. He wasn’t crazy about the work, but the pay was excellent. All he had to do was follow directions.
So much of his work was still a mystery to him. He knew there were some heavy hitters masterminding some very big schemes in this organization, but who was behind all the activity, and what their primary motivation was still was not clear to him. What’s more, how he’d wound up in his current position at MI6 was still a mystery to him as well. Two years ago, he had been just a low-level clerk in Britain’s foremost spy agency, when he first joined a new website, ‘Muslim Mingle,’ looking for a girlfriend.
He met Naim, a beautiful dark-eyed girl from East London, right away. Hesam fell hard and fast for her. After only a couple of dates, Naim started talking a lot about politics, and how Muslims weren’t treated right in English society. Sam didn’t care much about the issues, but he played along if it meant spending more time with Naim. Soon, she introduced Sam to her brother, Rasul Aziz who lived in Paris and was a member of a loose network of criminals who did low level jobs like car thefts, burglaries, and some jobs that entailed acting as a courier for items he knew nothing about. He began earning some serious money by helping out and participating in the petty crimes around London. Soon though, the group graduated to more serious activities, and Sam got deeper involved. A couple of times Sam was asked to ‘eliminate’ people — that’s what they called cold blooded murder — who were causing problems for the network. He did those jobs too, but didn’t like it much. Sam knew better than to ask a lot of questions. He just worked for the money and kept his head down.
Sam was heartbroken when Naim broke up with him just a couple of months later, but by then he was a full fledge member of the network. About that time, the network started asking Sam to do tasks related to his job at MI6. In the beginning, he just provided information to Rasul, who passed it along to others that Sam never met. But in the last couple of months, Sam could tell something larger was going down, and his role had been increased dramatically. His last cash payment was for €20,000, and he was expecting much more after orchestrating Jennifer’s little drowning accident in Paris. His plan was to work another six months or so for the network, and then he’d make his exit from both of his jobs. He appreciated the money, but even Sam knew this was a dangerous business, populated by dangerous people. He wanted to get out before he wound up at the bottom of some French canal himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Rasul’s head was pounding. The right side of his chest was throbbing with pain. He needed food and a place to rest, his body still reeling from the loss of blood. Rummaging through the desk drawers in the dirty groundskeeper’s shed he found a granola bar with an expiration date of two years ago and a candy bar of indeterminate vintage. He ate both, and found a faucet and water hose outside that afforded him a long drink of water. Raising his borrowed scrubs, and pulling back the bandages, he inspected the stiches on the right side of his chest. There were twenty-one stiches by his count, all neat and tidy in a row, but Raz could see a bit of fresh blood oozing from the end of the incision. Raz was pretty sure walking around town just a few hours after being shot and having surgery to remove the bullet was not what the doctor ordered. The last thing he wanted was to pass out in this dirty shed. He decided he’d better find somewhere to rest and recover for a couple of days. Once he was in better shape, he would have to figure out a way to get back to Paris, to some kind of protection, and far away from whoever was trying to take him out.
With sugar from the candy bar giving him a bit of new energy, Raz decided he’d better get off the golf course before the sun came up and some eager early morning golfers stumbled upon a half dressed man with obvious injuries holed up in the groundkeeper’s shed of the esteemed Oxford Golf Club. Shuffling across the greens in the early morning light, he decided that he needed to avoid the hospital area at all costs. He headed southwest away from the Golf Club, weaving his way through small residential streets, crossed the Thames on a well-traveled bridge, and then made his way back into Oxford proper on the A4144. Buttoning the stolen sweater up high on his chest, he tried to give the air of a gentleman out for a brisk morning walk. Underneath his sweater, however, the stitches had begun to pull and hurt, and he imagined his chest opening up at any minute and blood gushing from the deep wound. He couldn’t go much further. But where in the hell could he go?
With each step, the dream-like sequence played out in his mind over and over: The image of the ghost man, with his white robes waving in the breeze as he darted away, looking back at his victim as he lay dying on the sidewalk in front of the train station. In an instant, almost before he comprehended that he’d been shot, Raz realized that the ghost man was not blind at all. He replayed the image of the ghost man’s eyes scanning the scene of his crime, confirming the kill he’d just accomplished. He remembered the look of bemusement and satisfaction on his face: A job well done, he’d thought.
Raz knew of course, that he could not go back to the Islamic Center. It was they who had tried to kill him. But why did they want him dead? He was a good soldier, always doing exactly as he was told. Hell, he had just helped to pull off one of the biggest terrorist attacks in world history. Delivering a lethal bomb that had killed hundreds of people, including one of the only real friends he ever had. And now they were trying to kill him too? He had turned his back on everything he had ever held dear to prove himself to these people — discarded his friends, his family, his beliefs, even his religion. And this is how they repaid him? What the hell was going on?
The questions reverberated through Rasul’s mind as he made his way back into town. He was careful to walk as naturally as possible, and did everything in his power to blend in with the crowd moving down the street. As he walked along, however, he could feel his head swimming again, and the stitches felt as though they were coming apart. He couldn’t go much further, he knew he had to find a place to rest, to recover for a few hours at least.
Instinctively, he turned down the one street in town he knew best, the wide avenue he’d known as home for most of his time at university. Making his way down Cornmarket Street, he quickly found his old building and this time, didn’t pause before pushing open the door on the street entrance. His energy quickly slipping away, Rasul struggled as pain darted from his chest with each step up the flight of stairs. At the top, he lightly tapped on the door that was so familiar to him. This time no one answered. With all the energy left in his body, Raz threw his weight against the old door. The flimsy lock gave way with just one hard shove, and the rickety door flung back on its hinges.
The room was dark and quiet, and Rasul quickly scanned the room for an inhabitant.
“Hello?” There was no response. “Hello? Anyone here?” There was no sign of the Indian student.
Raz stumbled into the front room and gave the bathroom and kitchen a quick check. The second bedroom appeared to be empty as well, save for the bare mattress, as it had been before. No lights were on, and no sign that anyone had been around recent
ly. Breathing a sigh of relief, he moved back into the bathroom and flipped on the light. Raising his stolen scrubs, he saw that the wound had indeed opened a few millimeters toward the edge, and blood was oozing out.
Raz found a faded washcloth under the sink and a bottle of alcohol. Dabbing the cloth on top of the bottle, he pressed the cloth against the incision. The sting of the alcohol on the incision was almost worse than the gunshot had been. He let out a howl of pain, and his head began to spin again. For a moment Rasul wondered if he might pass out.
Holding the cloth tight to his chest, he went into the kitchen and threw open the refrigerator. Inside was a virtual laboratory of bacterial species, covering everything from cheese, to old fruit and an indecipherable black blob that must have been some sort of meat. There were two beers and a bottle of water. He downed the water in one long gulp, and then opened one of the beers, sending it spewing all over the ceiling and across the counter. He drank the beer fast, letting the overflow spill down over his chin and dribble onto the floor. After he had finished them both off, he then let out a long burp, so loud he feared he might actually rouse the neighbors.
Making his way to the couch in the front room, he lay across it, and pulled a dingy blanket off of the back of the couch and yanked it over his legs. Still clutching the cover to his chest, he laid his head back on the armrest, and was out cold in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Charlie Turner stood at the window of his office in Hazelwood Tower and stared down at the people on the sidewalk, eighty-three stories below. They looked like ants. What’s more, they behaved like ants, Charlie thought to himself. Each ant just following another one in lines, moving off to do their work, coming home at the end of the day. Always just marching along, never questioning the meaning of it all, never questioning anything for that matter. Charlie wasn’t like that. He questioned everything. He was never content to just march along to the sound of some commanding drummer. Instead he was always looking for a shortcut, a way to outmaneuver the other guy, to grab the prize without playing by everyone else’s rules.
That’s how he wound up in this business. Both businesses, actually. His day job was a constant game to outsmart and outmaneuver the financial markets and profit off of unseen market forces. But that was just peanuts. The real money — and the real fun — was in his growing resume of “side projects”.
What started back on Cornmarket Street in Oxford as just a bunch of college guys making a few extra dollars doing day trading, had over the years morphed into a brilliant strategy for making millions of dollars off of the inevitable fluctuations of the investment markets. The key of course was knowing when those “inevitable fluctuations” were going to hit. Everyone knew, of course, that there were always instantaneous and dramatic — sometimes even devastating — market swings immediately following cataclysmic events. But the problem, of course, was knowing when and how to capitalize on those market fluctuations. That, of course, was the unknown variable. If he could just learn how to predict those pivotal events that drove the markets, he could practically mint money at will.
Had the original brainstorm for the idea been Charlie’s? Or was it Jorge’s or Rasul’s? Andrew had been involved in the beginning, when they were just learning the ropes of day trading. But Andrew wasn’t motivated by money and had moved on to his interests in politics and other pursuits long before their strategy morphed to controlling the events that affected the markets. Among the remaining three, there was constant debate about who actually came up with their unique spin on the original plan. But everyone agreed that it started the day back in college when one of their gang noticed how the value of the British Pound took a beating in the hours after an Irish Republican Army bomb blew up near London’s Canary Wharf, killing two people and doing extensive damage to the surrounding area.
During those days — often referred to the as “the Troubles” — the IRA was in an underground campaign to win Ireland’s independence from British Rule. The IRA was a Terrorist group by every definition, eventually causing the deaths of over fifty people in their thirty-year campaign. At its height, it was a guerilla war that utilized car bombings, assassinations, and explosions in public buildings and transportation routes. The IRA attacks sometimes came as frequently as monthly, or even weekly, and the little group of Oxford College buddies began to notice that market dips were often a direct result of the attacks. The bigger the hit, the bigger the market fluctuation.
At some point, one of the group jokingly suggested that they could make a lot more money if they could only predict the IRA hits. They all laughed, until somehow one day, after a few beers, they began to talk seriously about the idea. Of course, they had to leave Andrew out of their little scheme, even from the beginning. He was too honest, too scrupulous and honorable to ever consider making money off of tragedies that befell others — even early on when no one was getting hurt. It took a few years to really get the ball rolling, but that was the beginning of what Charlie considered to be their brilliant investment strategy. Kind of like minting money, he thought.
And that was how it all began. The Cornmarket Conspiracy, as their little group liked to call it — born right there in their little shared college flat on Cornmarket Street, an ingenious strategy for making money. Charlie loved the money, of course, but what he really loved was the feeling of outsmarting everyone else. That had been his lifelong pursuit, winning the game, at all costs. Now THAT was a reason to get up every morning.
Now it was Wednesday morning, three days since the train explosion in the English Channel Tunnel. Charlie looked at his watch… almost 9 a.m. The call from Raz had not come. He’d received the voice mail as soon as he got into his office that morning at 7:15 a.m., and had spent the last couple of hours distracted; trying to figure out why in the hell Rasul was trying to call him. Hell, how was Rasul even alive? He was supposed to have been taken care of by now. He was supposed to be dead. A non-issue. Somehow the plan had gone awry, and that made Charlie nervous. There were too many loose ends at this point, and Charlie didn’t like it.
Sliding both his personal and business phones into his jacket pockets, Charlie locked his office door and took the express elevator to the lobby. Out on the street, he walked a few dozen feet in the morning crowd, and then turned down an alley that he often used when he needed complete privacy for his phone calls. Secure in the narrow alley between two buildings, and out of the wind, Charlie pulled out his personal phone and dialed the London number he had memorized. As with all calls on this phone, Charlie had to remember and manually punch in each phone number — this phone had no contacts or phone numbers saved.
As expected, no one picked up, but the automated voice response politely asked that he leave a message.
“Yeah, this is Charlie. I received a voice mail early this morning from our French associate. What the hell is going on? I thought he was supposed to have been taken care of by now. We have too many loose cannons on deck. Call me back.”
Charlie stared at the dirty brick walls of the alley, letting his mind race with the permutations of all the possible outcomes of his current situation. He had a hell of a lot of money in the bank. Maybe he should just cut and run now. His passport was good; he would have no trouble getting out of the country. He could be on Grand Cayman by this afternoon if he left now. Or better yet, he could be in Switzerland by tomorrow morning. From Switzerland, he could be anywhere in the world in a couple of days. His condo in Phuket was situated only a stone’s throw from the beach in one of the most beautiful resorts on the small island off of Thailand. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the waves lapping against the beach and could almost smell the lemongrass and lime of Tom Yam Goong drifting up to his second-floor bedroom at the beachside condominium complex. For a moment, he was laying on his soft silk sheets, listening to the sound of the ocean through the trees. It was heaven.
With the blast of a taxi horn, Charlie was quickly back in the dirty alley off of Wall Street, th
e cold December air now whipping through the alley entrance and blowing his coat open, allowing the freezing air to chill him down to his soul. Right now, the world was a very cold place, and he was standing at its frozen core.
The reality was, he couldn’t go anywhere. He was the brains of this organization, or at least he liked to think he was, and he couldn’t go running off, chasing down loose ends that needed attention, right here on top of their biggest scheme ever. He whipped out his private phone again, and this time typed out a quick text to Jorge, still ensconced eighty-three stories up in Hazelwood Tower.
“Come meet me on the street for a quick conversation. I’m waiting now.” He pressed send and leaned back against the wall, away from the wind. Jorge had better get his ass down here fast.
Inside of three minutes, Charlie looked up to see his friend’s quizzical face peering down the alley. Standing up straight so as to be seen, he motioned for Jorge to join him. It had been a while since the two had met in this little dark alley. Their conversations about their side business usually took place in delis and at coffee counters, using code words and vague references, but today there was no room for vagaries or inferences. Charlie wanted to be crystal clear with his old pal, and there could be no miscommunication.
“What’s up Charlie?” Jorge said as he sauntered up. He was, as usual, clueless.
“We need to talk.” Charlie motioned Jorge to step back into the shadows behind a filthy dumpster.
“Okay, shoot,” Jorge said, with no indication of irony. Charlie rolled his eyes.
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