“No, Raz, I don’t want to be involved in any of this. I’m only here to find Annaliese Craig. I thought she would be here tonight. I have no idea what the two of you have been involved in, and I don’t care. I don’t know anything about anything else. If either of you know where she is, just tell me and I’ll disappear. You two can figure the rest of this out without me. Please, I swear to you, I will forget everything I’ve seen here tonight. I will never tell a soul about any of this. I just want to find Annie and get out of here.”
At that, Raz couldn’t help but laugh. The thought of Jeffrey Hunter doing anything at all except exactly what he should do in every situation was humorous.
“Right, Jeffrey. You want me to trust you to keep quiet about the biggest terrorist hit on Britain in history. That sounds exactly like something you would do. There is no way you could ever keep your mouth shut. I can’t trust you or that bitch down below either. I’ve already killed one of my friends this week, I guess I can kill a couple more.”
Jeffrey’s blood ran cold. He now understood it all. The terrorist attack, his former friends’ involvement, the cold-blooded murder of his good friend Andrew, and now the realization that it was all just a part of a much broader conspiracy; A devious plan to kill hundreds of innocent people just to put millions of dollars into the coffers of a handful of evil men. And now, he realized he was on the verge of being the latest victim of the conspiracy to murder for money as well. Terror and panic began to take hold as he realized Rasul had every intention of killing him right here and now.
“Your friend Annie is sitting down in the tunnel right now alone, in the pitch black. She’s not alone though. There’s our friend Akeem with her, but I’m afraid he probably can’t be of much help right now, as he is most assuredly dead. And then of course there are a few thousand hungry rats. They’ll find her soon enough. I’m thinking the best way to deal with both of you is to give her a little company down there. So let’s move.”
With that, Rasul pulled open the heavy metal door on the floor, and for the first time Jorge and Jeffrey realized what he meant. They too were familiar with the tunnels under Paris, as everyone was. But like most Parisians, they thought that random entry points like this had been sealed up and lost track of decades ago. Rasul waved the barrel of the gun, motioning for them to proceed in front of him.
“If you try anything at the bottom of this ladder, the next flash of light you see will be coming from the end of this AK-47. The nice thing about this gun is, you don’t have to aim very well to get the job done.”
Jorge entered the shaft first, with Jeffrey right behind him, moving rung by rung down the old metal ladder. Jeffrey had already decided that he wasn’t going to make this easy for Rasul. He intended to cut and run as soon as they hit the bottom. Rasul would fire on them, but at least they would have a small chance of surviving. At least one of them was bound to be hit, but even if their chances were just 50/50, it was better than facing certain death at the end of the AK-47, or being left as dinner for the legion of rats swarming the tunnels.
As soon as Jeffrey heard Jorge’s feet hit the solid floor of the tunnel, he could hear him shuffling in the dirt. Was he running? It didn’t sound like it. Jeffrey had already decided that he wasn’t going to stand around waiting to see what happened, as soon as he landed, he would move silently away in the dark, hoping he could clear some distance undetected and get his bearings which way he could run, and then he would make a hard break for escape.
As soon as Jeffrey’s feet hit dirt, he quietly stepped backward, preparing to make his run in the dark. He was peering into the blackness in every direction, trying to let his eyes gather any available light and get oriented. He watched as Rasul’s lower body dropped the last few feet, gun already in position, ready to fire at them both.
Jeffrey stepped quietly back another few steps, three, four, five, six, and in an instant, he pivoted and sprinted wildly into the pitch black of the tunnel. He had no way of knowing where he was running, or even if he was about to slam into a wall. He was just running with all the adrenaline and power he had left in him, running to save his own life.
He ran so fast and furiously, it was at least thirty seconds before it dawned on him that no one was firing at him. In fact, no one even seemed to be chasing him. There was no sound of the AK-47’s ricochet of bullets, no flash of light, no yelling, in fact, no sound whatsoever. There was just silence, and the sound of water trickling down the tunnel.
Once he scraped along the wall of the tunnel and realized he’d rounded a bend, Jeffrey stopped running dead in his tracks. He stood stock still, waiting on a noise, any noise. Where was the gun? Where was Rasul? Why wasn’t he being pursued?
Peering back around the curve of the tunnel’s wall, Jeffrey could make out two figures positioned below the circle of light radiating from the shaft that led up to the church. One figure lay crumpled on the floor of the tunnel, and one stood over him. Staring at the scene, Jeffrey realized that the figure lying prostrate on the floor was Rasul, and the larger man standing over him was Jorge. Trusting his gut, Jeffrey slowly made his way back to the shaft, back to where Jorge stood over Rasul, but ready to cut and run again at any moment.
Approaching the scene, Jeffrey called out to his former friend.
“Jorge? Is he dead? What the hell happened?”
For a moment, Jeffrey thought he was seeing things. Jorge just looked up at him, with a huge grin on his face. He looked like a kid, happy with something he’d just done. Jeffrey moved closer still, until he was standing in the same circle of light with Rasul, still lying motionless on the muddy floor, with blood oozing from a large cut just above his left eye. Jorge, still smiling ear to ear, was standing over him.
“He’s out cold. I think his face may be broken too” Jorge said through his grin.
“What? How? What happened to the gun?!”
And then Jeffrey saw it, a solid brass sphere lying next to Rasul’s head.
“Yeah, he didn’t see it coming. I figured the two of us didn’t stand much of a chance against that AK-47, but if you can’t see a brass ball coming at you at 94 mph, I figured we might have a chance.”
Jeffrey blinked in the half light. So that was it. Jorge took him out with a brass fast ball. Picking up the brass sphere, he recognized it as one of the items that had been lying on the altar in the little chapel above. It looked like it was used for burning incense or something. Jorge must have scooped it up at some point in the chaos upstairs. Jeffrey remembered the stories he’d heard back at Oxford of Jorge’s glory days, but he’d never considered the fact that a ball hurtling at 94 mph could literally be a lethal weapon. It turned out Jorge was pretty resourceful after all.
Standing there in disbelief, trying to make sense of what had just happened, he heard Annie yell from several hundred meters down the tunnel in the opposite direction. Without pausing to consider Jorge’s involvement, or what might happen next, Jeffrey shot off down the tunnel to find Annie.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Jeffrey folded the newspaper and dropped it on his desktop in his office at #10 Downing, letting the large, bold headline lay face up in the middle of his desk. He stared at the words, and perhaps for the first time in the last dizzying week, took in the immense big picture of what he had helped uncover:
GLOBAL TERROR AND CURRENCY MANIPULATION SCHEME TRACED TO OXFORD CONSPIRACY RING
There, splattered across the top of the page, above the lead story and associated supporting reports, was a horizontal lineup of large, full-color pictures of Jeffrey, and most of his closest college friends: Andrew Bolling, Rasul Aziz, Fletcher LaForge, Charlie Turner, and Jorge Morales. Thankfully, they had not printed a picture of the Prime Minister along with the conspirators. It was bad enough the P.M. was already linked with them by former association, the last thing they needed was pictures to cement his link to the deadly criminal conspiracy.
The newspaper had gotten all the details largely right. The conspiracy was born
out of a group of brilliant, yet overly privileged, greedy and ruthless college friends. Led by their former professor, Fletcher LaForge, the group had started out as rookie day traders, earning pocket money to fund their college partying. Turner, Morales, Aziz, and LaForge had initially learned the ropes of making money off of minor blips in the routine currency valuations of the British Pound, the Euro, and even the American Dollar. Over the years, they had done their research and figured out how the largest currency fluctuations were always one of the first and fastest after-shocks of a terrorist attack. Investors who just happened to have their money situated in exactly the right position would recognize enormous profits from these seemingly random acts of terror. They realized that if say, your money was parked in an asset denominated in Euros, and then there was an explosion at a European soccer match, the Euro would nosedive, and then recover a few days or weeks later. There were enormous profits to be made in the fluctuation.
But then they took their investment scheme to the next unimaginably depraved level. The nefarious group realized they could reap huge profits by taking the “random” out of the equation. They began orchestrating these profit opportunities by masterminding and instigating these supposed “random acts of terror.” Once they realized how fundamentally simple and uncomplicated their schemes could be, and how relatively easy it was to get away with it, all hell had broken loose. Over the years, untold hundreds of innocent people had lost their lives, all in service to their greedy, wicked and coldblooded profit-generating strategy. They attributed the success of their ruthless plan to their self-supposed brilliance and resourcefulness, and arrogantly began referring to it as The Cornmarket Conspiracy, after the street where their scheme was first launched back in Oxford.
LaForge had always been the ringleader and ultimate insider of the group. He masterminded the hits, and as Assistant National Security Advisor, he knew where and when it would be easiest to strike. He was intimately familiar with the security operations of Britain and where their vulnerabilities could most easily be breached. His access to the vast security operations of the country left ample targets open and unguarded, securing the success of their malicious strategies.
Charlie Turner was the money guy, handling the strategic investments and profits through an intricate network of off-shore accounts and foreign trading companies. Cornmarket Holdings, named after their beloved street in Oxford where they had all been roommates at one time or another, handled most of the trades from its off-shore location in Georgetown, Grand Cayman, and then their individual profits would be distributed to their personal accounts hidden in tax havens all over the globe.
Turner’s position on Wall Street gave him the perfect cover and afforded him access to information that made trading in the clandestine network of off-shore accounts easy and accessible. He handled all the money, and utilized his buddy Jorge Morales for most of the legwork and small tasks. Jorge wasn’t the smartest of the group, or at least that’s what Charlie had thought, but he could be counted on to do as he was told. Or at least that’s what Charlie and the group believed. It had turned out to be their biggest miscalculation.
Rasul had started out as the ideal guy for the front lines and the heavy-duty dirty work. Although he was never a true believer in the radicalism that drove most global terror rings, his access to the extremist networks that operated on the fringes of his Muslim neighborhood made him a perfect go-to guy to arrange the actual attacks. He was usually able to recruit volunteers for the actual attacks, promising money, and in some cases Paradise for them, along with a nice lump sum payment for their families. That’s where he had found and recruited Akeem, and a dozen more like him. But Rasul had never acted out of radicalism, or some misplaced ideology. Like LaForge, Charlie, and Jorge, he was strictly in it for the money. It had always been all about the money and the access it could buy. His plan had always been to spend a few years and amass a tidy fortune from their little conspiracy ring, and then to buy an elegant estate somewhere in the English countryside, where he would establish a family and buy his way into respectability. That was the endgame: Money, respectability, access — everything he had been eyeing since his days at Oxford.
And in the end, as the newspaper reports explained, money is what brought their downfall. Like most malicious conspirators, they eventually turned on each other. A group who operates on the core operating strategy that they will betray others for money, will eventually betray each other for the same greedy mentality.
Fletcher LaForge was sitting in a three by four-meter cell in central London, awaiting indictment in front of the English Court. He would likely face a life sentence under the British 2006 Terrorism Act. Charlie Turner was being held in Federal Prison in New York. He had been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder, money laundering, and a host of other capital crimes. Unfortunately for him, the United States has capital punishment, which means he would almost certainly face a death gurney in twenty years, after his court-appointed attorney ran out of Hail Marys on his behalf.
Rasul Aziz was being held in a French prison awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom. As the main perpetrator of the Chunnel Train Bombing, he would receive the maximum sentence allowed in the United Kingdom and in France for murder: life imprisonment, with no chance of parole. In the meantime, the stitches across his eye socket would provide a daily and permanent reminder of the brass incense Thurible that came hurtling through the dark at his head at 94 mph. Jorge had been right; Rasul never did see it coming.
Annie had already turned in her resignation. Jeffrey had tried to refuse it, but they both knew that it was what was best for both her and for the administration. No matter how innocent she was in the scandal, no matter how much she had suffered, and no matter how valuable she had been to Jeffrey, the scandal was too great to be linked to the administration. Her role, no matter how unintentional, was still too large to be ignored. Besides that, she realized that if she were to save what was left of her life, she would have to leave and make a fresh start on her marriage. She wanted to move on, and who could blame her.
She and Richard had already taken a cottage in the Cotswolds, far from London and the wreck she had made of her life. She was looking forward to getting away from the city, and the memories and mistakes she had made there. Even after the entire sordid mess had come out during the investigation and was printed in the papers, Richard had loved her, and stuck by her. She was ready to move on, and a new life, and a new baby were perhaps the best way to get started on that.
As for Jorge, he ended up better off than most of his co-conspirators in the whole ordeal. After Jeffrey had found Annie deep in the tunnel that night, and helped free her from the chain, they had returned to the bottom of the tunnel entry shaft to find Jorge long gone. He had escaped up through the ladder shaft, but had left the trap door at the top wide open for him and Annie to escape. It was a sign that let Jeffrey know that Jorge would no longer be a threat to him or anyone else.
Jorge was apprehended soon after, trying to board a plane back to New York that very same night. Leveraging his extensive knowledge of the entire plan along with details about the financial machinations that had fed the greedy motives of the group, Jorge fared better than most. Given his willingness to talk and reveal everything he knew, his lawyers had hammered out a deal to trade his testimony against all of his former accomplices in the conspiracy, for a sentence of life imprisonment. He would be required to serve at least thirty years before there would be any possibility of parole for his part in the scheme.
Jorge would be going away to federal prison for at least three decades, but word was that he was finally happy. As a part of his deal, at his insistence, he had secured an agreement that his incarceration would include ample time working with Juvenile offenders, teaching them baseball skills and managing their prison team. Baseball had given him a shot at life, and he had thrown it away. But maybe he could help others, boys who were like him twenty years ago. He had finally found his life’s work, even if
it meant fulfilling it behind bars for most of the rest of his life.
***
Jeffrey got up from his desk, and checked himself in the mirror that was affixed to the back of the door of his coat closet. It had been five weeks since that night in the Parisian tunnels, and Jeffrey was finally putting his life back in order as well. Now that John O’Leary and MI6 announced this morning that they had completed their work and were closing the investigation, there was one more press conference to be conducted to answer final questions surrounding the case. Jeffrey hated the thought of facing the news cameras again about this personally painful and still raw chapter in his life, but his job required it. What’s more, he owed it to Andrew to help clear his name and see justice through to the end.
Wellington would exit his office any moment, ready to face the cameras, and Jeffrey had to be ready to stand with him. No doubt the majority of the questions would be directed at him, given his direct involvement with the arrests in Paris. Jeffrey had steeled himself for the reporter’s interrogations to come. He knew some would try and use his connections to the killers against the administration, but he knew that in the end, his only crime had been in trusting the wrong people. And that fact, he would regret for the rest of his life.
As for his job at #10 Downing Street, Jeffrey wasn’t sure how much longer he could do this. He and Wellington had accomplished so much, and he was proud of their work. They had helped usher Britain into unprecedented reforms in growing the British economy, guaranteeing the rights and security of British citizens, and helping secure Britain’s future in an increasingly dangerous and challenging world. But Wellington had no intention of stepping down now, and he would need Jeffrey there to help guide the administration and its goals into the future.
The Cornmarket Conspiracy Page 23