For the size of aircraft, the landing is surprisingly smooth. Whoever the pilots are, they really know their stuff. We land and I say goodbye to the girls and walk down a huge ramp at the rear of the aircraft that opens to let in the scorching, dry heat of summer on the Kazakh steppe.
I’m wearing Bermuda shorts and a floral Hawaiian shirt that I picked up somewhere on my travels, and as I see the welcoming committee lined up before me, I suddenly feel underdressed.
On one side of the ramp, Bang Bang Lee is standing with a line of extras from Kill Bill, all in their identical dark Armani suits with black ties and Ray-Bans.
On the other side, Rom Romanov is visibly suffering in the heat, huge and impassive, his unnaturally dark hair looking even more slicked back than usual. He’s wearing a crumpled sweat-stained grey suit whose tailor would no longer recognise it, his pale skin gleaming with a sheen of perspiration. Alongside him, his even huger bodyguards appear to be suffering more than their boss. I wonder if they were all flown out here in deep freeze units and have been awakened specially for me.
And then there are the others, the ones I never met first time round. There are South American types, Middle Easterners, Indians, more Chinese and, of course, Italians – easily the best dressed – plus a few I can’t place. They look as if they really shouldn’t all be together in one place and, if they are, then at least they shouldn’t be seen out in the open. Somewhere up there a satellite is wondering what on earth is happening.
I count nine private jets – in my banking days we called them smokers – lined up along the tarmac. No one else is in sight. No airport workers, ground staff, flight crews, just a long empty runway, hangars and a control tower, and us. Exclusive? It’s beyond platinum class.
Bang Bang steps forward, takes off his sunglasses and stretches his arms wide to embrace me.
‘Dave. It’s been a long time. But you’re looking good. Very good. Being dead obviously suited you.’
I smile and squeeze him tightly. ‘Me being alive is going to suit us all much better, believe me.’
INVESTMENT BANKERS are used to being persuasive. Being persuasive is actually our principal professional skill. Forget numbers. Juniors can do numbers, and juniors are a commodity that you can buy by the yard. Persuasiveness, on the other hand, generally has to be bespoke; you cannot commoditise it, and it requires wisdom, judgement and experience. Yeah, right. What I’m saying is that we’re ace bullshitters. It’s what we do.
So sitting at the head of a makeshift table in an aircraft hangar, staring at a bunch of sceptical faces owned by some of the world’s most successful – and therefore ruthless – criminals, without even the benefit of some Powerpoint bullshit to hide behind, doesn’t faze me at all. In fact, I love it so much I can feel something starting to run through my veins that hasn’t been there for a while – something that doesn’t come in tablet form, powder or a syringe.
‘Gentlemen – we left the table too soon. We made out like bandits,’ I glance quickly around the table, ‘if you’ll forgive the term, when markets fell and we were short. Governments reacted as we thought they would, panicking, unable to respond in Wall Street time rather than Whitehall time. Or, even worse, Brussels and Washington time. And what they did do was too late and only fed the beast they were trying to tame. We cleaned up. It was wonderful.’
At this point I’m touched when Rom starts clapping. It’s a little slow, as if he only manages it with a huge effort, and for a moment I think he’s taking the piss, but the others join in and clearly they are showing their appreciation.
‘Thank you.’ I nod gratefully. Always a good sign when your audience clap before the end. ‘But we chose that moment to close our positions, taking our profits and walking away.’
‘No one ever lost money taking a profit.’
It’s Carlos, a Venezuelan who I think bankrolls terrorists. Or maybe he’s the white slaver. Whatever. They were all introduced in one go and I’ve never been a great one for detail.
‘Absolutely right.’ I nod my strong agreement. ‘But we should have played the bounce. Not just closed the short, but bought the market and watched it go up as it recovered.’
‘But it didn’t recover.’ Carlos is clearly a market expert.
‘Correct again. Because we didn’t make it recover. It was ready. It was oversold. But everyone was sitting on their hands, scared shitless. We were the only ones in the know and we could have made the running. We could have called the market and made it happen. We could have been the market. If you have enough size on your side, weight of money alone will make you a winner. We had it and we could have used it, but we didn’t. We banked our profits and thought we’d done well. A few tens of billions between us. It was probably the stupidest thing we ever did. Gentlemen, we could have had more … an awful lot more.’
They’re looking thoughtful now. Amazing. These gangsters made vast fortunes but still it wasn’t enough. Worse than bankers.
‘And we still could. There’s still an opportunity. Markets are volatile, fragile, out of control. Governments are almost all in deficit, but some of them are cutting spending and scaring everyone that they’ll push the world into recession. While they’re doing that, others are printing money and pumping it into the economy in an attempt to get things going again – but risking their currencies and running up debts their grandchildren will still be paying. And everyone hates the banks. Bastards. Just because we were greedy, overpaid parasites who were running out of control. We had the party, but everyone else had the hangover. And now the politicians all want to go banker-bashing and the regulators are licking their lips and planning how to carve up the banks. I never did like regulators – little mean guys with no charisma who never got paid properly.’ I shrug and look helplessly at Carlos. ‘It’s a nightmare.’
‘But where does our profit come from?’
‘Oh, the profit? That’s easy.’ I scan the faces around the table. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ None of them wants to speak. They may have some thoughts, but none of them wants to look stupid in front of the others.
‘I go back. I return from the dead. I set up a fund to trade the markets again – a comeback fund, a salvation fund. Very high profile, because the best place to hide wrongdoing in the markets is in plain sight. And do it large. This will be a fund that backs the recovery, and more than that: creates the recovery. And when this fund puts on positions, guess what? A whole bunch of other guys place the same bets. Think weight of money. We’ll be like a sumo wrestler playing with six-stone weaklings. Our bets will be so successful that, after a while, everyone will follow us. Just making a bet will mean it’s a success as soon as people know about it. In the old days this was called market manipulation, but that was only if you got caught. And we won’t get caught, because we’ll have our own firm. We’ll buy one. A small one, but very high calibre. And we’ll only employ totally trustworthy people. Our own people. Everyone here can nominate someone. We won’t need many because the settlement and back office side are automated; all we need is someone to take the decisions on the trades that we’ll make, and that’ll be me. Our target will be to double our money in six months. We’ll start with, say, ten billion or so and take it from there. I suggest we stop when we hit fifty, but we can decide that later.’ I relax and sit down, a modest smile on my face. ‘So … who wants to play?’
I do have a moment of nervousness as the silence stretches out for one, two, almost three seconds before the magic kicks in. First one, then another, then all of them start nodding. One or two are actually rubbing their chins, licking their lips, taking cautious sips of water from the glasses in front of them. I’ve got them. I love these moments. But there’s one final detail – an important one if I’m ever to have a chance of winning Two Livers.
‘One final point …I begin.
‘What’s that?’ It’s Bang Bang, and he knows me well enough to see that a key moment is coming. ‘Are you going to talk to us about the way the profit is split?’
Every eye is on me. They think I’m making a big play for more of the upside. They’re wrong. It’s worse than that.
‘No. That stays the same.’ They all relax, a few of them even smile. ‘I want something much more important than that.’
‘What’s more important than money?’ It’s Carlos, unable to resist taking the floor again. Fucking tango dancer.
I look around the table, staring at each of them in turn. ‘When this is over and we’ve all made billions more than we ever dreamt possible, you have to give me your word about one thing.’
You can hear the proverbial pin drop in the hangar.
‘All of you – and your people, your organisations, your cartels, everyone you control … Now they’re straining on my every word. The tension is killing them.
‘All of you will promise never to do anything bad again. Ever.’
‘WHAT?’ It’s Rom, but he could be speaking for all of them. ‘Are you crazy? Are you joking?’
Carlos intervenes, half apologetic. ‘Dave, we aren’t going to stop doing … let’s say, our normal business. It’s what we do. It’s how we put meat on the table.’
I stare at him evenly, trying not to be provocative, trying to hide whatever I might really think of him.
‘Carlos, this is different. This time we’re all going to make so much money that we’ll actually stand to make more and do better and have more fun by going straight once it is over. Think billions, Carlos. Billions and billions. ’
‘But we’re bad people. That’s who we are. It’s what we do. We’re like bankers, only criminals. Look what you guys did. Far worse than us. No one ever asked you to stop being bankers. No prison. They even kept on paying you.’
I shrug sympathetically. ‘I know. But bankers are different. And after this, everything will be transformed – for all of us. And I am serious. Is everyone on board?’
RUNNING A video conference from the middle of the Kazakh steppe requires some serious equipment. Luckily, that’s exactly what we have. A team of technicians have set up something that looks like a TV studio in one of the hangars. I’m sitting at a desk, looking almost like a newsreader, waiting to be connected to the offices of Ball Taittinger in London. The Silver Fox thinks he’s got a new business call with a client from the Far East. In a sense, he has.
When he comes into the room I’ve set the screen so that I can see what’s happening at his end, but he can’t yet see me. He looks remarkably unchanged, in a snappy Savile Row suit, pale pink Hermès tie and with his silver-grey hair swept back off his perma-tanned face. For a man in his sixties, he’s handsome, dashing and sophisticated – the kind of operator you’d expect to run the best public relations firm in the business.
‘You’re looking good.’
He stares at the screen, gets only a screensaver rather than a face and looks to his left, presumably at the technician running the conference at his end.
‘I’m sorry, who is this?’
I flick a switch and savour the impact. It takes a second, as he switches back to the screen, and then zooms in on my face.
‘Is … this … a joke? Or a recording? What’s going on?’
I chuckle in response to his remark and he almost leaps out of his chair. It’s the first and only time I can ever recall him totally flummoxed. I have to put him out of his misery.
‘Neither. It’s me. I’m here. I’m alive and I’m well. And I’m coming back. To do that I’m going to need to hire a good PR firm. The best. I don’t care what they charge me, but they have to be good. Because I’m coming back from the dead. Let’s talk about your firm’s credentials. How many people have you brought back from the dead?’
Even the smartest pro in the business takes a little while to get over that one. But to give him full credit, once he’s heard my amazing story – the way I was fished out of the Thames by a passing barge, resuscitated, and then stayed on board, recovering, until they reached the Channel, where I transferred to a cargo ship and decided just to disappear – he rolls remarkably fast with the punches. In no time at all he’s suggesting ways I can emphasise certain aspects of my ‘time away’, as he calls it, like the months I spent in a Tibetan monastery, meditating and reflecting on life’s values, the charitable work I did in Chinese orphanages and, of course, the time devoted to prayer. Oh, and he also says how pleased he is to have me back. And you know what? I think he actually means it.
IT’S AMAZING how much you can get done, even from the Kazakh steppe, when you have unlimited money and some of the best people in the world working for you. I’m a fortnight into my stay here and already I have a credible alibi for where I’ve been and what happened after Blackfriars Bridge. Around the world more than fifty financial institutions have quietly started accumulating positions in companies that might turn out to have a more interesting future ahead of them than they realise right now. Because you never know what the future might hold.
In London, a hotshot investment banker called Laura MacKay is surrounded by an invisible aura. Invisible and protective. She’s done fantastically well in the crisis, keeping Grossbank afloat, holding it together without selling out to either the British or German governments, but working the kind of hours that would kill a mere mortal and having very little time to play. As her reward, they’ve made her chairman. My old job. It couldn’t be in better hands, though I guess it’s been a killer.
Which is not to say she’s been totally idle. At one time she was dating a well-known Indian millionaire playboy, but just in the last couple of days his family have called him home to Mumbai to marry the daughter of another wealthy Indian dynasty. Apparently, they’ve signed a mega deal with a brand-new but very influential Asian industrial conglomerate that came out of nowhere, and the other side specified that he had to come home, settle down and take the reins.
Miss MacKay was also seen out a couple of times with a Chelsea footballer, but just in the last week he’s been sold for a record price to a team in Tajikistan that no one’s ever heard of, but which a local oligarch has apparently decided to turn into a Champions’ League side.
And she was photographed in a celebrity magazine with an up-and-coming actor, a good-looking guy with pecs and shoulders and a hero’s jaw. But he’s just landed a breakthrough role in a major feature film that had a financing package come through unexpectedly from some Latin American business tycoon. He starts shooting next week in Patagonia – for six months.
So she’s all alone, but around her wheels are in motion, and although she doesn’t know it, she’s never really alone. An invisible cordon surrounds her, electronically, digitally and, at a discreet distance, physically, all of the time. No one can mug her, no one can molest her, no burglar will get near her home. Even the secret service couldn’t provide better protection. All they can do is arrest the bad guys. The people watching Two Livers are the bad guys. Fuck with them and they’ll put two bullets in the back of your head – and they don’t need to trouble anyone with questions. She’s safe, looked after on my behalf until I return home, and I need to get cracking.
Before the world can know I’m still around, she has to. I don’t want to speak to her on the telephone – I need to see her face. I don’t want to con her into a video conference. However good the technology, I need to feel her reaction, sense it, live it, in a way that only works if you are physically there alongside her. Sneaking into the country is a high-risk move, but luckily I have powerful friends in low places.
So on a dull, overcast Saturday morning I find myself standing outside a coffee shop on Oxford Street, furtively looking at a reflection in the window from the other side of the road. It’s her. She’s wearing a Vivienne Westwood blazer and, what I guess, are J Brand jeans. She has a Tod’s handbag casually slung over her shoulder and large sunglasses that I like but can’t place. She’s walking fast, her pace confident, and has a ‘don’t fuck with me’ look on her face that discourages admiring glances from the men she passes in the street.
I’
ve been following her for nearly twenty minutes, having picked her up outside her home, a large Mayfair townhouse that she must have bought since getting the top job at Grossbank. I’m wearing a donkey jacket and jeans, dark glasses, a blue baseball cap with its peak pulled down at the front, and I haven’t shaved for a week. It’s my idea of a disguise, but it seemed better as an idea than it looks in practice. In the movies the guys on the surveillance team never stand out, even when they lurk in doorways or hang around on street corners. In real life I feel like I’ve got a flashing light on my head and a klaxon going off just in case she doesn’t notice me.
She turns off Oxford Street, crosses Wigmore Street and heads up Harley Street. It’s long and open, largely residential or offices, mostly occupied by expensive medical practices. I cross to the other side of the road and observe her as we walk almost the full length of the street, until she stops and pauses at a large front door, goes up the steps and rings the bell. After a moment the door opens and she goes inside. Then I realise where she is. It’s the Foetal Medicine Centre. I came here with Wendy when she was expecting Samantha. And on another occasion early on in my marriage, much more discreetly, with someone else. That didn’t have a happy ending.
Two Livers must be pregnant. How did it happen? Well, I can guess how it happened. But when? And with whom? She was supposed to be under proper surveillance. Does this mean she’s in love? She’d never be pregnant by accident. I have a sick feeling in my stomach and suddenly start questioning everything. There must be someone else. Someone I don’t know about.
Which is when she suddenly reappears and heads across the street directly towards me. I pretend to look at my watch, turn round to glance at a street sign, then catch my breath as I hear her footsteps behind me.
The Ego's Nest (Dave Hart 5) Page 3