The Ego's Nest (Dave Hart 5)

by David Charters

My hand stays resolutely where it is. ‘You have the advantage over me. I don’t know who I’m talking to.’

  He drops his hand to his side. ‘You don’t need to.’

  I’m not a man of violence at all. Violence is something best left to people who are good at it. But I really feel like smacking him in the mouth. Only he looks ‘useful’ in a way I’ve recognised before, and I think he’d spin me round, pin me to the ground and generally hurt and humiliate me before my fist got anywhere near his jaw.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re learning, Mr Hart. Learning about you and your operation. And if you don’t mind me saying, what you’ve done here is fascinating. We’re impressed. And we don’t impress easily.’

  This is surreal. I look at Dan. He’s embarrassed, uncomfortable and wretched. But he’s got the look in his eye of someone who’s used to that.

  ‘What have they got on you, Dan? We were mates.’

  He looks away. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  I turn back to blondie, the steely-eyed killer. ‘What next?’

  ‘We weren’t planning to talk to you quite yet. So for now you can go.’

  ‘What? Go?’

  ‘That’s right. Unless you want to stay here and get on with your work? We won’t be long.’ He turns to his guys. ‘Another thirty minutes?’ They nod and give him the thumbs up. ‘Don’t try to leave the country, Mr Hart. We know where you are at all times. And we know who matters to you. You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you, Mr Hart?’

  Damn. Do they know about her? Fucking Harriman must have told them. Investment banking was never meant to be like this. ‘I … I’ve got a few things to do.’

  ‘That’s fine. Go ahead.’

  Go ahead? In my own fucking office? Who does this guy think he is? Just because I’m recycling billions of dollars in drug money into the legitimate economy, he thinks he can tell me what to do in my own office!

  ‘Fuck you, pal.’

  Who said that? Shit, it was me! And as I say it, I bring my foot up and kick him hard between the legs. Dan looks uncertain what to do and, with whatever little physical strength I have, I push him onto the steely-eyed killer, who is momentarily doubled up, and run flat out for the door to the fire escape, throwing it open and hitting the fire alarm button as I do so. I’ve never been here before, and find myself in a concrete stairwell with steps going down to the bottom of the building. I fly down the first flight, nearly tripping over myself in my haste, and just as I’m about to turn and head down to the next floor, a dark figure steps out from a doorway and something hard stops me in my tracks. I can feel the concrete floor against my cheek, my eyes won’t focus and I happily slide into unconsciousness with that delicious escaping feeling that I last got from an opium pipe.

  I THINK I’m dreaming. Two Livers is leaning over me, wearing what looks like a Cavallaro silk blouse, strategically unbuttoned at the top, bra-less and breathing hard. She must have rushed to my bedside, and the effect is startling. My head hurts, but I find myself wondering if I could reach out and tear her blouse open and pull her on top of me without doing myself permanent damage.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re at St Thomas’s. They brought you here for a brain scan. There was a problem at the office. You were there at two in the morning. No one knows what you were doing. The fire alarm went off and you fell down the fire escape stairs. Dan Harriman called me. How do you feel?’

  ‘Crap.’ I look around the hospital room and put my finger to my lips. She nods. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  The hospital don’t want to discharge me. I’m suffering from concussion. I need to take it easy and they want to keep me under observation – or at least someone does – for a day or so more. Fortunately Two Livers is not to be trifled with. The ward sister, a heavyweight Irishwoman who probably sees herself as an immovable object, suddenly learns what it’s like to meet an irresistible force. We’re leaving and not even physical violence will stop us, not that they’d try once they see the look on Two Livers’ face. Tom is waiting outside and we head back to her place in Mayfair. Well, that’s where she says we’re going. We peel off down a narrow side street and I wonder what shortcut Tom’s discovered to get there, when we suddenly stop and she opens the door, pulls me out and waves Tom on. We duck back inside an alleyway and watch as an unmarked white van with two men in the front swings past us on the tail of Tom’s Merc.

  ‘Where are we going?’ My head hurts and I’m finding it hard to think straight.

  ‘Somewhere safe. If there is a safe place for us now.’

  ‘Us? Yeeeehaaaaa! I don’t care where it is, as long as we’re together.’ I go to kiss her and she pushes me away.

  ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself.’

  Another white van pulls up and we get in through a sliding door in the side. I look at the driver and it’s Happy. He glances back at us and gives a big wide grin. That’s three this year.

  I turn to Two Livers. ‘Is someone going to tell me where we’re going?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not yet. It involves a boat, a plane and another boat. And then swimming costumes and sunnies, possibly for quite a while.’

  ‘You mean we’re doing a runner? Getting out of town?’ She nods. I shake my head, even though it hurts. ‘No, not yet. We can’t. If we do a runner now, we’ll have everyone after us. Bang Bang and Rom, Dan’s friends, the whole world. We have to be smarter than that.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  My head still hurts and I can tell I’m not on the top of my game, but I smile reassuringly. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

  IT’S NIGHT-TIME, and I’m hiding in the bushes outside a farm cottage in Oxfordshire, feeling slightly ridiculous. Investment bankers don’t do hiding in bushes, especially on dark, damp evenings. It’s a large, traditional thatched cottage, of a type and in a location highly sought after as a weekend retreat for investment bankers and hedge fund managers, which means it must have been inherited or married into, because the owner is Jim Bradman, the new Treasury minister, and there’s no way a career politician like Jim could have earned enough to buy it himself by the age of thirty-eight.

  Crouching beside me in the darkness is Happy Mboku, identifiable in the darkness only by his eyes and the gleam of his teeth. And next to him the large, lumpy mass is Nob, and next to him Sly and Timur and the rest of the team, and yes, we’re wearing black – in my case Ralph Lauren chinos and a full-length highwayman’s jacket with hood by Necessary Evil. I’m too old to go Gothic. I got through the whole of the internet boom and the new media bubble without ever going black, but here I am now, forced to wear something that, in some circles would be considered cool, but which senior investment bankers would sneer at. And all so I can sneak around in the darkness and not get spotted. Goodbye dignity, bring on expediency. This had better work.

  What I’m hoping to do is talk to Bradman. And I mean really talk – the kind that politicians rarely do, because I’ll need him to be listening, rather than in transmit mode. I’m taking a huge risk, but there aren’t many alternatives and I’m calculating that there’s just a chance that someone naive and idealistic enough to devote their political life to the Lib Dems will listen to what I have to say, think about it and do something, using his position in government to rein in the bad guys. Which bad guys? All of us. The bad guys and the worse guys. MI5, Bang Bang and Rom, even me. We need to bring this whole show under control. Do I have a shot? We’ll see. All I know is the odds have to be better than trying to hide for the rest of my life with one of the most beautiful, desirable, noticeable women in the world on my arm. Fat chance of that working.

  We saw him arrive, alone, about half an hour ago. No detective, no wife, no kids. What we don’t know is whether anyone else is going to show up any time soon. It’s a Thursday night and he’s come to the country to spend Friday doing constituency business, because Parliament won’t be sitting. For all I know he’s come here for an evening of drug-cra
zed debauchery with his mistress/boyfriend/Alsatian, or the whole of the local Women’s Institute.

  I get up and slip and slide over the lawn, pick my way over the flowerbeds and creep round to the front door, staying low as I pass the windows.

  The front door is locked, but Sly is right behind me and it takes him less than ten seconds with a set of lock picks to open up, stand back and wave me in.

  Bizarrely, I’m conscious of my muddy feet on the carpet. Why do I think of something like this now? God knows. I can hear classical music coming from the living room and creep forward on my hands and knees. When I get to the living room door, I peer round it slowly. Bradman’s sitting in an armchair, reading a book, with what looks like a glass of whisky beside him. He’s peaceful, relaxed, nicely selfcontained and, above all, looks mature. He’s the kind of man I’d be in the evenings if I wasn’t snorting coke and shagging hookers. He’s at ease with himself. Part of me is disappointed that I haven’t found him on his hands and knees in women’s clothing, being whipped by a dominatrix. I suppose that’s what comes of allowing the Lib Dems into politics. And part of me is deeply jealous that he can be so self-contained, and look so wise and content when no one’s watching and he doesn’t need to pretend.

  And then I lean too hard on the door and it creaks and swings open. Bradman’s eyes go wide as he sees me lying on his living room carpet, watching him.

  ‘Hart – what the hell are you doing here?’ Bradman yells the words and turns to one side, presumably looking for some kind of panic button. That’s when he notices the row of faces staring in at us at the window, starting with Happy Mboku’s.

  ‘Christ almighty. Who are these people?’ He leaps to his feet and looks around, and I’m afraid he’s searching for a weapon. I need to take charge of the situation.

  I get to my feet, put my arms out to show I’m unarmed and, in my smarmiest, most oleaginous voice, oozing what I hope is reassurance, start to explain.

  ‘Minister – I just want to talk to you. And these are my associates. We all want to talk to you.’

  He stops panicking for a moment, stares back at the faces at the window, looks at me, takes a deep breath and is just about to try to calm down and work out what’s going on, when Sly peers round the door behind me, complete with jagged scar and eye patch. Bradman turns and bolts for the other door.

  It looks as if it leads to the kitchen, and I dash forward to cut him off, slamming my weight against it and standing there, panting, not sure which of us is more afraid.

  ‘Minister, please. There’s something we need to talk about.’ I’m struggling to get my breath back, which is probably a good thing, because he can see how harmless and ineffectual I am. ‘Minister, there’s something going on that you need to know about, involving organised crime, the secret service and some very unpleasant people. There’s an awful lot at stake here. Many tens of billions of pounds. Jobs and investments. The reputation of the City of London. And a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get some of the biggest criminal organisations in the world to go straight. The drugs trade could be halved overnight, human traffickers put out of business, racketeering brought to an end – because the bad guys are let inside the tent on condition they go clean. This is huge, and we need to talk about it. Now, tonight, because time is short. And it needs a decisive political intervention by someone who understands risk, who isn’t afraid. A real man. This could be your big moment. The moment that decides where you go in politics … and in life.’

  SO WHAT do you think he did? He’s a Lib Dem, for fuck’s sake. These guys yearn to play a part. They’ll jump into bed with anyone if there’s a chance of power and glory, and they’d sell their grandmothers for a place in the history books. Just look at the coalition. People think the Lib Dems are innocents abroad when it comes to realpolitik. The truth is, because they’ve been out of power for generations, giving them access to the kind of toy box politicians get to play with is like giving whisky and car keys to seventeen-year-old boys. Or, as I’ve said before, like putting someone like me in charge of a major financial institution.

  We talked for hours. Happy and the guys came in and cooked us supper. So I explained all about the Salvation Fund, our investments, our plans and our backers. And the deal we’d made with them if we delivered. I told him about the goons in the office, HMG’s heavy breathers, who could fuck everything up if they were allowed to. And I went to great lengths to explain that an opportunity like this wouldn’t come along more than once in a lifetime. If he played it right, it could be transformational. It would need the prime minister’s intervention, it would need the heavy breathers called off, it would need an amnesty – probably a secret one – for some serious heavy hitters who made their names hitting people. And the upside? The kind of one-off financial boost for the UK that the Bundesbank and the Fed could only dream about, the chance to tackle crime in a way that no other generation in history had been offered, and a fairy tale ending for me, where I get the girl and live to enjoy her.

  Oh, and then there’s the billion. The ‘quiet billion’ that only he and I would ever know about. The private part, a kind of special reserve that he could use for good causes. Any good causes he chose. The prime minister could have one too if he wanted. And the chancellor. In fact there’d be enough for everyone to have one if they wanted. At least all the people who count at times like this.

  At first he didn’t believe me. You wouldn’t, would you? But as a politician he could tell a lie when he heard one, and after a while he worked out that he wasn’t hearing any. When it was clear that he got it and wanted to grab it, I called Two Livers and she joined us for the final briefing session to prep him for the big call.

  And around 6 a.m., when we’d run through it enough times and judged that he was ready, he called the prime minister and woke him up.

  EPILOGUE

  SO I got my nest. Well, sort of.

  I’m sitting on a bench in St James’s Park, looking at the ducks on the water. I do this occasionally when I want to get my thoughts together. I think I’ve achieved a kind of stability. And I think I’ve found happiness too, or at any rate a version of it that works for me. Happiness is not waiting for anything new to happen. I’ve only had sex with one woman in the past year. A lot of times, admittedly, but I haven’t strayed. She’s amazing. She keeps surprising me. I’m besotted with her and so far I’ve been utterly, uncompromisingly faithful. Well, mostly.

  I do very few drugs these days, just a few lines of coke and a little weed, because I find I don’t need them as much, and I haven’t been pissed in months. At least, not really pissed. I have a nightly martini when I’m in London, and most days I have a cigar, and a bottle of wine with dinner, and a nightcap, and I still drink at lunchtimes, and I really go for it on a Friday, but Fridays have always been different. Most of the time I’m off the booze because I’m finding stimulation elsewhere.

  I’m smartly dressed. Today is a special day. And beside me the woman I love looks like a billion dollars. Or maybe ten billion. She’s wearing a formal Burberry trench coat buttoned up to the neck, with a pashmina. I can’t actually see if she’s wearing anything else underneath. There are times when she doesn’t, when she wants to surprise me. But today I know she is, because we’re going somewhere special.

  We’re going to a celebration at the House of Lords. It’s the second anniversary of that extraordinary day when I was forced to come clean about the Salvation Fund to a politician.

  Jim Bradman didn’t believe it at first, but once he got it he really went for it. Stuff like this doesn’t fall into your lap every day of the week. And he took it to the top, explaining the risks, talking them through where it all might lead, passionately advocating the importance of allowing people – even wicked people – to change. We’d done it in different conflicts around the world, so why not use the same techniques in the conflicts that make our streets such dangerous places? Draw a line and allow people to come in from the cold. Bringing their money with them, of
course.

  And they did.

  They had to do it secretly, and so the Salvation Fund continued until Grossbank bought it out and the investors got their money back. The team retired rich and happy, and I still see them from time to time. Maria got her million, and so did Tom.

  And what did I get?

  You know what I got.

  I got the girl.

  I turn and smile at her and she smiles back. Her fingernails are painted a very dark purple and she runs them along my thigh.

  I want to wrap my arms around her, but I know I can’t. Not now anyway. ‘Later. We have to go now.’

  We get up and walk to the road, where Tom is waiting in an immaculate black Rolls Royce Phantom. His, not mine. It was his birthday last week and I thought he deserved it.

  ‘House of Lords, Tom, peers’ entrance.’

  We drive along Birdcage Walk towards the Palace of Westminster, passing the Treasury as we go. When we swing into the Lords, I hear Tom say to the policeman on duty, ‘Sir David and Lady Hart, to see Lord Lee and Lord Romanov.’

  Well, I had to make an honest woman of her, didn’t I? A monstrous diamond and sapphire ring gleams on her finger beside a small gold band. The diamond was a gift from Rom, who insisted he had acquired it legitimately from the people of Sierra Leone and it was the least he could do after all the billions I made him. And the small bulge on her front isn’t the start of a martini gut. I’m going to be a father again, and Two Livers is almost dry these days while she carries our son inside her. Imagine that. A young Dave Hart. I wonder what he’ll be like. I guess that’s for the nanny to find out.

  I suppose that will be part of the next chapter. I’m desperately conscious that we need to grow together as a couple. Otherwise life will get boring again, and the devil makes work for idle hands.

  We get out of the car and there are Bang Bang and Rom, waiting to take us in to a special celebration lunch. The chancellor, Jim Bradman, will be there, and Carlos, who has an honorary knighthood, and Bang Bang’s bringing half the cast of Kill Bill, and no doubt Rom will have some of the undead there too, and there’ll be a bunch of other familiar faces. Happy runs his own security firm now, and Nob is