Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  Even Weiss did not dare force the issue, and so Ronnie continued: “The other matter I wished to discuss also concerns Jo Stanley inasmuch as it relates to the manner of her passing and the reasons behind the assault that was made upon her.”

  “What reasons?” Weiss snapped, with a vehemence that drew one or two puzzled looks from around the table. “She was mugged. Case closed. It’s unfortunate, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but, hey, shit happens.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Weiss,” said Bunter, not feeling any need at all to match the volume or intensity with which Weiss had interrupted him. “You’re making life much easier for me. You see, I had been a little nervous about making the allegations that I am now going to lay before my fellow partners. But all your words and actions only serve to persuade me of its strength. So let me state my case—”

  “You can’t just come in here and hijack this meeting!” Weiss shouted.

  “Keep digging, Mr. Weiss, you’re just making the hole you’re in that much deeper.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tina Burnett interjected, “but what the hell is this all about? Ronnie, what are you trying to tell us?”

  Ronald Bunter paused. His brow furrowed. For a moment it might have seemed to the other occupants of the boardroom that he was just an old man who’d lost his train of thought. In fact, he was an old litigator who knew exactly how to put an audience on the edge of its seats. Finally, a fraction of a second before someone else said something, he replied, “I’m telling you, Ms. Burnett, that your partner Shelby Weiss was almost certainly responsible for the death of Jo Stanley, which I contend was no random mugging but instead a targeted assassination. I furthermore assert that the reason for the assassination was that Ms. Stanley had established a link between Mr. Weiss and the financier Aram Bendick, the same Mr. Bendick who, as you cannot help but have noticed, has been bragging about the vast fortune he made by betting against Bannock Oil. And I believe that further investigation will show that the reason why this discovery of Ms. Stanley’s was so dangerous to both Mr. Weiss and Mr. Bendick was that they were engaged in an international conspiracy to use an attack on the Bannock field at Magna Grande, off the coast of Angola, as the means to precipitate the collapse of Bannock Oil. And finally, I am certain, though I cannot as yet prove it, that the prime mover in this conspiracy was Mr. Weiss’s client John Kikuu Tembo, better known to most of you by his alias Johnny Congo.”

  “That’s a damn lie!” Weiss shouted as the partners’ meeting descended into uproar. It took more than a minute before Jesús Mendoza, the oldest and most authoritative of the Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett trio, was able to restore order and say, “These are some serious accusations you’re making, Ronnie. Do you have the evidence to back them up?”

  “To the standard of criminal proof? No, Jesús, I don’t. But do I have the kind of case you would have grabbed with both hands when you were the brightest young DA in East Texas? Hell yes.”

  “Then you’d better lay it out for us.”

  So Ronnie told the story, right from the moment Jo Stanley forced Hector Cross not to throw Johnny Congo out of the back of a plane, but to give him up to the authorities; to Congo’s mysterious involvement in Cabinda; to Jo’s observations of Weiss’s strangely unconcerned, even upbeat mood in recent weeks; her discovery of Bendick’s name on Weiss’s phone (which, Bendick pointed out, Weiss had almost certainly observed, or at the very least suspected); her email to Cross and her sudden death.

  He concluded, “I can’t produce a smoking gun, or not yet, anyway. But if I were a young, ambitious DA, I would right now be getting subpoenas to seize all Mr. Weiss’s telephone and email records, not to mention his bank accounts, though my guess is the dirty ones are all overseas. I think you’re an evil bastard, Weiss, but you’re not a dumb one. I’d also be calling the FBI, the Feds, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York—I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that’s the court that has jurisdiction over the financial centers of New York City—to put Aram Bendick under the microscope, too. I’d be looking into the trades Mr. Bendick made, and his movements, both inside the United States and beyond in the days immediately preceding the start of financial hostilities against Bannock Oil, and I’d call the State Department, because they’ll want to start lobbying the Swiss and the Cayman Islanders and possibly the Panamanians to open up their banks to our investigation.”

  Weiss was sitting, white-faced and silent, as the recitation went on. He’d spent years reading juries, so he knew, just by looking at the other lawyers in the room, that they were buying Bunter’s story, whether he had the smoking gun or not. Now he had to fight back.

  “You’ve got nothing, Bunter,” he snarled. “No evidence, no witnesses, no documentation—nothing but the crazy theories of a woman who was clearly desperate to appease the lover she’d walked out on, and to make up for feeling bad about keeping Johnny Congo alive. If you people want to listen to more of this garbage, fine. Me, I have had enough. I’ve got work to do. Maybe if you had some work, Bunter, you wouldn’t be wasting time on garbage like this.”

  Weiss got to his feet, knocking over his chair as he did so, and stalked out of the room.

  “Thank you, Ms. Burnett, gentlemen, for letting me say my piece. I thought it went very well, didn’t you?”

  Oh yeah,” said Major Bobby Malinga of the Texas Rangers, who was sitting in a van across the road from the Weiss, Mendoza, Burnett and Bunter offices listening to the feed from the wire that he had attached to Bunter’s chest a couple of hours earlier.

  “Come on, Weiss, call your daddy . . .” Hector Cross muttered.

  A second later Weiss dialled a 646 area code, indicating a Manhattan-based cellphone number. The number started ringing. “Pick it up . . . pick it up,” Hernandez muttered. Then she pumped her fist and mouthed, “Yesss!” as the unmistakable voice of Aram Bendick answered, “What do you want?”

  “We’ve been made,” Weiss replied, sounding on the verge of panic.

  “Whoa! Take a chill pill. Calm down. What happened?”

  “You remember that chick I told you about, Jo Stanley, the one you said I should deal with?”

  “No.” Bendick’s voice was flat, emotionless, crunching in the bluntness of the denial.

  “Sure you do. You told me she was none of your business; I had to fix it. Well, I did.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Now Weiss became angry and that helped calm his nerves. “Listen, smart-ass. I’m talking to you as a lawyer and I am telling you that Stanley figured out what we were doing. And she told her old lover, Cross, the guy who screwed up the Magna Grande situation.”

  “Ouch.” Cross winced in the stuffy darkness of the van.

  “And Cross told Stanley’s old boss Bunter, who showed up at my office an hour ago and laid it all out, the whole thing, right in front of my partners. That’s four attorneys, all of them officers of the law, who now know about a conspiracy to destroy Bannock Oil and defraud its stockholders. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re guilty of that conspiracy. And that’s not even the worst part. See, Bunter also suggested that the Magna Grande disaster was masterminded by my client and your investor Johnny Congo, specifically with the aim of lowering the price of Bannock stock, from which we both profited. And that puts us this close to a conspiracy to cause the deaths of more than two hundred people, more than half of them U.S. citizens. Do you hear me, Bendick?”

  “Sure, I heard what you said, but you’ll notice I didn’t say anything because I honestly don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about. I have a long record of backing my judgement on positions some folks think are crazy. Some I lose. More often I win. This was one of those cases, and I’d like to see anyone try and prove otherwise. See you around, Mr. Weiss.”

  “Damn!” Hernandez threw her headphones down on to the workbench in front of her. “That bastard’s right, he didn’t say a thing we can use.�
�

  “Did you seriously think he would?” Hector Cross asked. “The point is, we have a confession from Weiss and I’m sure that your colleagues in the Harris County DA’s office can use that as leverage to get him to make a statement implicating Bendick, with evidence to back up his claims. I’m guessing that if he was acting for Congo in the commission of a crime then he can forget about attorney–client privilege. You heard what Ronnie Bunter said: Get on to every federal agency that has anything to do with money, terrorism or good old-fashioned crime and put them on the case. Forget how cool Bendick was on the phone, it’s squeaky-bum time now. I bet he’s got all his munchkins deleting emails, dumping files in the trash, shifting dirty money to offshore accounts. It’ll all be kicking off.”

  “I don’t know why you’re sounding so goddamn cheerful,” Hernandez said. “If he’s doing all those things he’s destroying the only evidence that could ever get him convicted.”

  “That’s what you think.” Cross dialled a number on his phone and pressed the “speaker” button. They could all hear the number ringing and then an American voice saying, “Hi, boss, what can I do for you?”

  “Very simple, Dave, just let them know what you’ve been doing over the past few hours and days.”

  “Cut a long story short, I’ve been hanging out with some old buddies from the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. They were real happy to help me track down the people responsible for the deaths of so many of their fellow citizens, some of them military veterans. So we got out our laptops, put our heads together, started writing code just like the good old days and, what do you know? We hacked right into Aram Bendick’s corporate computer system, so we already have all the evidence he’s trying to hide, and can see what he’s doing right now, as he does it. That means we can track all the money he’s trying to hide, which so far amounts to a little over two point five billion dollars . . . no, sorry, make that two point seven billion . . . Man, he really made a lot of money out of killing all those folks!”

  “That’s great work, Dave. Tell all the guys who helped you thank you very much from me. And a massive pat on the back for you, too. I think you may just be an actual, living genius.”

  Imbiss laughed. “You’re the boss, Heck, so I won’t contradict you!”

  Cross ended the call and turned his attention back to Malinga. “Here’s what we just established today. Shelby Weiss had Jo Stanley killed. Question: Who would he go to if he wanted a hit? Answer: Whoever it was that organized Congo’s escape, because don’t tell me Weiss doesn’t know who that was.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, he knew,” Malinga replied. “And he’s not the only one. The guy in question is a businessman, claims he’s legit, name of D’Shonn Brown.”

  “Any relation to Aleutian Brown?” Cross asked.

  “Brother, why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I bumped into Aleutian a while back.”

  “Did you, ah, bump hard?”

  “Hard enough, but don’t worry, it was a long way from your jurisdiction.”

  Malinga gave a wry smile of approval. “Well, then, I appreciate your efforts to keep the streets safe for law-abiding folks to go about their business. Hernandez, time we put a call in to the DA’s office. We’re going to need warrants for Weiss’s office, home, phones: you name it. And as soon as you find any connection to D’Shonn Brown—one conversation’ll do it—we go for warrants on him too.”

  “You make sure you get them,” Hector Cross said to Malinga as Hernandez started barking into a phone. “Jo Stanley was a good woman, and she believed in the rule of law above all else. The least she deserves is for her killer to be caught, tried, found guilty and punished.”

  “Saves you having to do it, huh?” said Malinga.

  “She’s the only person I wouldn’t avenge personally. I thought about it—I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t. But she wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  “Good, because I’d hate to be coming after you as well as Weiss and Brown.”

  “And Bendick, don’t forget about him.”

  “Oh, I haven’t, you can count on that. And I will make those calls you were talking about. Not to mention the U.S. Customs, Federal Aviation Authority and New York Port Authority. If Aram Bendick took a plane or a boat or any other means of transport to get out of the country in the weeks leading up to Magna Grande, I’m going to find out about it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’m going to hand the whole damn thing over to the Feds and watch them take the credit. I’m just a good ol’ boy from Texas, Mr. Cross. So far as I understand, which is not too far, Aram Bendick was involved in an international conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism as a means of rigging the markets.”

  “Sounds about right,” Hector agreed.

  “You’re going to let the Feds do their job, though, right? Not tempted to take any shortcuts?”

  Cross laughed. “On occasion I am quite capable of obeying the law. Besides, I want the pleasure of following this story as it unfolds. I want to see Weiss and Bendick do the perp walk. I want to see the look on their greedy, lying faces as their lawyers deny all the charges. I want to watch all the evidence emerge . . . And one day, maybe, I want to see them locked away for a very, very long time.” “Well, then I guess I’d better start making those calls,” said Malinga as he cocked his white Stetson over his right eye at a jaunty angle.

  There were only twenty-three of them gathered on the top floor of Seascape Mansions, Cross’s safe house in Abu Zara. The Magna Grande disaster had left Bannock Oil in almost total disarray. John Bigelow had been forced to resign as the company’s President and CEO as had the remainder of the board of directors. Bannock Oil had been placed in administration and the assets of the company sequestrated. The remainder of the company’s drilling concessions in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans had been sold off at fire-sale prices in a desperate bid to meet the company debts. The only properties that remained in the company’s possession when the dust finally settled were the Zara oilfields, which had an estimated life of a mere fifteen years. All in all, the net market value of Bannock Oil Ltd had been reduced by a staggering 80 percent.

  It was an abysmal low point for a company that had once been so illustrious. Nevertheless Bannock Oil still required protection and Cross had come through the disaster with his reputation almost untarnished. He had taken advantage of the Bannock asset sales to buy back Cross Bow Security for a fraction of what he had once been paid to sell it.

  At least Shelby Weiss and Aram Bendick were no longer a threat. They had been found guilty by the Supreme Court of Texas of conspiring to cause the destruction of the Magna Grande drilling operation for their own gain, and causing the deaths of more than two hundred people aboard the Bannock A, many of them U.S. citizens. The judge has sentenced them in court to jail terms of fifty years and seventy-five years respectively. They would almost certainly die in prison before they even came up for parole. In a desperate bid to mitigate his sentence, Weiss had told investigators everything he knew that linked D’Shonn Brown to the operation that had sprung Johnny Congo on his execution day, and it was only a matter of time before Brown was wearing an orange jumpsuit and eating prison food too.

  Cross and his team, however, still had a job to do, protecting what remained of the Bannock Oil Company. So now he held up both hands for silence, and laid out the scale of the task. “We haven’t seen the last of our enemies. The most virulent and dangerous of them are still out there, lurking in the undergrowth, keeping a low profile, waiting till the world is looking the other way. Mateus da Cunha and Johnny Congo, alias Juan Tumbo, alias King John Kikuu Tembo won’t be appeased until they’ve wrested the Magna Grande oilfield from the control of the Angolan government. They intend to do this by completing the job that the Magna Grande disaster started. That’s to say: creating unrest and anarchy, destabilising Cabinda to the point where da Cunha can step in, present himself as the nation’s savior and declare inde
pendence from Angola. And if thousands more innocent victims are slaughtered and mass destruction is perpetrated once again, they won’t care. It’s all just part of their plan.”

  The atmosphere in the room had changed from lighthearted banter to serious, professional concentration. “They have time on their side and massive funds at their disposal,” Cross went on. “For da Cunha, this is all just a matter of naked greed. He lusts after the mineral riches of Cabinda. Congo’s different. He wants revenge for the death of Carl Bannock, for wrecking his personal empire in Kazundu, for sticking him on death row, for forcing him out of Venezuela. So he’s got a vendetta against me personally. He wants me dead. And the feeling is entirely mutual. I want him dead too.”

  Cross paused for a moment to let his words sink in. Then he went on.

  “So . . . we’ve been making plans. Most of you don’t know this, but Nastiya O’Quinn, helped by her half-sister Zhenia, has been able to infiltrate the enemy camp and win da Cunha’s trust. That gives her a lead to Congo too. Neither of them are aware that Nastiya and Zhenia are connected in any way to Cross Bow Security. They believe that Nastiya is a Russian financier who heads up a company that specializes in raising funds in her country of origin to invest in activities which can deliver maximum rewards, regardless of legality. Let’s face it, the average Russian oligarch wouldn’t be worth a rouble if he’d ever worried about the law.”

  There were knowing smiles on the faces of many of the audience, but a few of the others looked dubious. Then one of the Cross Bow men raised a hand.

  “Do you have a question, Pete?” asked Cross, somewhat reluctantly.

  “Yeah boss, it’s about Nastiya. She was with us on the Kazundu job. What if Congo saw her then. No disrespect, Nastiya, but you’re not the kind of woman that a man forgets.”