The Cotton Malone Series 7-Book Bundle

by Steve Berry

  He watched as the man called Godfrey disappeared into the south ambulatory. He’d dealt with many people in his life, but the amoral despot who’d just left genuinely made him uneasy. How long he’d been in Britain was unknown. The first call came a week ago, and the details of their relationship had subsequently been finalized through more unexpected calls. Ashby had easily arranged his end of the bargain, and he’d been patiently waiting for confirmation that Godfrey had done the same.

  Now he knew.

  Two days.

  TWENTY

  LOIRE VALLEY

  2:45 PM

  Thorvaldsen had been driven south, from Paris, to a quiet French hollow sheltered by vine-clad hills. The château sat moored like a ship in the middle of the meandering Cher, about fifteen kilometers from where the muddy river entered the more majestic Loire. Bridging the waterway, its charming frontage of brick, stone, turrets, spires, and a conical slate roof bordered on the fantastical. Not gray, or severely constructed for defense, or decaying from neglect, instead it cast a whimsical air of medieval majesty.

  He sat in the château’s main salon beneath chestnut rafters, magnificent in their centuries-old workmanship. Two wrought-iron electric candelabra provided harsh light. The paneled walls were dotted with superb canvases by Le Sueur, a work by Van Dyck, and some first-rate oil portraits of what he assumed were cherished ancestors. The château’s owner sat across from him in an exquisite Henri II leather armchair. She possessed a charming voice, quiet manners, and memorable features. From everything he knew about Eliza Larocque, she was clear-sighted and decisive, but also stubborn and obsessive.

  He could only hope that the latter trait proved correct.

  “I’m somewhat surprised by your visit,” she said to him.

  Though her smile seemed sincere, it flashed too automatically.

  “I’ve known of your family for many years,” he told her.

  “And I know your porcelain. We have quite a collection in the dining room. Two circles, with a line beneath—that symbol represents the ultimate in quality.”

  He bowed his head, acknowledging her compliment. “My family has worked for centuries to establish that reputation.”

  Her dark eyes displayed a peculiar mixture of curiosity and caution. She was clearly uneasy, and trying hard to conceal it. His detectives had informed him of her jet’s arrival. They’d then tracked her from Orly Airport until sure of her destination. So while Malone and Sam trawled for information in Paris, he’d headed south to do some fishing of his own.

  “I have to say, Herre Thorvaldsen,” she said, keeping to English, “I agreed to see you out of curiosity. I flew from New York last night, so I’m a bit fatigued and not up to visitors.”

  He watched her face, a pleasant composition of graceful curves, noticing the corners of her mouth as they angled into another smile of an accomplished manipulator.

  “Is this your family’s country estate?” he asked, trying to keep her off guard, and he caught a momentary flush of annoyance.

  She nodded. “Built in the 16th century. Modeled after Chenonceau, which stands not far from here. Another idyllic wonder.”

  He admired a dark oak mantelpiece across the room. Unlike other French homes he’d visited, which were bare and suggestive of tombs, this house was clearly no sepulcher.

  “You realize, Madame Larocque, that my financial resources are substantially greater than yours. Perhaps by as much as ten billion euros.”

  He studied her high cheekbones, serious eyes, and firm mouth. He thought the stark contrast between her creamy patina and her ebony hair intentional. Given her age, he doubted if the hair color was natural. She was, without question, an attractive woman. Confident and smart, too. Accustomed to having her way—unaccustomed to bluntness.

  “And how would the fact of your obvious wealth interest me?”

  He allowed a measured pause to break the natural flow between them, then said, “You’ve insulted me.”

  Puzzlement crept into her eyes. “How is that possible? We just met.”

  “I control one of the largest and most successful corporations in Europe. My ancillary businesses, which include oil and gas, telecommunications, and manufacturing, stretch globally. I employ more than eighty thousand people. My annual revenues far exceed those of all your entities combined. Yet you insult me.”

  “Herre Thorvaldsen, you must explain yourself.”

  She was off guard. But that was the beauty of blind attacks. The advantage always lay with the attacker. True in Mexico City two years ago—equally true here today.

  “I want to be a part of what you’re planning,” he declared.

  “And what is that?”

  “Though I wasn’t on your jet last evening, I can only surmise Robert Mastroianni—a friend of mine, by the way—has been extended an invitation. Yet I am to be shunned.”

  She kept her face as stone cold as a grave marker. “An invitation to what?”

  “The Paris Club.”

  He decided to not allow her the luxury of a response. “You have a fascinating ancestry. Directly descended from Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, who was born near Ajaccio, Corsica, on March 8, 1764. He became the implacable foe of Napoleon Bonaparte. With marvelous skill, he manipulated international politics to the eventual undoing of his lifelong enemy. A classic Corsican vendetta. His weapons not guns or bombs, but the intrigues of diplomacy. Its coup de grâce, the destiny of nations.”

  He paused while her mind chewed on his facts.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I’m not an enemy. Quite the contrary. I admire what you are doing, and want to be a part.”

  “Assuming for a moment that what you say is even partly true, why would I entertain such a request?”

  Her voice was warm and lazy, signaling not the slightest hint of alarm. So he allowed his face to take on an equal look of shrewdness. “The answer to that is quite simple.”

  She was listening.

  “You have a security leak.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  PARIS

  Malone followed Sam back downstairs, where they located a row of cluttered shelves marked business.

  “Foddrell and I email each other a lot,” Sam said. “He’s big against the Federal Reserve system. Calls it a giant conspiracy that will be the downfall of America. Some of what he says makes sense, but most of his views are really out there.”

  He smiled. “Good to see you have limits.”

  “Contrary to what you think, I’m not a fanatic. I just think that there are people out there who can manipulate our financial systems. Not to take over the planet or destroy the world. Just for greed. An easy way to get, or stay, rich. What they do can affect national economies in a lot of ways, none of which are good.”

  He didn’t disagree, but there was still the matter of proof. Before they’d left Christiangade he’d perused both Sam’s and Jimmy Foddrell’s websites. Not all that dissimilar, except, as Sam noted, Foddrell’s predicted global gloom and doom in a more radical tone.

  He grabbed Sam by the shoulder. “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “That note upstairs is talking about a book, written by a certified financial planner, who’s also into the same kind of things Foddrell and I talk about. A few months ago, I found a copy and read it.”

  He released his grip and watched as Sam scanned the crowded shelves.

  Malone’s trained eye also assessed the books. He saw that they were a hodgepodge of titles, most of which he would have never bought from people who lugged them into his shop by the crateful. He assumed that since they were for sale in Paris, on the Left Bank, a few hundred yards from the Seine and Notre Dame, their value elevated.

  “Here it is.”

  Sam removed an oversized gold-colored paperback, titled The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.

  “Foddrell had to leave this here,” Sam said. “There’s no way there just happened to be a copy. It’s pretty obscure.”
/>
  People continued to browse. More wandered in from the cold. Malone casually searched for Skinny, but didn’t see him. He was reasonably sure what was happening, but decided patience was the call of this day.

  He relieved Sam of the book and thumbed through the pages until he spotted a slip of paper pressed inside.

  Back to the mirror.

  He shook his head.

  They returned to the upper floor and saw written on the same pink note that had led them downstairs:

  Café d’Argent, 34 Rue Dante

  Thirty minutes

  Malone stepped back across the upper floor to the casement window. The plane trees below stood lifeless, limbs bare as brooms, their spindly shadows already lengthening in the midafternoon sun. Three years ago he and Gary had visited the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Gary had wanted to learn about what his father did for a living, and the museum turned out to be fascinating. They’d enjoyed the exhibits and he’d bought Gary a book, Handbook of Practical Spying, a lighthearted look at spy craft. One of the chapters, titled “Keeping Caution from the Wind,” explained how contacts could be safely approached.

  So he waited, knowing what was coming.

  Sam stepped close.

  He heard the door below open, then close, and he spotted Skinny leaving the shop holding what appeared, in color and shape, to be the Jekyll Island book from downstairs.

  “It’s an old ploy that nobody ever uses,” he said. “A way to check out who wants to meet you. Your friend has been watching too many spy movies.”

  “He was here?”

  He nodded. “He seemed interested in us when we were out front, then came inside and, I assume, hid behind the shelves downstairs while we found the book. Since you sent him your picture, he knew who to look for. Once satisfied that I looked okay, he came back up here before we did, and went back down a minute ago.”

  “You think that’s Foddrell?” Sam asked, pointing.

  “Who else could it be?”

  Eliza came alert. Not only did Henrik Thorvaldsen know her business, he apparently knew something she didn’t. “A security leak?”

  “One of the individuals, part of your Paris Club, is not what he appears to be.”

  “I haven’t said that any club exists.”

  “Then you and I have nothing more to talk about.”

  Thorvaldsen rose.

  “I’ve enjoyed my visit to your estate. If you ever come to Denmark, I would be pleased to host you at my home, Christiangade. I’ll leave you now so you may rest from your trip.”

  She gave a cautious laugh. “Are you always so grandiose?”

  He shrugged. “Today, two days before Christmas, I took the time to travel here and speak with you. If you insist that there is nothing for us to discuss, then I shall leave. The presence of your security problem will eventually become obvious. Hopefully, the damage will be minimal.”

  She’d acted so carefully, choosing her members with deliberate care, limiting the total to seven, herself included. Each recruit had signaled acceptance by anteing a twenty-million-euro initiation. Each had also taken an oath of secrecy. Early efforts in South America and Africa had generated unprecedented profits, and secured everyone’s continued allegiance, since nothing fortified a conspiracy better than success. Yet this Dane of immense wealth and influence, an outsider, seemed to know everything.

  “Tell me, Herre Thorvaldsen, are you seriously interested in joining?”

  His eyes twinkled for a moment. She’d struck a chord.

  He was a squat man, made even shorter by a crooked spine and bent knees. He wore a baggy sweater, oversized corduroy trousers, and dark sneakers, perhaps as a way to mask the deformity. His thick silver hair hung long, unkempt. His tufted eyebrows flared bushy, like wire brushes. Wrinkles in his face had evolved into deep clefts. He could have easily been mistaken for a homeless person, but maybe that was the whole idea.

  “Can we stop the pretense?” he asked. “I came for a specific reason. One, I hoped, was to our mutual benefit.”

  “Then, by all means, let us talk.”

  His impatience seemed to recede as he sensed her concession.

  He sat. “I learned of your Paris Club through careful investigation.”

  “And what piqued your interest?”

  “I became aware of some skillful manipulation occurring in certain foreign currency exchanges. Clearly, not natural occurrences. Of course, there are sites on the Internet that profess to know a lot more about you, and your activities, than I do.”

  “I’ve read some of those. You surely know that such postings are nonsense.”

  “I would agree.” He paused. “But one in particular caught my eye. I believe it’s called GreedWatch. That site has surely been striking a bit too close to home. I like the quotation at the top of its home page, from Sherlock Holmes. There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

  She knew the site and its webmaster, and Thorvaldsen was correct. It had struck close. Which was why, three weeks ago, she’d ordered remedial measures. She wondered, did this man know about those, too? Why else mention that specific website?

  Thorvaldsen reached into his trouser pocket, withdrew a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to her. “I printed that off GreedWatch yesterday.”

  She unfolded and read.

  Has an Antichrist Come?

  If you analyze the current systematic conquering of the independent countries of the world you can easily find that, behind all of these aggressions, a pattern of unique power emerges that includes economy, military, media, and politicians. I will try to present that this power belongs to the world’s financiers. I think an Antichrist is at the head of these tyrants. Her name is Eliza Larocque. She wants to rule the world, totally invisibly, by the secretly possessed economic power her family has built through centuries.

  There is no safer and more profitable business than lending money to countries. Like financiers joining together, refusing to compete with one another, and manipulating markets and currency to their collective advantage pose a grave threat. Larocque and her associates possess a hierarchically organized structure that buys or acquires shares in everything valuable in the global market. They may, for instance, possess Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and, from the top of their Olympus, watch these companies fight each other on the market. But thanks to the capitalist system and its secret business regulation policy, nobody except them is able to know. By controlling the governments in the Western countries, they control the whole Western world. If you follow global political policy you can easily see that democratically elected leaders of countries change, but policy follows the interests of the rich and therefore stays more or less the same. Numerous elements point out the fact that there is an invisible organization that rules the world. The facts I have collected about Eliza Larocque tells me that she leads that organization. I am talking here about a conspiracy that captures almost the whole world.

  She smiled. “Antichrist?”

  “Granted, the wording is unorthodox, the conclusions bold, but it is on the right track.”

  “I assure you, Herre Thorvaldsen, the last thing I want is to rule the world. Far too much trouble.”

  “I agree. You simply want to manipulate it to the mutual advantage of you and your colleagues. If that manipulation has some … political fallout … so what? It’s profit that matters.” Thorvaldsen paused. “That’s why I’m here. I’d like to share in those profits.”

  “You couldn’t possibly need money.”

  “Nor could you. But that’s not the point, is it?”

  She asked, “And what would you have to offer, in return for that sharing?”

  “One of your members is in financial trouble. His portfolio has been stretched to the breaking point. He’s heavily in debt. His lifestyle demands massive amounts of capital, money he simply does not have. A series of bad investments, overextensions, and carelessness have brought him to the verge of collapse.”

  “Why do
es this man interest you?”

  “He doesn’t. But in order to command your attention, I knew that I would have to provide something that you don’t already know. This seemed ideal for that purpose.”

  “And why should I care about this man’s troubles?”

  “Because he’s your security leak.”

  Her spine shivered. Everything she’d envisioned could be in jeopardy if one of the chosen had sold out the others.

  She needed to know, “Who is this man?”

  “Lord Graham Ashby.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ENGLAND

  A late lunch was waiting for Ashby when he returned to Salen Hall. His paternal family’s ancestral seat was a classical battlemented manor, perched amid twenty-four forested hectares to which Ashbys had held the title since 1660.

  He entered the main dining room and took his customary seat at the north end of the table where a portrait of his great-grandfather, the sixth duke of Ashby, a close confidant of Queen Victoria I, watched his back. Outside, frigid December air swirled with white flakes—a prelude, he believed, to a coming snow and Christmas, just two days away.

  “I heard you’d returned,” a female voice said.

  He glanced up from the table at Caroline. She was wearing a full-length silk charmeuse gown, bare legs slipping in and out of a high-cut slit. A kimono-style robe covered her thin shoulders, open in front, the gown’s golden coloring matching her long, curly hair.

  “I see you’ve dressed as a good mistress should.” She smiled. “Isn’t that my job? To please the master?” He liked their give-and-take. His wife’s prudish ways had long ago become tiresome. She lived in London, her apartment filled with pyramids under which she lay for hours each day, hoping their magical power would cleanse her soul. He hoped the apartment would burn, with her inside it, but no such luck had come his way. He’d been lucky, though, in that they were childless, estranged for years, which explained his many mistresses, Caroline the latest and longest lasting.