by Gordon Ryan
When the women were back in the storeroom above the dungeon, Daria took Tess by the arm. She waited until Susan had disappeared into the bailey. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those guys can get any woman they want, with as much money as they’ve got. And they’re educated men, too. I don’t understand why they want to kill us, but surely they’re not going to rape us if they take the castle, right?”
“Are you kidding? That’s the first thing they’ll do. Spoils of war and all that. Someone will take you into a back room, call his nastiest friends, and they’ll have a go at you. The others will look the other way. Eventually, they’ll tire of you and cut your throat.”
“God, Tess, you’re blunt.”
“You want the truth, don’t you? Or do you want me to pretty it up for you?”
“The truth.”
“That’s what I thought,” Tess said. “I’m torturing one of my best friends. What does that tell you about how they’re going to treat us when they take the castle? The truth? The truth is all three of us are in for a good old fashioned gang rape, if the castle falls.”
“Then you be damn sure it doesn’t fall,” Daria said.
“It won’t.”
Chapter Thirty-five:
John Liao listened to the man on the other end, then asked for clarification. It was highly irregular to question an investment decision from a Temasek executive, but this was a highly irregular request.
“You’re sure? Twenty-five billion to gold?”
There was a long delay, then Hao Chang’s voice came through, crackling. The call must come from a satellite phone.
“Yes,” Chang said on the other end. “You’ll have to liquidate stocks, and all your dollar holdings.” Like Liao, Chang spoke excellent, Oxford-accented English, his Singlish accent nearly erased.
“It will make waves.”
“Of course. So be quiet about it.”
Positioned between America and Asia, and on the edge of Europe, but outside the Eurozone, London was the capital of global currency exchange. One of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds, Temasek Holdings had extensive dealings in the city, through which a good chunk of its hundred billion dollar plus portfolio flowed.
Liao swallowed hard. One didn’t move twenty-five billion dollars into gold unless one was expecting a major currency disruption, probably caused by a war or a terrorist attack. Entire fortunes had been made or lost by predicting such things.
“You have the code?” Liao asked.
He flipped open his laptop and entered a password to get the encrypted code. Outside the window, the view into the city and across the Thames was gray and miserable. The damp, endless winters and the brutally short days were the hardest things about living in London.
“Yes, are you ready?”
“Ready,” Liao said.
“AX375E39.” A pause. “Z24TTL.” Another pause. “4YN28B. Read it back.”
Liao did. It verified.
He hesitated. He didn’t know Chang well, but he knew the man’s reputation. Every tiger economy needed teeth and claws. Some men reached the top through connections, or were simply lucky enough to be born under the right numbers. Not Hao Chang. A man like that didn’t get where he was without devouring the weak and stupid.
“Very sorry to question you, sir,” Liao said. “But you are sure with these numbers?”
“I’m sure. I want that transaction executed at precisely fourteen hundred GMT, Friday. Don’t communicate with the home office. This is a pig in a python. It must move delicately if it is to go down. Quietly, Liao, quietly.”
“You are certain?” he asked one more time. “One hundred percent certain?” Liao thought he’d heard an odd tone to those last words of Chang’s. Strain in his voice.
A delay, then Chang snapped, “You blur like sotong, or what?”
It was a Singlish expression. Blur like a squid. Squirt ink to hide one’s stupidity. Clueless, as the Americans would say.
“Very sorry, sir. I just didn’t want to make a mistake.”
Liao hung up the phone and stared out the window. Why the Singlish? Men like Liao and Chang did everything they could to purge their language of the crippled grammar and unintelligible accents of Singaporean English.
It must have been intentional, Liao decided at last. Couldn’t have been a slip-up.
He was warning Liao, that’s what. Don’t make a mistake here. Obey me without question or you’ll be driving a cab on the streets of Singapore. All that education will be swept away and you’ll be speaking like the man on the streets.
Liao called his secretary from his speaker phone. “I need you to clear my schedule for the rest of the week. Call Jensen and Li. I want them on the next flight from Frankfurt. And get the Dubai office on the phone.”
Three days was not much time, so Liao got right to work, quietly laying the groundwork for a massive move out of the dollar and into gold.
#
Six thousand kilometers away, under a leaden Vermont sky, in the shadow of a castle, Hao Chang hung up the satellite phone. Anton Kirkov pulled the knife away from his throat.
Chang lifted his fingers to his neck. The knife had been pressing against the flesh and he half-expected to feel blood.
John Liao, that fool. He’d wouldn’t execute that trade, would he? He’d call the office to verify at least one more time, more afraid of making a mistake than enraging Chang. Right?
The larger trebuchet fired. The stone flew through the air and struck the castle. Chips of rock and mortar exploded into the air. The gatehouse and the nearby walls had taken on a pock-marked appearance.
Soon, Kirkov’s men would open a breach. And then, Chang thought glumly, the castle would fall.
Chapter Thirty-six:
Once Tess saw where the enemy trained the larger trebuchet, she set about countermeasures to defeat it. She tore up every mattress or rag in the castle and made giant pillows out of rolled tapestries. Niels helped her build a system of ropes, cranes, and pulleys to maneuver the pillows into wherever they thought the trebuchet would strike next.
Neither one of them was an engineer, but it seemed to cut the force of the blows by half, and the damage—when they caught a shot—was minimal. This forced the enemy to move the trebuchet to fire at different spots, but this was time consuming and scattered the shots across a wider stretch of the castle.
“I hate to see my trebuchet defeated by what looks like giant couch cushions,” Niels said.
Peter came up the stairs beside them. He had Nick with him. “And here I was thinking that it was ironic to see you using an authentic fifteenth century Belgian tapestry—woven with scenes from a feast in a castle, no less—to defeat a castle siege.”
“Keep down, behind the battlements,” she told them. “Peter, watch Nick’s head.”
She scanned the field for crossbows trained in their direction. Earlier that morning, a small group of men had come within range and killed a man with well-directed fire. She saw nothing at the moment.
“It looks like a giant toy,” Nick said. The boy peered through a pair of merlons. “Is it just that big thing falling that throws the stone?”
“That’s called the counterweight,” she said. She was impressed with the sophistication of his thinking. “See all those guys cranking the wheel? They’re working and working to lift the weight. All the weight does is store energy. It’s kind of like a battery that way. When the weight falls, it puts all that energy into one second of force. That’s strong enough to throw the stone all the way to the walls. Do you understand?”
Nick nodded. “I think so.”
The men stepped away from the wheel. “Everybody down,” she ordered. Across the walls, men fell to their stomachs.
They lay like that for a minute, maybe two, before Tess heard the rope snap. She had to look. She lifted her head.
Damn. The stone caught a lucky gap in her defenses and bashed the wall just inches
from one of her pillows. The wall shook and splinters of stones showered into the air. She grabbed Nick and shielded his face and head.
Tess looked over the edge. Kirkov had hit that spot before. She had to buffer that spot; too many more direct shots and he’d reduce the wall to rubble.
“He’s got one thing down,” Niels said. One by one, people cautiously lifted their heads and resumed work. “He’s found the weakest spot and is attacking it.”
“What about the gates?” Peter asked. “And the vaults?”
“They’re weak, but deceptively so,” Tess said. “I shut off the power and the climate control to the vaults. They try it, they’ll get a nice surprise. It’s the same with the gatehouse. We don’t have a moat, and the portcullis is still weak, but that spot beneath the gatehouse is a kill box and they know it.”
“Kind of like your pillows,” Peter said. “The first time I saw them I thought you were grasping at straws. What’s a pillow going to do against a hundred and fifty kilogram stone?”
“Still, none of that matters if they hit us hard enough. We feel strong up here, but they hit us hard enough and we’re going to crumble.”
And with that, the last piece of the puzzle abruptly fell into place. Tess stood and blinked and then grabbed Peter’s arm.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “I know what they’re doing and why.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I know why they killed Borisenko, and why they’re trying to take the castle. And it explains why they don’t have rifles down there, sniping at us. They need to take some of us alive. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the dungeon. To make Dmitri talk.”
#
Dmitri looked up blearily when Tess and Peter arrived. Bloodshot, baggy eyes, half-naked, shivering body: he looked twenty years older. She kept her expression cold, unfeeling. Maybe it would mask the absolutely shitty way she felt when she looked at him.
“It’s only been a couple of hours since I saw you last, but god, you look terrible.” It was a lie. She’d seen him that morning and it was now late afternoon. He’d have no way to know that.
She sent off Lars, who fled as if afraid he’d be the next in chains, then took a dipper and splashed Dmitri.
“No need to bother,” Dmitri said. “I’m awake at the moment. It comes and goes, you know. Mostly comes.”
Tess, Peter, and Dmitri said nothing for a long moment. Water dripped off Dmitri’s outstretched arms and plinked to the ground. He stood in a puddle; the end result of many such dousings.
“If you could just let me sleep for a few minutes,” Dmitri said. “What’s the harm in that?”
“Like last time? That was fun, right? Drift off for a few seconds and then get jolted awake.”
“Tess, for god’s sake, don’t do this to me.”
She said nothing, but gave Peter a sideways glance to remind him to keep his mouth shut. He looked anguished.
“Please?”
“What’s the net worth of this place, Peter?” Tess asked. “If you liquidated every penny of your rich friends in both camps, how much cash could you raise?”
“A hundred billion, maybe.”
It was a staggering sum, especially since she’d seen half those people sleeping in cold rooms, crapping in garderobes and covered in mud.
“That’s a hell of a lot of money. If you took all that money, what kind of damage could you do?”
“You could corner the market in gold,” he said. “Or you could bankrupt a small country. I know I said the global system is fragile, but trillions of dollars are sloshing around in there at any one time. A hundred billion is not enough to bring it down.”
“What about someone like Alexander Borisenko, the Russian Oil Minister? He’s got access to more money, doesn’t he?”
“That would be Anton Kirkov, now, but yes, some. Not a lot at any given time.”
She kept digging. “Who moves all that government money, then? If the government of China wants to buy a bunch of treasury bills, who makes that decision?”
“Varies from country to country. It’s extremely complex, although…” He stopped and thought for a moment. “What do you know of sovereign wealth funds?”
“You mean, like Norway’s oil money?”
“Right. They’ve saved all their oil wealth and put it into something like a huge mutual fund. It’s meant to keep the social system intact once the North Sea oil runs out. Norway’s is more transparent than most. There are trillions of dollars in these funds, and some of them are vulnerable to abuse.
“Isn’t that what Hao Chang does?” she asked.
“Right. He works for Temasek, which is a fund owned by the Singapore government. He could single-handedly move billions of dollars of assets.”
“And he’s with Kirkov right now, maybe working with him, maybe a prisoner.”
Peter spoke more quickly. “There are three others in the castle who do pretty much the same thing.” He glanced at Dmitri. “I’ll tell you later who they are, if it’s important. Together, they could move three hundred billion dollars, conservatively.”
“So they kill the people they don’t need and force the others to move their money around. Take these funds and throw in the hundred billion net worth you mentioned earlier. Would four hundred billion dollars be enough?”
“Maybe,” he said in a skeptical tone. “The most dangerous thing right now would be a run on the dollar. Everyone owns a mountain of US debt or assets in one form or another. But you drive it low enough and the central banks start to intervene. They can’t see all that wealth just vanish.” He shook his head. “My gut feeling is that the money isn’t enough. You’d need something else to give the system a shock. A major terrorist incident or something.”
“The answer is right in front of your nose,” Dmitri said.
They turned to him.
“You, especially, Peter, should see it. It’s in your family. It powers everything. You said it yourself.”
“You’re talking about turning off the oil,” Peter said. “Nobody could do that except maybe the Saudi royal family. And they’d never do it. It would be suicide. They need that money and the Americans would never stand for it.”
“You’re forgetting the world’s number two oil exporter,” Dmitri said. “The Russians. And Anton Kirkov.”
“How do you mean?” Tess asked.
“Borisenko is dead. Kirkov is his number two. He got his finger on the Russian oil spigot to Europe.”
“The Russian Oil Minister is powerful,” Peter said, “but he’s not Joseph Stalin. He could shut it down for about fifteen minutes before the Federal government intervened.”
“Sure, if he were just going to shut down a few computers,” Dmitri said. “The Druzhba Pipeline is four thousand kilometers long. Knock open a few holes, take out a few pumping stations and it would be down a lot longer than fifteen minutes. Try six months, a year.”
“That’s about a million and a half barrels a day,” Peter said. His voice was barely a whisper.
“What’s that as a percent of global use?” Tess said.
“What’s two liters of water as a percent of your body weight?” Peter asked. “Take it out and you die. Oil supplies are balanced on a knife’s edge.”
“And there’s one sovereign wealth fund you missed,” Dmitri said. “Yekatarina has infiltrated the Stabilization Fund of the Russian Federation. The instant the pipeline explodes, she moves tens of billions of dollar-denominated assets into oil.”
“Then what?” Tess urged.
“We pile it on. We buy gold, we set an Saudi oil field on fire. We attack the dollar from every direction. Like a sinking ship, the dollar will create a downdraft that brings in hundreds of billions in panic sells, and shuts down half a dozen stock exchanges. A few faked terrorist incidents and false reports of chaos and the whole thing comes down. No more financial system. No more transportation. The world has about three weeks of foo
d supplies at any given time before it’s in trouble. Enter the Black Horse.”
“My god, Dmitri,” Tess said. “This so-called Black Horse is the greatest slaughter in human history. It’s the next Dark Ages.”
“They set everything in motion already. Bombing the pipeline, attacking the financial system. The only thing left is to take the castle, kill the useless people and capture everyone else.”
“Maybe it’s inevitable,” Peter said. “These guys are just bringing it on a little bit early.”
“It’s not inevitable, you ass,” Tess said.
“But how did Kirkov and Yekatarina turn so many people?” Peter asked. “That’s the part that confuses me. Most of those guys were friends of mine.”
“What? That’s the easy part,” she said. “You gave them a fertile field and then you planted the seed. That’s right. You hand-picked men and women who already thought the world was coming to an end. You convinced half of them yourself. The rest are just mercenaries, ex-Blackwater contractors, soldiers of fortune, the like. Kirkov probably threw some money at them and threatened them at the same time and they all turned.”
Lars climbed down the stairs. He avoided looking at Dmitri.
“We’ve got it, now,” Tess said.
“What did he say?” Lars asked.
“That your dreams are about to come true. We’ll see how much of Eric Bloodaxe is still in you. There will be plenty for Vikings to do, if Dmitri’s friends get their wish.”
Peter looked thoughtful, but Lars’s expression grew even more glum. It sucked to be disabused of your fantasies, she supposed.
“Let Dmitri down,” Tess said.
“Are you sure?” Peter asked.
“Look at him. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“What are you going to do?” Lars asked. “You’re not going to—?”