Freefall

by Mark Furness

  Accounts of the Iskandar’s wrong-doing - collected by investigators from the StAR partnership between the World Bank Group and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - are supported only by hearsay witness testimony, second-hand news accounts, and what have proved to be fraudulent bank documents.

  Anwar Iskandar’s role at one of the Arab world’s largest investment funds, KLR Vulcan, has long fuelled suspicion.

  As I neared London, a text arrived from Sarah:

  Sorry about the ending at Abby Green today. I have my spade in hand. Just found a doco in my files confirming Cavalcade link to KLR Vulcan. I’ll be in touch. x, SK.

  XIX

  THE FIRST words that came into my mind were ‘funeral parlour’. The only thing that suggested Cliff McDonald and I were entering The New Silk Roads investment conference was a sign on a floor-stand.

  The Park Suite Left meeting room at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in Mayfair was draped from ceiling to floor with silver-coloured curtains. Huge bouquets of red and white flowers, mixes of roses and lilies, sat on pedestal tables arranged around the walls. I could smell no perfume from the flowers, but there was plenty of perfume in the room. The competing scents of a hundred, highly-polished men and a dozen women merged with the odours of fresh coffee and French pastry.

  The people sipping, nibbling, nattering and swapping business cards talked for a trillion dollars.

  Of course none of the real owners of the money were attending BKB Nouveau’s conference. Those men and women were in their workshops and factories, offices, classrooms and hospitals, entrusting their retirement savings to the professionals. From my eavesdropping, the card-swappers’ core interest was discussing the quality of their rooms at the Dorchester and where to drink tonight after the official dinner.

  “Where did they check them in?” I said to Cliff, nodding at the throng of talking heads. His eyes were scouting the room for the registration desk.

  “What?”

  “Their eye-patches and cutlasses.”

  At my utterance, a young woman chatting to a portly fellow beside us glanced sharply our way. Her brilliant red hair was pulled into a pony tail that looked painfully tight; it had lifted her eyebrows so high it was a wonder that her eyeballs hadn’t popped from their sockets.

  “Cliff!” she said gleefully, proudly displaying her glow-in-the-dark teeth. She grasped him by the forearm. “We are so glad you could come.”

  A badge over her left breast said: Sally Hawkins. Communications Director. BKB’s elephant-eared PR woman talked brightly to Cliff about chaperoning him at their big horse race in Paris in two weeks. Cliff looked sheepish. I raised my eyebrows at him as if it was news.

  Cliff said: “Sally, this is my colleague, Gar Hart. I hoped you could fit him in today.”

  “I’ll see. This way please”.

  We followed her towards the registration desk. Cliff’s name tag was already printed. She had to handwrite my name on a label. Her face suggested I was as welcome as a bout of herpes. I had no doubt she’d Google, or probe Linked In, for my pedigree at her first private opportunity.

  “Now, gentlemen,” she said, “just a reminder that you are here today as observers. I can give you copies of the presentations on a memory stick, or email them to you later, if you prefer. But I’m afraid there will be no questions from the media.”

  Cliff lapped the invisible sugar cube from her palm and nodded assent.

  “Are you kidding?” I said.

  She reached for her whip. “I’m afraid they are our rules, Mr Hart. You don’t have to stay if you don’t like them.”

  “Let’s see how we go.”

  She moved to the side of the room and talked animatedly to a tall, young man in a dark suit wearing an earpiece. He eyed me and Cliff without expression. I couldn’t help myself; I waved to them and smiled.

  The pension fund managers – to whom BKB, Cavalcade and a handful of other investment advisors were trying to sell their wares – were quite rightly given the prime seats in the front rows on either side of a middle aisle of the main conference room. They filed in from the outer reception area, some still clutching their cups and saucers. There was a raised platform, with blue velvet skirting, sitting front and centre of the room. The platform had a speaker’s podium and a large projection screen behind it. A red-roped area at the back of the room housed about a dozen seats beside a floor stand that read: Media. Cliff and I sat with a handful of others in our holding pen.

  The program said John K Baker would be the third speaker. We sat through the opening razzle-dazzle, but when some joker from BKB launched into a diatribe about his fabulous bank, I signalled to Cliff to follow me outside. Cliff spoke briefly with the PR woman on the way out and joined me in the funeral parlour where there was self-serve coffee and tea. Cliff and I were alone.

  “Gar,” he said, stirring sugar into a cup of milky tea, “if you don’t abide by the rules, we won’t be invited back to these events.”

  I baa-ed like a sheep.

  “Ever heard of subtlety, Gar?”

  “I’ve heard of it. I’ve just not seen it crack many nuts”.

  Cliff chuckled. Maybe I was being too hard on him. Maybe. My phone whistled.

  It was Jack. “We’ve done some work on East’s Trust8 business. They’ve wiped all mention of the Trust8 connection to Cavalcade off their website. Problem for them is Trust8 also has a Chinese language website, a shadow site, if you like. There is a press release on there, written in Mandarin, where Trust8 brags about having Cavalcade as a client. It quotes East and Baker slapping each other on the back, all very palsy-walsy.”

  I walked to a corner of the room for additional privacy and told Jack about my meeting with Sarah Kerr and her theory about Egypt’s Iskandar family possibly bailing Cavalcade out after the Global Financial Crisis.

  He said: “Let’s tread carefully here. If that’s true, or partly true, the stakes are going to get very high. Did you know the youngest son, Kafr Iskandar, was blown up in his car in Rome a few months ago? The killers escaped.”

  Cliff signalled to me. Baker was on stage. I told Jack I’d call him back. I found my seat in the conference room.

  I expected to see the plump, business-suited Musketeer from the Ascot Polo Club photo with Henry and Charles East. The man on the stage was similar, but he was leaner, with close-cropped, dark hair and a neat, thin moustache on his top lip. His nose looked narrower. He had a military fitness to him and was a much more elegant man. Plastic surgery? And a personal trainer? Or maybe cancer was trimming his physique, early stages.

  Baker urged delegates to think with an open mind about investing alongside Cavalcade in regions that may be difficult for Western corporations to understand, such as North Africa, South America, India and China. His pitch was that Cavalcade had a track record of picking the right local partners – particularly in the construction of infrastructure such as roads, airports and housing – in high growth, but politically risky parts of the world.

  During question time, a couple of fund managers took to a microphone. Baker’s sidekicks sidled up to the managers like real estate agents’ flunkies at house auctions tagging clients for follow-up, and exchanged handshakes and business cards. Baker grinned like he was spearing fish in a bucket. When he walked off the stage and down the aisle towards the back doors, I followed his entourage of two men and a woman.

  The pug-dog-eyed PR woman blocked my way.

  “Thanks,” I said and handed her my name tag. She spluttered something, but her dagger-heeled wheels and stumpy legs made her too slow to keep pace with me. I caught Baker near the lifts.

  “Mr Baker, I hoped we might have a word.”

  “And you are?”

  “My name is Gar Hart. I’m from The Citizen.”

  “Advertising sales?”

  “Reporter.”

  “You’re off your patch. Is that Australian I can hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know your boss,” he said.


  “Really.”

  “Both of them actually: Ailsa Dusseldorf and Zachary Werner.”

  Baker’s technique was quaintly old school: impress and intimidate by claiming intimacy with those who pay your wages. I had to acknowledge I bounced a little. I wondered if he knew I was on probation at work and facing criminal charges.

  “How well do you know Mr Charles East?” I said.

  “His name rings a faint bell.”

  “His son rode your polo ponies. You do business with Charles East in China. They live in Sydney.”

  “Is that so? We do business with a lot of people. I can’t recall them all.”

  The lift doors opened. I followed Baker and his people inside. His male sidekicks stood side-by-side between me and Baker, a suited female behind him. They formed a neat triangle with him in the middle.

  I could put him on the spot: show him the polo photo I had in my jacket pocket of him and the Easts; press him on the Easts and Trust8; ask him why the murdered psych nurse Bruce Tyson had called him; grill him on the Egyptians and his dead business partner, Jean-Paul Marais. I may never get another chance to corner him in person, but to spit all that out here would just telegraph our half-thought-out punches and give him the chance to duck for deeper cover. He was already junking his links with Trust8.

  As Baker stepped out of the lift, I said: “The Citizen is doing a series on the world’s leading investment advisory businesses, Mr Baker. Cavalcade is one of the firms we’re profiling. It’s a great chance for you to tell your story to the market, expand on what you just said to this conference.”

  “What do you really want, Mr Hart?” said Baker.

  “I’ve just transferred to London from the Sydney office. It seems I was misled about the depth of your relationship with the Easts. We can clear everything up with an interview.”

  “Look,” he said, “give my colleagues your business card. I promise we’ll come back to you. Very soon.”

  I handed my card to the woman in his entourage. I felt I’d lit a fuse.

  XX

  CLIFF and I had lunch at a nearby pub. From our conversation, he’d definitely been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was letting it dull with age. Even so, he wouldn’t drink more than one pint of beer. He was very fond of Claire Styler. They were housemates once, he conceded. I began to suspect they were roommates too, but he didn’t like that terrain and shot back to the office before I could grill him further.

  Outside the pub, rain threatened, but it looked a way off, so I took a stroll around Hyde Park near the Dorchester Hotel. I phoned Malcolm as I walked and promised to visit him the next day. When the rain caught me, I realised I’d left my overcoat in the Dorchester cloakroom. By the time I got there, the official part of the conference was over, but a few of the delegates were sitting at the Promenade Bar off the marble-pillared lobby. I joined the throng. I thought I’d eavesdrop, maybe pick up some gossip on Baker, and I felt like a guiltless drink without Cliff propped beside me sipping like a sparrow.

  I found a tall stool at the oval bar and ordered a Martini, which appeared to be the poison of choice. My phone pinged. It was a text from Cliff with a note: Here’s how you crack nuts It included a link to a YouTube video of a Labrador dog nosing almonds in their shells across a shed floor towards a horse that proceeded to smash the nuts with its hoof for the dog to eat the kernels. I laughed too loudly and ordered a second Martini.

  “Good joke?” said a female voice at my back. She was part of a couple aged in their early thirties, I guessed. They could have been brother and sister. With her liquorice hair and cream complexion, she looked a little like Claire. Her partner was fair-skinned too: tall and lean with a long, black fringe he kept combing with his fingers. They were both dressed for the Dorchester and formed their vowels as well as anyone at Buckingham Palace. We chatted. I immediately forgot their names.

  I stepped to the edge of the bar and made a phone call to inform Cliff I’d be going straight back to Brighton from London and that I’d see him in the office in the morning. I asked him to gather all he could about the Iskandar corruption allegations in Egypt, and Kafr Iskandar’s car bomb murder in Rome.

  I returned to the bar to collect my overcoat off my seat and finish my Martini. The young woman pleaded with me to play her favourite YouTube dog video. I opened my phone and she dictated her search words. A few seconds later we watched a dog dressed in a skirt stand on its hind legs and dance to mariachi music for minutes on end. I don’t know what happened to time after that.

  I remember the marbled walls of the Dorchester toilet, and standing at the basin, looking in the mirror, splashing my face with cold water, having trouble staying upright. The room blurred. The young man with the fringe was standing behind me. I had no resistance when he took me by the arm. He led me, bobbing like a string puppet, into a cubicle and pushed me to sitting on the toilet seat. He locked the door behind us. I tried to yell but no sound came out. I could only watch. He pulled off my suit jacket and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. Then he loosened my tie and unbuttoned my collar. He lifted my tie over my head, with the knot still fastened, and hung it on the door hook with my jacket. He unbuttoned my shirt cuff and rolled the sleeve to above my elbow. I tried to move, I tried to yell again: nothing. He looped my tie over my arm, slid it to just above my elbow and pulled it tight, very tight. I saw my blue veins bulge inside my elbow joint. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket a small black case, something you’d keep reading glasses in. He extracted a syringe, neat and small. Not fucking air, I thought, not fucking air. He tapped my vein with a finger, puffed it up. He stuck the needle in, tugged the plunger back a little, until my blood swam with the clear fluid already in the syringe, then he squeezed. The fog was quick, warm at first, and soft. Nice. The gaps between my heartbeats got wide and blackness swallowed me.

  XXI

  I HEARD Fish howling, way out in space, his night voice singing with his choir of sirens.

  I blinked. The light hurt my eyes.

  “Edgar, can you hear me?” A mouth was opening and closing inside ginger fur on a ballooning bald head. The speaker tucked a penlight in his mouth and pulled my eyelid up to spear the light beams in. He slapped my face with his open hand.

  “Now stay with me, Edgar. Keep your eyes open. Tell me your full name. Talk to me, Edgar.”

  “Gar,” I said.

  He showed me a photo driver’s licence. “Is this you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are taking you to hospital now, Edgar. You’re back with us. You’re a lucky man. We thought we’d lost you there.”

  “Where is he?” I decoded my vision of the speaker. He was wearing a paramedic’s uniform.

  “Who?”

  “The one, the one who did this.”

  “Here we go, Edgar,” the mouth said. The paramedic and his partner lifted me off the floor and laid me on their trolley. I saw their medical case on the bathroom bench; I recognised the label Naloxone on the bottle beside it, a used syringe next to that. So their guess was a heroin overdose? They must have got it right because I was back from wherever I’d fallen. I gagged on the smell and taste of my vomit. The man wiped my nose and mouth with a wet tissue. Nausea twisted my gut. They rolled me on the trolley out of the toilet, through the main lobby of the Dorchester Hotel.

  The glow-in-the-dark teeth and red hair of the BKB PR woman caught my eye as they wheeled me past a huddle of gawping conference delegates.

  “God damn drug addicts,” said a male voice with an American accent from inside the huddle. “They’ll as hell do it anywhere.”

  A YOUNG, MALE POLICE constable took a statement from me as I lay in a bed in the emergency department of St Thomas’s Hospital on the banks of the Thames. It was clear he thought I was cooking up the angle that a mysterious couple had spiked my drink with a stupefying drug and then injected me with heroin. As far as he was concerned, I was lamely trying to cover my butt with my family; his eyes said so
. My mother-in-law and my children were on their way from Brighton, the nursing staff interrupted us to say.

  “Why would someone try to murder you in a toilet at the Dorchester Hotel, Mr Hart?”

  I ran the next steps in the conversation through my head before speaking. Do you have a day, Constable? See, I have this global conspiracy theory ... it goes like this ... nothing proven, of course.

  I said to him: “I have a vivid imagination, Constable. I’ll leave my statement there, thanks.”

  As the constable completed his forms, I remembered Steele’s line at our table at the Red Emperor when we talked about Bart Hill’s OD: A little dab’ll do ya. I’d just had a dab too much, that’s what the constable had concluded. So had the hospital staff; they’d seen it all before. Mine was just a new name on the A&E admission sheet with an old story.

  Time went somewhere. Kate, Alice and Hugo walked in. They had looks on their faces like someone had died. Only Alice gave me a hug.

  The staff suggested counselling. Kate collected the information papers after I threw them on the floor in the curtained hospital cubicle.

  I had to acknowledge that my adversaries’ tactics were first class. The fringe-comber had left me inside the toilet cubicle with the syringe hanging out of my arm and a plastic packet of high-grade smack in my shirt pocket. I’d been found with my wallet intact and my phone working: nothing stolen. It added up to a reckless, middle-aged tourist on a binge who’d gone too far on a new supply in a big city he didn’t understand.

  The barman and other staff at the Dorchester confirmed that I did have a drink with a couple. Two drinks apparently. The couple had paid for their drinks by cash and left. I was the dodgy one, they said. I’d left an unpaid bar tab.

  What had saved me, I learned from the medico’s at the hospital, were relentless calls to my phone combined with Hugo’s police-whistle ring-tone, which had alerted another man who was using the hotel’s toilet. He had pushed open my cubicle door and called the hotel staff.