by Mark Furness
The Sidewinder pub on Upper James Street in the Kemp Town area of Brighton was a few minutes’ walk from the Halliday’s apartment. Sarah and I found a corner and a sofa next to a low table on which to perch our first bottle of Bordeaux. We toasted Malcolm.
“Did you ever hear him say he hated anyone?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” she said.
“I say hate all the time. One night I was out with Malcolm and I realised he never used that word.”
“To Saint Malcolm,” she said, and we clinked glasses again. Sarah went outside for a cigarette.
Sitting alone, my thoughts buzzed like disturbed insects without a place to land. I conjured a montage of images: Silver Dog’s shot head wearing my Buck mask; Henry East’s stitched lips painted in yellow antiseptic; Bryan Tyson’s burnt visage; the fringe-comber’s grin as he pressed the needle in my vein; and my imagining of Hugo being chloroformed in a filthy council flat.
Sarah returned. She ruffled my hair. “You’re not here,” she said.
“Sorry. I’ve lost my job.”
I told her about the Dorchester and the consequences. When I told her about Hugo, she put a hand on my arm and kept it there.
“The truth will out,” she said. “And your boss is under a lot of pressure.”
She was right. I couldn’t see what was happening to Jack.
“Don’t lose heart, Edgar Hart. I gave up the chase when I moved to Bath, but now you’ve cracked the whip on me, I’m enjoying it. I need you.”
“It might be a short ride,” I said.
She ignored me. “I’ve been back to one of my contacts. She worked in the Cavalcade finance department. It appears I made a mistake about the Egyptians.”
I put my head in my hands. I had wanted something fresh to take to Jack, to plead my case for reinstatement, and Sarah and the Egyptian money-connection to Baker were my best bet.
“Cheer up,” she said. “You might want to take notes. I just had the wrong Arabs.”
I topped up our glasses, took a digital voice recorder from my pocket and switched it on. The pub was noisy, so I pulled out my notepad and pen too.
Sarah drank and talked. I drank and scribbled, tossing in the odd question. Sarah’s theory, supported by her friend who had worked at Cavalcade, was this; the Cavalcade founders, Baker and Marais, had personally borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in the surging global stock markets through the early to mid-2000s. It made each of them billionaires on paper. But when the global financial system collapsed during 2008, Baker and Marais were too slow to sell out. By early 2009, their personal debts far outweighed the value of their assets, and their lenders - global banks and wealthy private investors - wanted their money back. Baker and Marais couldn’t pay.
Then along came a white knight: an agent claiming to represent Arab oil money. The agent offered to rescue the Cavalcade partners if they would help place oil dollars around the world for safe keeping in the event that his Arab employer’s enemies - such as internal political rivals or hostile external forces like the United States - tried to oust him.
“So who was Cavalcade’s white knight?”
“Muammar Gaddafi.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“He wasn’t dead when he bailed them out. He left an Aladdin’s Cave behind, with some vicious people holding the keys.”
Sarah’s friend further claimed that when the Libyan dictator was still alive, he had a secret meeting in Paris and personally appointed Baker as his agent. Baker’s brief was to invest funds on behalf of the Libyan people, but the money trail between Baker and the Gaddafis had to be fingerprint-free.
“What do you mean, fingerprint-free?”
“No documentation.”
“So what happened to Marais?”
“He didn’t want to deal with Gaddafi.”
“So Baker had him killed?”
“Gaddafi’s mercenaries did the deed. Two French nationals who were crewing the yacht the night Marais drowned.”
I opened a photo on my phone. I showed Sarah the picture of her and Baker, him standing with his arm around her shoulder by the Brighton seaside.
“How well do you know Baker?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I want to.”
“Trust involves risk, Gar.”
“I keep taking risks and I keep getting burned - and so are my kids now.”
“You don’t strike me as the type to take pictures at face value, so don’t start now. It was during that event with Baker that I met my current contact inside Cavalcade.”
“Who is?”
“Mine.”
I grinned.
She reached for my phone and I handed it to her. “Though I did like that dress,” she said, examining her portrait, apparently accidentally swiping to the next photo when she handed it back to me.
“Where did you get that one?” She was looking at the image of Baker with the former World Bank President, Rene Gasquet, at BKB Nouveau’s Paris racecourse event.
“It was on our files in head office.”
“Do you know who that is?”
“I’ve looked up Gasquet. When he retired, he did some consulting work for Petro Europa’s operations in Libya. Do you think the World Bank was, or is tied up with Baker?”
“I don’t know about Gasquet,” said Sarah. “I mean him.” She pointed at the third man in the photo with Baker and Gasquet, the one wearing the caterpillar moustache.
“And he is?”
“Who do you think Baker was working through? He couldn’t have direct contact with Gaddafi on an ongoing basis. Baker went through his agent. Until a few years ago, Nasim Naama was the Director General of the Libyan Investment Authority.”
Sarah spelt out Naama’s name, which I wrote in my notebook, and she went outside to smoke another cigarette.
I Googled on my phone and found a paragraph on Naama in The London Examiner online from 2011: The head of the Libyan Investment Authority, Nasim Naama, has resigned his post as the rebel forces fighting the dictator Mohammed Gaddafi gain ground. Naama said he could no longer perform his duties for Libya. Naama has sought refuge in Vienna, Austria, with members of his family.
Then I searched for the Libyan Investment Authority. A BBC News story dated November 2014 read: Some US$3bn (£1.8bn) is reported missing from the accounts of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA).
....investigators say they have found evidence of ‘misappropriation, misuse and misconduct of funds’ at the LIA headquarters in Tripoli.
The LIA has total funds worth about $70bn. It was set up in 2006 by Saif al-Islam, one of Muammar Gaddafi's sons, to manage Libya’s oil revenues. The LIA has overseas investments such as stakes in the Italian bank UniCredit, the Italian football club Juventus, and Pearson group, the owner of the Financial Times.
I felt Sarah’s hand on my shoulder. She looked at my screen.
“Do you believe $3 billion went missing?”
“What do you think?”
“A think it’s a drop in the ocean. The United Nations Security Council had frozen a hundred and seventy billion US dollars’ of foreign Libyan assets by the time Gaddafi was killed. But the UN was talking about known assets. What I’m talking about with Baker is the other money, the deep, black stuff: the money with all fingerprints removed.”
Sarah sat down, drank the last of her wine and ran an index finger around the rim of her glass, making it sing an eerie opera. “I think that three billion dollars was a smoke screen used by Gaddafi’s surviving cronies to cover their tracks. It’s nothing in the bigger scheme of things, is it? Someone might even hand a little back to the authorities in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Everyone’s a winner. End of story.”
I saw my Henry East theory crystallise. Charles East had pressed his son to admit to a smaller crime to close the official case and cover up a larger one lurking out the back. I saw a dotted line from Henry’s Double Happi
ness inside share trade in Sydney connecting to Charles East’s Trust8 operation in Shanghai, linking now to Cavalcade in London, and then Gaddafi in Tripoli, Libya.
“How did Baker get the fingerprints off the money?”
“That sounds like your job, Gar.”
Sarah kissed me on the cheek and left me in the pub scratching notes about possibilities. I had my world map at the Halliday’s flat. I now had Tripoli to add.
As I walked back, I felt like we’d harpooned a whale - with a sewing needle and some cotton thread. Captain Ahab went insane chasing the uncatchable whale, Moby Dick, of course, and I was out of a job. I could even go to jail.
“You were a long time with Sarah,” Kate said when I got back.
Alice was standing beside her and raised her eyebrows at me. “There’s lipstick on your cheek, Dad”.
XXVIII
A DOCTOR from St Thomas’s phoned me at Kate’s the next morning while I was eating scrambled eggs at the kitchen table. Kate was faking reading a newspaper, her ears twitching. I took the wireless handset into the adjoining lounge room.
“Mr Hart,” said the doctor, “we have the results of your blood tests. I know you were anxious. There was heroin in your system. No HIV, hepatitis, or other nasties, but your liver enzymes were raised. That’s probably alcohol-related. We also found scopolamine.”
“I’m sorry. Scopola-what?”
“Sco-pol-a-mine. It has several uses. Motion sickness. Scuba divers use it for nausea. Sometimes it’s administered as a pre-medication for surgery. It’s an uncommon drug, but it has been used for nightclub robberies around our hospital catchment in London from time-to-time. They spike drinks with it.”
“Side effects?”
“A decent dose will give you loss of motor skills, blurred vision, drowsiness, hallucinations.”
“So why would I overdose myself on that stuff so I can have waking nightmares, then put enough heroin in my veins to fell a horse?”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make much sense.”
“Doctor, can I put you on speaker phone. I’d like my mother-in-law to hear what you have to say.”
I took the handset into the kitchen and put it on the table beside Kate. Her face softened as the doctor supported my version of events at the Dorchester. I asked him to provide a copy of the test results and a summary of the hospital’s experience with scopolamine so that I might use it to assist my pleading with the police.
About an hour later, the doctor emailed my blood analysis to me, and a paragraph confirming the presence of scopolamine. I pulled some research on scopolamine off the internet and forwarded the lot to Jack with a detailed defence. I included a summary of Hugo’s internet luring and assault. I didn’t mention Ms Hoodie’s bribe offer; it was too hard to explain in writing.
I brewed a pot of tea and waited. Oddly, when Jack’s call arrived, it was on Kate’s fixed home line.
He said: “Pull your battery out of your mobile phone - now.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, mate, please.”
I did as he asked. I knew Jack used an encrypted Blackberry, changed his email addresses regularly, had his office swept for bugs at least twice a week, and switched phone handsets, laptops and SIM cards like he changed his clothes. He had done so ever since he received a visit from an official of the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic asking why he was writing a story on the financial affairs of a high-ranking Communist Party official, when the story was still only an idea he’d discussed with The Citizen’s head office by a private conference call between London and Shanghai.
“Even this fixed line is risky,” he said. “But we need to talk.”
“You got my email about the Scopolamine?”
“Yes. I’ll get to that in a second. Listen, our tech people have looked into the email glitches Claire reported. There’s been a foreign body in our system. We’ve traced it to an internet service provider in Mumbai. The trail blurs from there, but that’s spilt milk.”
“So they could have seen what I just sent you?”
“There’re a lot of footprints in yours and Claire’s email boxes, and more recently, Cliff McDonald’s. We’ve put some fresh security protocols in place at our end but we think they are still in your handset. A bug: tracking software of some sort. Do you have GPS location services switched on?”
“Sure. Compass, maps; I’ve got a jogging app.”
“Anyone else have access to your phone recently?”
“Apart from the Dorchester?”
“We’ll get to that. I’m talking from weeks ago. We’ve traced back that far.”
Sandy Wallace. I was asleep when she climbed out of my bed; heavily asleep, now I thought of it. My phone was on my bedside table when I woke and she was gone. My birth-date password wasn’t hard to guess: lazy, easy to remember - stupid. Charles East and Silver Dog could have eavesdropped on every email and conversation I’d had for weeks, maybe even turned on the microphone remotely and listened to me talk with Baker in the lift at the Dorchester. I told Jack.
Jack said: “Go to the nearest phone shop and buy a new one. Get a new SIM card and phone number, and buy a new laptop too. Don’t use your name to buy them. Get Kate to do it. We’ll reimburse her. Then phone me back on this number.”
Jack gave me his latest dial code.
“I thought I was off the payroll,” I said.
“Get the fresh phone and we’ll talk.”
“Can you speak with Kate,” I said. “She’ll need to hear this directly from you.”
Kate and Jack chatted, hung up.
“You’re lucky to have Jack,” she said. Kate had always wanted Jack for Charlotte.
About an hour later, sipping a mug of tea while standing on the roof terrace on a clear, cool, windless morning, I called Jack with my new kit. I explained Sarah Kerr’s Muammar Gaddafi theory. I thanked chance that I’d used a separate digital recorder and not my phone to note our conversation in the Sidewinder pub. I remembered it had been noisy, too noisy, I hoped, for a remote listener to hear the conversation via my phone through my jacket pocket. Then I told Jack about Ms Hoodie’s job offer.
“I’ve put Alice in the crosshairs of these scumbags, and worse with Hugo,” I said. “I don’t know where to go next.”
“Do you think you can stick Alice and Hugo on your back and run for the rest of your life?”
“Yeah, okay. I’m not that fit.”
Jack had spoken to The Citizen’s key decision-maker, Zac Werner, after our IT people found the bugs in Claire’s and my emails. Jack was confident that, armed with the hospital report on the scopolamine and Hugo’s abduction, he could have me reinstated on new probation.
“Look, mate,” he said. “The upside is they didn’t really want to knock you off. Not right now.”
“Cheers.”
“Let’s think this through. They’re targeting you as a possible new recruit. Let’s play along and waste some of their time while we work on what we have, but let’s not give them any more easy opportunities to fuck us up, which means we need to take Alice and Hugo off the field.”
Jack and I sketched a plan. We needed Kate to take Alice and Hugo to her sister’s home in the south of Ireland. Jack would supply a bodyguard for them. He would speak to Zac Werner about the security expenditure, which he’d pitch as an investment, because a story like this, if we could crack it, would put The Citizen’s reputation on another dimension as a global news service. I didn’t say it to Jack, but after this project, I was heading off to make gourmet bush sausages with Hughie Jones for a living, and maybe grow some sheep.
“They are primarily focused on you,” said Jack. “So you draw them away and come to me in Shanghai while we nut out the big picture. You can help me probe what Baker and East are up to in China. Let’s run the fuckers ragged.”
“One other thing,” he said. “Don’t get rid of your old phone, or your old laptop. Let’s give them some red herrings of our makin
g to chase. We’ll leave their bugs inside your old devices. You are going to have two phones, two email addresses: two characters from now on.”
I called Kate into the kitchen and we put Jack on my new phone with open speaker. We gave her the facts about the Easts and Baker. I’d never seen Kate so feisty. She had little faith in the authorities, I learned over the kitchen table. Malcolm had been threatened a few times by angry readers of the Sun. She wasn’t impressed by the police response. In fact, she believed they were behind one break-in and vandalism attack at the Sun’s offices after the paper reported that detectives in the armed robbery squad were sharing parties and women with the villains they were meant to catch.
Jack hung up. Kate and I called Alice and Hugo into the kitchen and I recapped the situation, no holds barred. After Hugo’s experience, it took no time to persuade them that going into a communications lock-down while they were in Ireland was essential. That meant no mobile phones, no internet. Hugo’s school would be advised he had to return to Australia at short notice for family reasons.
Around 3am the next morning, I drove Kate’s car to the nearby city of Hove. Kate sat beside me; Alice and Hugo spotted for me out of the rear window as we cruised the backstreets until I was convinced we weren’t being followed. Kate saw the silver Range Rover first, parked kerbside next to a long stone wall in a suburban street. I parked behind it. The waiting car’s driver, wearing a baseball cap, dark clothes and boots, helped me load our baggage into the back of his car. Todd, as he called himself, was an ex-British Army Major who had returned a few years ago from Afghanistan and was now working for the same global personal security firm that was protecting Claire in Sydney. I guessed he was around my age. A good age for his sort of craft, I thought: a blend of experience, physical strength, and at least average brain power. I didn’t have the luxury of pre-testing Todd’s cocktail of attributes. He drove away with my family behind his tinted windows, heading for the Holyhead car ferry port on the west coast of Wales en route to Dublin, and then south by road to the village of Portroe in County Tipperary, and the cottage of Kate’s sister.