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‘Sooner the better,’ said Slivitz, ‘with the amount of gold I’ve just poured into my clients’ troughs. A good international nuke war would send gold through the roof.’ Then his face dropped. ‘But I don’t suppose it will happen,’ he said, gloomily.

‘Gold up two more dollars,’ shouted a voice from the far side of the console.

Rocq was nervous. Gold was now $522; it had been climbing steadily. The pattern was such that he knew he had to stay in for a while longer, and shelve the plan he had made to start unloading when the price reached $523 — an increase of $25. He wanted a cigarette badly, but he had quit two months ago, and he wanted to stay quit. He wondered whether he might be more sensible to stick to that plan, but having caused his clients to miss out earlier in the day, he needed at least to regain some of their favour by taking them right to the end of the rise. His phone rang. ‘Rocq,’ he said, answering it.

There was a crackle, then the quiet voice of Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh of Umm Al Amnah. ‘How is it going, Alex?’

Rocq was relieved that he had called; the prince was in very deep, and now he could pass the buck to him. ‘Still rising — just jumped two more dollars — my hunch is that we’re near the top, unless there’s going to be any retaliation by the Iraqis. What do you want to do?’

‘Up to you, Alex.’

Rocq cursed; that wasn’t the answer he wanted.

‘I’d be inclined to sell pretty soon.’

‘Five more dollars, then sell,’ said the prince.

‘Okay — but it might not go.’

‘Chance it.’

‘Okay.’ Rocq hung up, and breathed a little; he was off the hook on that one. The light on Tor 2 flashed.

‘Hallo, Harry,’ he said to Baron Mellic. ‘Still got your hair on?’

‘No — I scratched it all out thinking about that two hundred and fifty thousand bucks you cost me.’

‘Well — I’ve made it up for you — gold’s five hundred and twenty-two and we’re still in the game.’

‘So who’s doing me favours? We’re thirteen up and we should be twenty-four.’

‘Harry — if I hadn’t let you down this morning, I’d have taken you out at five hundred and ten, and saved myself the ulcers waiting here, watching every second to see if it starts to move back down.’

‘You’re full of shit.’

‘Damned right — and I haven’t dared leave my chair to go to the bathroom all afternoon. I think it’s time to sell.’

‘No. You can sweat it out a little more. I expect at least five thirty, Alex, and if it goes more, I want more. I don’t want to read tomorrow’s papers and discover gold went five fifty and you closed me out at five thirty-one — and all because of a complaint with your bowels.’

‘I didn’t know Rubber Weekly carried the gold prices.’

‘Just keep bouncing, Alex, will yah?’ The Baron hung up. Rocq’s intercom light began flashing and he picked it up. The voice down the other end didn’t need any introduction; it was Sir Monty Elleck, the chairman of Globalex:

‘Come up and see me right away, Alex, please,’ he said, curtly.

‘Yes, sir.’

Rocq scribbled some buying and selling instructions down on his pad and handed them to Boadicea, the nickname they had given to the flame-haired girl order clerk. She looked disdainfully at the scrawl on the pad. ‘’Ere, Alex,’ she said, in her thick East End accent. ‘You oughter spend some of your million pound bleedin’ commission on learning how to write.’

‘I’ll do a deal with you — you learn how to speak and I’ll learn how to write. Maybe we could go to college together.’

A ball of paper hit him in the nape of his neck as he walked out of the door; he sincerely hoped it wasn’t his list of instructions.

Sir Monty Elleck was not only the chairman of Globalex; he owned the company lock, stock and barrel. He was also the managing director, presiding over a board which met once a year for one hour. Of the eleven other directors on the board, only two had any practical knowledge of the commodity business. All eleven men had been selected by Elleck because of their high ranks, some by birth, some by merit, that made them in a position to be able to recommend and introduce new clients from the pick of the nation’s wealthy and successful. The board comprised one duke, two earls, four knights, three self-made multi-millionaire heads of international public companies, and the shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry. All of them received handsome introductory fees from every new client they introduced, together with a percentage of Globalex’s brokerage fees on all their subsequent transactions; although they never knew it, Elleck screwed them all blind on this part of the deal.

Sir Monty had come a long way since his grandfather, Baruch Elleckstein, a Lithuanian immigrant to England, had sold his first hundredweight of pig-iron from a barrow in Leadenhall Street. The physical distance had not been far — 88 Mincing Lane was a mere couple of hundred yards from the spot in Leadenhall Street — but the financial distance was vast. It was Elleck’s father who had realized there were easier ways to make money out of metal than humping around hand-carts loaded with the stuff, and it was he who founded Globalex, anglicized the family name, and put the Elleck family on the motorway to fortune. Seventeen years ago, whilst plugging-in a Kenwood food mixer for his wife, in the kitchen of their Mayfair flat, Joseph Elleck had inadvertently allowed his index finger and thumb to slide too far around the plug, and they had made contact with the negative and positive pins at the exact moment of insertion. When his wife came into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, she found no life in either her husband or the Kenwood mixer.

It would have been of little consolation to her to have known that the wiring to the socket into which Joseph Elleck had inserted the plug had been manufactured by a firm which bought all its copper wire through Globalex.

Monty Elleck was Joseph’s only son, and he succeeded immediately to the throne, taking to his job with great zeal. During the next decade, he opened branch offices throughout the world, and made one Prime Minister of Great Britain a £500,000 profit in less than six months, for which he received his knighthood. He was married to an overweight wife, who spent her time waddling around whichever of the Elleck residences — either in St John’s Wood, Gloucestershire, Gstaad, Sardinia, or Miami — took her fancy. He had an underweight son, who, as a result of a congenital mental defect, was attempting to start a kibbutz in the Shetland Isles, and two plump daughters whose main ambitions in life appeared to be to become fatter than their mother.