Looking at his screens, he saw that the Asian markets were already putting pressure on international oil corporations with significant UK investments, as well as multinational gas and electricity providers. Sterling lost ground against both the euro and the dollar. When the FTSE index opened at 8.30 a.m. it was sixty-five points down. Oil, however, was gaining: up five dollars a barrel in early trading.
‘Excellent,’ murmured Malachi Zorn, lying almost horizontally in his chair, his feet up on his desk, sipping a cup of fresh coffee. ‘Just excellent.’
A newsfeed was crawling like a ticker tape across the bottom of one of his screens. An item caught Zorn’s eye, and he flipped forward in his chair, leaning towards the screen to get a closer view. It seemed that more of the money that the fraudster Bernie Madoff had stolen from his clients had been found. There were indications that it might amount to as much as five billion dollars. Zorn stretched back in his chair again, and grinned.
‘You know the big mistake you made, buddy?’ he murmured, as if speaking to Madoff in his prison cell. ‘When they came for you, you were still around.’
20
Carn Drum Farm
‘It’s a nice bit of land you’ve got here, Taff,’ said Dave Smethurst, giving an appreciative nod as he gazed at the magnificent Welsh landscape, its wild beauty only magnified by the dramatic shafts of morning sunlight that pierced the thick, charcoal-grey clouds like beams from a ‘Super Trouper’ spotlight.
‘I know,’ Gryffud said, looking out at the hills he loved with all his soul. ‘If I ever wonder why I’m doing all this, I just come out here and witness the glory of what nature can do in the absence of mankind… and then I know what I’m fighting for.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Smethurst, with flat indifference to Gryffud’s oration. Then he added, ‘We’re going to fuck up some of this nature good and proper, you know that, right? And not just here, neither.’
Gryffud grimaced. ‘That’s unavoidable. I wish there was any other way at all of doing this. But since there isn’t, we have to accept that it’s a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.’
‘Collateral damage, eh?’ said Smethurst. ‘I know all about that.’
Gryffud caught the snide tone in his voice. ‘Are you saying I’m no better than some fascist American general? Is that it?’
‘I’m saying I don’t give a shit. There’s no justification you could give me I haven’t heard before. It’s all bullshit, if you ask me. But it’s none of my business, is it? I’m here to do a job, collect my money, keep my mouth shut and fuck off. And that’s what I’m going to do.’
‘You don’t care about the future of the planet, then? I don’t understand how anyone can have that attitude. And if that’s how you feel, I wonder if you’re really the right man for the job.’
Gryffud glared at Smethurst. He was a good six inches taller, and several stone heavier than the former soldier. But the smaller man just grinned at him.
‘Calm down, Taff. I don’t care about the planet because it’s got fuck all to do with me. It’s been here for billions of years, and it’ll carry on for billions more when I’m gone. But I do care about my trade. I’m the dog’s bollocks at what I do, right? And I’ll do a better job for you than any other bastard you’re likely to find. That’s why I’m the right man for the job.’
Gryffud nodded grudgingly, reflecting as he did so that it had not been him who had found Smethurst. That, too, had been Uschi Kremer. She’d been given his name, she said, by a friend of a friend.
‘OK,’ Gryffud said. ‘Let’s get on with it. How do you want to proceed?’
They were standing on the hillside above a cwm — the steep, curved head of a glacial valley — that fanned out as the land fell away before them.
‘Basically, the target as a whole covers an area of about fifteen hundred metres by nine hundred, which is way too big for us. So I think we should concentrate on a smaller area, about two hundred metres by one hundred, in the south-west quadrant. That’s got two advantages, right? Number one, it’s full of juicy targets, and you should be able to set off some nice little chain reactions that’ll do far more damage than your actual strikes. And number two, it’s the area of the facility that’s closest to the launch site. The place you picked is a kilometre from the refinery. That’s at the absolute extreme limit of the range I can get from these things.’
‘There’s no alternative. All the land closer to the refinery is owned by National Petroleum, and there are regular security patrols.’
‘But the place you’ve picked is safe, right? ’Cos we’re proper fucked if anyone catches us with this little lot in the van.’
‘Don’t worry. The property’s derelict. Some developer from London bought it, thinking he could convert it into holiday cottages, but he couldn’t get planning permission. Now he can’t sell it, and he’s letting it rot. Believe me, nobody goes there.’
Smethurst seemed satisfied with what he’d heard. ‘Fair enough. Right then, I’ve set up a proving ground so we can get all our trajectories worked out as precisely as possible. The target area is just over there…’
Smethurst pointed at a small, flat patch of land at the bottom of the main slope, with hills rising all around it like an auditorium around a stage. Then he went on, ‘And the launch site is eleven hundred metres over there to the south-east.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘Obviously, what I’ve got to do is work out the basic characteristics of the projectiles, the propellant and the launchers, yeah? I need to know how far the little bastards go at any given trajectory; how long it takes them to get there; how much fuel to use; and how long I have to set the mortar fuses. Once I know that, all I have to do is plot the angle and distance from the actual launch-point to the specific targets you’ll be aiming to take out. Then I work out the right combinations of fuse, launch-angle and propellant…’
‘Sounds complicated,’ Gryffud said.
‘Don’t you worry, pal, I’ve got programs on the laptop to do all that.’
‘And you’re confident we can do something that will really make people sit up and ask questions?’
Smethurst grinned and slapped the big man on the back. ‘Fuck, yeah, Taffy-boy. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’
21
The All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon, London
The second Monday of Wimbledon is regarded by many tennis lovers as the best day of the whole tournament. Weather permitting, the last sixteen in both the ladies’ and men’s competitions all play, so there are top seeds on court all day long. Sadly, not all of them are worth watching.
The opening match on Centre Court featured the women’s world number one, a sturdy-thighed Swede who had spent the past ten days wandering around Wimbledon Village in her time off without once being recognized. Five minutes and three games into the first set, with half the seats still waiting to be filled by ticket-holders who were more interested in finishing their lunch, she was already flattening a patently inferior Bulgarian. The Bulgarian, however, was winning the decibel battle. As her grunts and shrieks echoed around London SW19, Zorn turned to his guests and said, ‘If I want to hear a noise like that I’ll go rent some lesbian porn.’ He took out his phone and went online to the BBC’s Wimbledon home page. To Zorn’s delight a match on Court Two had been done and dusted as quickly as this one was likely to be. ‘OK, Come with me. I’ve got something better.’
Zorn was entertaining two investors and their partners as his guests today. One was Carlos Castizo, the heir to a Colombian drug-cartel fortune, who, like a Latin American Michael Corleone, was engaged in giving his family’s enterprises a sheen of legitimate respectability. The other was Mort Lockheimer, the former head of asset-backed bond trading at a now-defunct Wall Street bank. Lockheimer’s trades, specifically the vast sums he had wagered and then lost on subprime mortgage bonds — in the mistaken belief that property prices could only go up — were arguably the single biggest factor in his former employer’s demise. He had thereby cost thousands of bank workers their jobs and left shareholders with nothing, but, by a great stroke of good fortune, Lockheimer had actually left the bank about three months before his entire portfolio was revealed to be a ten-billion-dollar liability, rather than the great asset he had claimed, taking a golden parachute of more than a hundred million dollars with him. He had now spent all of that, and more than twice as much again — all of it borrowed — on buying into Zorn Global.