Lesley Corbin smiled, as well as nodding her head. ‘Precisely what I was leading up to. Publicity is their – his, if it’s not a conspiracy and Alfred Appleton is acting alone – hydrogen bomb. You don’t go to enter a defence, a total refutation, they don’t just blow you to smithereens: they evaporate you. Again, we need American law guidance. But I’ve seen – you’ve seen, I’m sure – enough publicity exposures on television and in newspapers here in England to know you could face the equivalent of being hanged, drawn and quartered by publicity.’
The physical reaction had long gone beyond shivering coldness. Harvey Jordan now felt empty, disembowelled, as if just such medieval justice had been exacted upon him. Without sufficient consideration, he blurted out, and too late realized this was another mistake, ‘I’m trapped – no way out.’
‘There’s always a way out,’ said the more controlled woman. ‘We’re talking now about maximum damage limitation: avoiding, if we can, the sackcloth and ashes exposure that’s going to make you a public, humiliated figure in England and America.’
‘That’s got to be a gross exaggeration!’ Jordan protested.
‘You want to expose yourself to as little as a fifth of it?’
‘Not a tenth of it.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Stop it happening. Stop any of it happening,’ insisted Jordan.
‘God does miracles. I just do the best I can.’
‘Do the very best you can.’ In his worst nightmare Jordan had never imagined – come close to contemplating – that he could be trapped like this again. But he’d recovered before. He’d recover again. And not just recover. Punish again, too.
Six
The following day continued to be unreal, Jordan remaining aware of – watching – everything around him but having no contributory part or involvement in any of it, as if he were part of a ghost movie in which the character can see and hear and participate but can’t be seen or heard by anyone else. Which was, in fact, how he wished his life could revert, to how it was before. But couldn’t any longer. By the day after he was a long way towards recovery: Harvey Jordan reborn, the all thinking, all calculating, ahead-of-the-game operator. But not totally recovered. To have believed that, and tried to convince himself of it, would have been ridiculous: absurd to have even begun to think that. He’d become complacent, careless, not thinking clearly or properly enough just because he’d had it too easy for too long. Not any more. This was his wake-up call, at klaxon-decibel level. He’d get out of it, even if he didn’t at this precise moment know how; he’d minimize it to the point of no longer being dangerously exposed, and he’d never again relax as he had relaxed. Maybe, even, cut himself away from places he knew so well – where too many people knew him so well – to find a new and different vacation spot. Not just one. Several. Move around the Caribbean and the Far East and the Pacific, not bother any more just briefly being known and favoured. And wherever it was, enjoy the readily and always available Ghilanes of the world.
This was all reassuring – necessary thinking – for the future. But there were more immediately pressing and essential practicalities. His antennae tuned to its maximum sensitivity, despite every indication that the surveillance had stopped in France, Jordan set out to once more become – and remain – Mr Invisible. It was instinct to set his intrusion traps but he did not emerge on to the pavement from his apartment block until he could see the yellow flag of an empty taxi to take him to the rail terminal at Waterloo, alert to everyone in the queue behind him to buy a ticket to Basingstoke. He disembarked just two stops down the line at Clapham, remaining on the platform until it cleared of the four others who got off there as well, recognizing no one from the earlier queue. He took a waiting taxi to Sloane Square, a long enough journey upon which to isolate any following cab, which he didn’t, and went underground there but only took one station west, changing from the District to the Piccadilly line at Victoria to loop east as far as Green Park for lunch at The Wolseley at a table specifically reserved for its uninterrupted view of the only public entrance into the restaurant. He did not suspect anyone of showing any specific interest in him throughout the meal. Conscious of how many observers must have been involved in the surveillance of himself and Alyce in France, Jordan didn’t detect any brief signals between people entering or leaving the restaurant during what might be a change of possible observation shifts. He had the bell captain order a taxi that was waiting for him at the kerbside when he left, altering the given destination of Euston as the taxi was travelling north up Regent Street, and reached the newly rented service apartment in Hans Crescent just before 4 p.m.
Waiting there for him were all the credit and store cards – one from Harrods, which he could see from the apartment window – credit reference file replies and pin and ATM withdrawal numbers, everything he’d applied for in the name of plastic surgeon Paul Maculloch. Jordan put it all in his combination-locked briefcase, pausing at the moment of leaving to look around the flat he was never going to use, thinking how comfortable his brief stay there might have been.
John Blake hurried from behind his reception desk the moment Jordan entered the Marylebone apartment block. ‘No one’s enquired after you all day,’ the man reported at once. ‘There haven’t been any telephone calls, either.’
‘I’m hoping to hear something soon,’ said Jordan, caught by how honest he was continuing to be.
All the intrusion traps inside the apartment were undisturbed. Jordan was on the verge of shredding everything in Paul Maculloch’s name when a sudden need to keep the rental overtook him, a warming and satisfying confirmation that he had definitely recovered from the understandable shock of the recent news. It still took the increasingly confident Jordan an hour to minutely shred most of what he’d accumulated to pass himself off as Paul Maculloch and which now had a very important although quite different purpose. At the end of that hour he was left with a copy of the man’s birth certificate, parental marriage certificates, passport, proof of rental occupancy of the Hans Crescent apartment and a single Al credit reference file. With difficulty he managed to get it all into the already over-crammed bedroom concealed safe in the closet, containing, in varying denominations, the?154,000 profit from his countrywide tour as Peter Wightman.
There would be substantial inroads into that, Jordan accepted, his mind now fully concentrated upon the financial cost with which he was confronted. The short let and now very necessary rental of Hans Crescent would amount to?21,000, which objectively he didn’t begrudge as a complete loss. The further?200 he’d spent getting all the Maculloch credit information wasn’t totally wasted, either. The big uncertainty – although objectively again perhaps not the biggest – was how much all the legal advice was going to cost him. This was why he had to bury the tax-free profit from fifteen years of identity stealing as deeply and as untraceably as possible.
Harvey Jordan had left Lesley Corbin with the understanding that she would find an American attorney fully licensed and qualified to protect – and if necessary represent – him at every degree and level of every linked North Carolina claim. And as he insisted on the best he would have to wait for her to come back to him after a careful selection. Jordan hadn’t waited upon the convenience of others for more years than he could remember and had already decided not to allow Lesley Corbin more than one more full day before calling her back, irrespective of any agreement. But, now he needed the time, maybe even more than one day, to keep things in the satisfactorily protective sequence he had to establish.
While he was still at school Jordan had mentally tested himself – and invariably won – against chip-speeded computers to work out complicated arithmetical percentages and currency fluctuations and aggregates, and from his early programming career, concentrating on internet gambling games, he knew to the last penny the amount of his carefully hoarded and, hopefully, totally hidden fortune. The majority of it was beyond investigative reach in the tax-avoiding and secret haven of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, to which he could literally carry cases of cash on the short sea crossing from England without any danger from putting hand baggage through X-ray airport security checks. The current, untraceable amount in safe deposit boxes in the island’s capital, St Helier, was 2,805,000. In addition, in separate boxes, was the Chagall painting, an assortment of seventeen uncut and unset, but officially provenanced, diamonds and three diamond-set antique bracelets which conservatively, building in the fluctuations of jewellery prices, brought the stash up to?3,600,000. Jordan intended this stash, short of physical imprisonment which Lesley Corbin insisted impossible, to remain untouched and officially unplundered, whatever the outcome of his current predicament.
The risk, despite Leslie Corbin’s assurances, was closer to home. In London, at Coutts, Lloyds TSB and NatWest, there were bank accounts, none of which exceeded 5,000, maintained for the access to safe deposit
