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.
For Lockheimer, this was a win-win deal. He was absolutely certain that Zorn was going to make him a fortune. But more than that, to be an investor in Zorn Global was to be a member of a very exclusive club, one that was talked about with admiration and envy in the smartest, richest circles. Mort Lockheimer had attracted a great deal of negative publicity in the months after his losses on subprime trades were written about in a host of blogs, newspaper articles and even books on the financial crisis. He’d been made to look like a crook. Even worse, he’d looked like an idiot. His wife Charlene and daughters Chelsey and Alissa had been humiliated, and had retaliated by heaping vast amounts of acrid, bitter shit on him. Now he looked like a hero again, or less of a schmuck, at any rate.
Be that as it may, though, Charlene was not happy about Zorn’s change of plan. ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ she hissed in Lockheimer’s ear. ‘I want to sit on Centre Court. Tell him we ain’t moving.’
‘You tell him,’ Lockheimer countered. ‘That guy’s gonna make us more money than we’ve seen in our whole fuckin’ lives. If he wants to go sit someplace else, that’s what we do. And if he asks you to blow him, just get on your knees and start sucking.’
‘Screw you, asshole,’ Charlene glowered. But even though she was simmering with resentment, she picked up her bag and followed her husband up the steps to the exit. And when Zorn asked her how she was, she put on her broadest, most plastic smile and said, ‘Just great!’
To anyone watching Zorn — and someone was — he appeared far more entertained watching the squabbles — for Castizo’s twenty-two-year-old mistress was no happier to be moving than Lockheimer’s fortysomething wife — than the abysmal tennis being served up on court. It was as if he was confirming in his own mind just how desperate these already wealthy individuals were to give him large amounts of their money. Messing around with their day was as good a way as any to test the depths of their greed. And of course, unlike his guests, Zorn did have a genuine interest in tennis. He’d actually come to Wimbledon for the sport.
Accompanied by Ahmad Razzaq, Zorn led the way out of Centre Court and through all the people trying to get on to Wimbledon’s so-called Tea Lawn — in actual fact the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s staff car park, dolled up for the fortnight with a bandstand and tables with green and purple striped parasols. There was more muttering from both sets of guests, which only intensified as a posse of uniformed security guards barged their way past, stepping on the toes of one of the women’s Louboutin sandals as they went, escorting a dark, thickset, heavily stubbled player.
‘That’s Hernandez, the number nine seed,’ said Zorn, as the black uniforms and white tennis clothes were swallowed up by the crowd. ‘Tough guy, plays real hard, never gives up on a ball. But he’s up against Arana, and I say the kid wins it in four.’
The path towards Number Two Court narrowed, cramming spectators making their way there even more tightly together. The court was a plain concrete bowl, whose only concession to show court glamour was its padded seats. There were no celebrities to be spotted, no royal box to gawp at. Zorn could not have cared less. Oscar Hernandez was the established player, but Quinton Arana was a nineteen-year-old qualifier on a mission. The son of a blue-collar family from a Pennsylvania mining town, he’d already taken two seeded scalps in the first week, and he was gunning for a third. Zorn watched a couple of ultra-competitive rallies, filled with fizzing ground strokes, applauded both players as they chased down seemingly lost causes, gave a loud, ‘Yeah!’ of delight, and declared, ‘Now this is what I call tennis!’
22
Carver heard every word. His seat was to the side of the court, ideally placed to observe Zorn and his party in the front row, behind the nearest baseline. The collapsible umbrella on his lap concealed a directional microphone. The khaki canvas fishing bag next to it contained a hidden camera. It had not been detected in the derisory bag- check to which he’d been subjected at the entrance gate, nor had there been any body-search or scanner, a fact that would make his life a great deal easier later in the week. The camera was sending pictures back to the iPad that was also in the bag, along with a rolled-up copy of that day’s Herald Tribune newspaper, a V-neck cotton sweater from J. Crew, and a packet of throat lozenges. Carver was dressed in an all-American summer uniform of stone-coloured chinos, pale-blue Ralph Lauren shirt, and dark-blue, single-breasted Brooks Brothers blazer. He had
