occasional mentions in the gossip columns, no more was heard of him until 1995, when he set up a small company called Zorn Financials. It was a one-man band. Just Zorn, alone in an office, surrounded by screens, essentially placing bets on a variety of financial markets.’
‘Any market in particular?’ Grantham asked. ‘I thought most of these people were highly specialized: particular commodities, currencies and so forth.’
‘Absolutely,’ Nainby-Martin agreed. ‘And what’s more, they tend to use other people’s money. Young Zorn, however, took positions without any apparent regard for the type of market, or its location, or the nature of the play. And he did it by risking every penny he had, all the time.’
‘Sounds like a typical death wish to me,’ said Grantham. ‘His parents had left him alone, nothing to live for. He was just tempting fate to get him, too.’
‘That’s certainly a theory,’ said Nainby-Martin. ‘And the rest of his behaviour seems to give it a certain credence. Once Zorn started making big money, he spent it seeking thrills: seriously fast cars, speedboats, skydiving, mountaineering expeditions to the Himalayas, all that sort of thing. An adrenalin junkie, you might say.’
‘So how did Nicholas Orwell enter the picture?’
‘Ah well, a year ago, Zorn let it be known that he was thinking of going into business in a more conventional way, setting up a hedge fund called Zorn Global that would accept investments from exceptionally high-net-worth individuals. He was contemplating a minimum stake of one billion dollars. And the man he had in mind to act as his personal ambassador to the world’s super-rich was Nicholas Orwell.’
Grantham laughed to himself. ‘Orwell must have loved that idea.’
‘He’s not shown any sign of objecting,’ Nainby-Martin replied drily. ‘Our information is that Zorn offered him a fee of five million dollars, plus the same again for his charitable foundation.’
‘So he’s doing this for charity? How very noble.’
There were stifled sniggers round the table at Grantham’s acid sarcasm.
‘Quite so,’ said Nainby-Martin, maintaining an impressively straight face. ‘But in any case, rumours of Zorn’s new fund went round the smart set in an instant. In no time people were practically begging to be allowed to give him their cash.’
‘In this financial climate? Aren’t they all hanging on to their money for dear life?’
‘Apparently not. The problem for the rich appears to be that there’s nowhere to put their money. Stocks and commodities are all over the place, property values are going nowhere and interest rates on savings have been rock-bottom for years. They’re looking for a magician who can buck the markets.’
‘And Zorn is happy to oblige.’
‘Precisely.’
‘So this event in Italy — I assume it was aimed at possible investors? Orwell does the schmoozing, Zorn takes all the money?’
‘Something like that.’
Grantham nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see. Let’s carry on with the show.’
Zorn and his guests started moving down the stairs again. The men of the party were dressed in more formal variations on Zorn’s dinner suit. The women, by contrast, wore dazzling couture gowns in silk and lace, decorated with jewels worthy of a pirate’s treasure trove; a description that in some cases was disturbingly close to the truth, given the dubious means by which their men had come by their fortunes. Through this select little group flitted a man known the whole world over for the bright, shiny charm of his smile and the deceptive plausibility of his words. He strode jauntily to the front as they all descended the steps and exchanged a few words with Malachi Zorn.
‘Aha!’ said Grantham. ‘Nicholas Orwell himself, the very man I was
…’
Grantham fell silent as he peered, frowning more closely at the video. He waved at McAndrew. ‘Pause it!’ Then he got up and walked towards the screen, stopping just a few feet away. He stared intently for a few more seconds, and then tapped his forefinger against the screen, directly over the motionless image of a blonde, whose slender elegance stood out from the other women there, despite all the time and money they had put into perfecting their appearance.
‘I’ll be damned,’ murmured Grantham to himself.
Behind him there was another shuffling of papers and a voice said, ‘If you give me a second, sir, I think I should be able to identify her.’
‘No need,’ said Grantham. ‘Her name’s Alexandra Vermulen. Born Alexandra Petrova. She’s Russian, age around forty. Also known as Alix. Fascinating woman.’
‘You sound as though you know her well,’ Nainby-Martin remarked.
Grantham said nothing. He was thinking back to the only time he had ever met her: at a funeral in Norway, saying farewell to a good man who had made one bad mistake. And then he thought of a time before that, and the events that had linked him to Alix through the man who had loved her, Samuel Carver.
‘No,’ Grantham finally replied. ‘I can’t say we’re particularly close.’ For a moment he sounded uncharacteristically wistful. But then, to his staff’s relief, he snapped back to his usual, acerbic style: ‘But one thing I do know, from my experience, is that whenever that woman enters the picture, trouble’s never far behind.’
Tom Cain
Carver
4
Mykonos
Over the years, Carver had made a lot more enemies than friends. That was the nature of his business. When you spent your adult life getting rid of criminals, terrorists and malevolent psychopaths of every description, you were bound to provoke a grudge or two.
Carver wasn’t his real name. When his mother had abandoned him as a baby he’d been adopted by a couple who called him Paul and gave him their own surname, Jackson. He began his career as a second lieutenant in the Royal Marines before being selected for the Marines’ own elite-within-an-elite, the Special Boat Service. He quit after a dozen years in uniform, and dreamed of a peaceful, normal life on Civvy Street, until a hit-and-run driver killed the woman he planned to marry. Carver had gone off the rails and been sleeping off a drunken brawl in a police cell when his former commanding officer, Quentin Trench, offered him a job perfectly suited to his particular talents and training.
He became a freelance assassin, his major client a group that called itself the Consortium. It consisted of men whose wealth and influence enabled them to commission work that could not be attributed to any elected government, removing individuals whose guilt had long since been proven beyond any doubt, without recourse to judges or juries. Carver provided them with deniability: calculated hits that either appeared to be random accidents, or could be attributed to another, false perpetrator.
He was very good at his job and paid accordingly, but as long as he possessed a shred of humanity he could not help but be affected by the taking of another man’s life, however evil that life might be. He tried to justify his work mathematically: every guilty life he took saved many more innocent ones, but that rationalization could not stop the steady erosion of his soul, or ease his emotional isolation.
And then, one August night in Paris, in an underpass beside the Seine, Carver committed an act for which there was no justification. He had been set up, and he took fearsome revenge on the men who had deceived and betrayed him. Still, the stain on his conscience had never quite washed away, and his need for atonement had never been satisfied.
This was not, however, a subject on which Carver liked to dwell. He saw no point in trying to repair an unchangeable past or speculate about an unknowable future. He dealt in the here and now, and saved his mental energy for problems he could solve, like the two now confronting him. First he had to deal with the three remaining gunmen pursuing him through the streets of Mykonos. And then he had to get the hell away from the island.
He had not had anything to do with Ginger’s murder, and a decent lawyer might be able to argue successfully that the dead man in the alley had been killed in self-defence. But there was no telling what pressure would be put
