Tom Cain - Carver

For a while he even toyed with the idea of sabotaging the private jet that would carry Zorn from New York to London. The timing was crazy, though: it would mean hiring a jet of his own to cross the Atlantic in order to reach Zorn’s plane before it took off. It was too soon, anyway. He and Grantham alike both needed to know more about what Zorn was up to. And Carver needed flexibility, a little wriggle room in case he had a sudden change of plans. Nothing about this job felt right, and he had no intention of getting caught with his pants down if Razzaq, Zorn, or some other player as yet unknown started changing the rules of the game.

He ended up concentrating his attention on Wimbledon, searching out every piece of information he could find about the All England Club and the suburban townscape that surrounded it. Looking at the aerial views of the tennis complex, and correlating them with the official maps available on the tournament website, he noticed an entrance gate on Somerset Road, just behind the press and broadcast centres. It was not listed among the spectator gates, and seemed to be an access point for trucks servicing the tournament’s insatiable demand for food, drink and merchandizing. To the left of the gate, the road disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel. It didn’t take long to discover that this led to an un loading bay below Number One Court before rising back up to an exit on to Church Road, on the far side of the club. Carver reckoned there had to be some way of distributing all the deliveries from the unloading bay to the places where they were needed without interfering with the crowds above ground. That meant more, and smaller tunnels. So now he had the possibility of underground ways into, out of and around the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

He also looked into the debenture tickets Zorn had bought. Their original owners had paid?27,750 for the right to buy a Centre Court ticket for every day of the Championships over five years (Number One Court debentures cost roughly half the price for the same period.) They were the only Wimbledon seats that were legally transferable, and could be sold at any price the market would bear. With each seat came perks: a dedicated entrance to the show courts, private bars, restaurants and so on. If Zorn had these tickets, Carver had to have them, too. He phoned a ticket agency.

‘We can do you a debenture ticket. When do you need it?’ the man from the agency asked.

‘Monday, Wednesday and Friday.’

There was a soft whistle. ‘Blimey, that’ll cost you. I mean, the best price we’ve got for the men’s semis on Friday is, hang on… $6,758. In pounds that’s-’

‘Don’t bother, I’ll take it,’ said Carver. ‘And I’ll take the other two days. And I want Number One and Number Two Courts as well, all three days.’

Now the whistle became a chuckle as the agency man worked out what he was about to sell. ‘You planning to be in three places at once?’

‘I’m planning to be wherever I need to be.’

‘Fair enough, but there’s a problem, yeah? They don’t do debentures for Number Two Court. So there ain’t no tickets on sale for that.’

‘Yes, there are.’

‘No, there’s not. See, that’s not legal.’

‘I’m sure it’s not,’ said Carver. ‘But if I’m willing to pay the same price for Number Two Court tickets as for Centre Court ones, I reckon someone will want to sell me them. I’ll pay cash, if necessary. So, can you help me?’

‘Well, obviously, selling you them tickets is a criminal offence, as such…’ There was a pause and Carver could sense the battle between greed and fear going on in the man’s mind. Eventually, as he thought it would, greed won.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

It would take Carver most of Saturday night to finish his planning. But first he wanted to know more about the business his target was in. His financial affairs were handled through a private bank in Geneva. It placed customer service at the very top of its priorities. So when Carver called his personal manager, Timo Koenig, and asked him if he could spare an hour or so for a drink, the fact that this was a Saturday evening did not deter Koenig — openly at least — from saying yes.

‘Great, meet me at seven in the bar of the Beau Rivage,’ said Carver.

The Beau Rivage was an old-fashioned grand hotel on the banks of Lake Geneva. It had been quite a while since Carver had visited it. The last time, also, he’d had a meeting with a bank manager, and he’d been with Alix. Things hadn’t worked out too well for them that night. Carver saw no need to tell Koenig about it… let alone how much worse they’d worked out for the banker.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Geneva

Carver bought the drinks. A beer for himself and a martini for Koenig, a well-preserved fifty-year-old, kept trim by tennis and skiing, whose idea of casual weekend attire consisted of immaculately pressed jeans, a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and a cotton jumper so crisp and clean that that it appeared to have only just been unwrapped from the store tissue paper. Carver had not shaved all day, and he’d seen no reason to change before he went out. He felt like a vagabond by comparison, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. ‘What do you know about a man called Malachi Zorn?’ he asked.

‘Not a great deal,’ said Koenig. ‘I have never had any reason to do business with him. But he made his fortune shorting Lehman’s, no?’

‘You tell me. How does a guy like this work? For example, you say he shorted Lehman’s. I know that means he bet against them. But how?’

‘Mm… good martini,’ said Koenig, savouring his drink before answering the question: ‘CDSs… sorry, credit default swaps…’

‘Which are what, exactly?’ Carver asked.

‘A credit default swap is a way that an investor can make money out of someone else’s loss. You might say it is an insurance policy taken out on something you do not necessarily own.’

Less than a minute into the conversation, and already Carver felt like he’d walked into an alternative universe. ‘That sounds like me taking out insurance on your car. Why would I want to do that?’

Koenig smiled, as though what he was describing was the most normal thing on earth. ‘Well, you might decide that was a good investment if you knew that I was a terrible driver who was almost certain to crash.’

‘Or if I knew I could make you crash…’ Carver said.

Koenig clearly thought he was joking. ‘Ah, well, that would be cheating!’

‘If you say so.’

‘In any case, a default swap is just like a regular insurance policy,’ Koenig continued. ‘You buy a certain amount of cover for a fixed premium, over a given period — usually ten years — and it pays out in the event of loss. The premium is often very low. If you wanted to take out a credit default swap on a very safe, AAA-rated corporate bond, for example, it might only cost you fifteen thousand dollars a year for ten million dollars of coverage. So your downside is fixed: over the course of a decade the maximum you will ever spend is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But if the company collapses and its bonds become worthless, then you will make ten million dollars. Those are very good odds. And because the length of the term is so long, a default swap is very useful when you are sure that a collapse of some kind will occur at some point, but you don’t know exactly when.’

‘But what’s in it for the other guy, the one who’s selling?’ Carver asked.

‘Ah, well, he gets a guaranteed income, based purely on a promise,’ said Koenig, to whom this was clearly a perfectly reasonable proposition. ‘He does not have to spend any money of his own. He just collects your premium every year for ten years, and hopes that he never has to pay out. In most cases, he will be right. He will end up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for doing absolutely nothing. But sometimes, particularly in times of crisis, an unexpected, apparently impossible, failure occurs and he loses his bet. The market was certain that Lehman’s was safe, because it was too big to fail, and so it was very cheap for Monsieur Zorn to buy billions of dollars of credit default swaps. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, he collected those billions, and, of course, the banks that had sold him those swaps lost the billions they had to pay him.’