Tom Cain - Carver

The media were informed that Malachi Zorn had rested well overnight. He was not yet well enough to give a full-scale press conference. He would, however, consent to a brief one-on-one interview with an ITN reporter, on condition that the resulting material was made freely available to any news outlet that wanted it. The lucky woman who got the job was sent on her way to what she and her jealous colleagues all considered a potentially career-making encounter, with suggestions for questions ringing in her ears.

No one thought of asking Zorn, ‘How much are you being paid to do this?’ If they had, they might have caught Michael Abraham Drinkwater enough by surprise that he would have blurted out the truth: ‘One million dollars.’ He had sensed the Brits’ desperation, stuck to his guns, and insisted on receiving the second half of the money Zorn was due to pay him. In the end, Young had been forced to give in. And so Drinkwater had gone back into character again.

The interview took place in Drinkwater’s room. He spoke from his bed, sitting up, with a pile of pillows behind his back. To add to the drama of the occasion, a bandage had been wound round his head and he was wearing dark glasses to shield him from the glare of the TV lights. There were bruises, cuts and swellings on the left-hand side of his face. They had been put there by a make-up artist.

‘When the car was first attacked, it stopped very suddenly and I was thrown forward and hit my face against the seats in front,’ Drinkwater explained, as the interview began, using lines given to him in advance by Cameron Young’s top writers. ‘Guess I should have worn a seat belt, huh?’

He managed a weak, battered smile. ‘But you know, it might have saved me. I was right on the floor of the car, between the front and rear seats. So I was sheltered from the rest of the attack.’

‘Have you seen the statement released last night by the Forces of Gaia, the terrorists who claimed responsibility for the attack on you yesterday and for Tuesday’s atrocity at the Rosconway oil refinery?’

‘Uh, no… no I haven’t. But I heard about that. My doc told me about it.’

‘Do you have any message for those terrorists?’

‘Well, I guess I wish they hadn’t tried to shoot the messenger! And I hope that the police can arrest them, and that justice can take its course. But really I’m not the issue here, and nor are these terrorists. The important thing is that decent, hard-working people died on Tuesday, and they deserve to be remembered. Their sacrifice must be honoured. Their deaths must not be in vain. We need to take the whole issue of energy security much more seriously. I’ve been saying this for a long time, and it’s just terrible, to be honest, to be proved right in this way.’

The reporter put on her most soulful expression and nodded thoughtfully. ‘So how did it feel when some people suggested that you had been behind the refinery attack?’

‘Well, you know, it wasn’t easy hearing that. I lost a very dear friend in Nicholas Orwell at Rosconway. And it was a miracle that I didn’t die yesterday afternoon. You can take it from me, I didn’t order anything. I’m a trader. I make deals. I don’t kill people.’

‘Well, speaking of deals, you were planning to launch your Zorn Global fund here in London tomorrow with a gala reception in the City of London. Will that be going ahead now?’

‘Absolutely. I’m alive. I’m in one piece. And I will not give the terrorists the satisfaction of beating me. I’ll be there…’ Drinkwater leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘And I’ll tell you what, maybe I can fix you an invitation, too!’

Cameron Young was watching on a live feed to his office at 10 Downing Street. ‘Cheeky beggar!’ he said, to no one in particular. Still, there was no harm in a little humour. If they got through the next couple of days with the markets steady, Zorn Global’s investors happy, and the real Zorn satisfactorily dealt with, that million dollars would look like a positive bargain.

Malachi Zorn was watching, too. So far as he was concerned, the information that Drinkwater would be hosting the reception in his place was the best news that he could possibly have been given. He immediately contacted Razzaq.

‘The reception is going ahead as planned,’ he said.

‘I see,’ his security chief replied. ‘So can I take it that we will be proceeding exactly as we had originally planned?’

‘You certainly can,’ said Zorn. ‘We’re going to make a killing.’

Wax Chandlers’ Hall, City of London, and Cheapside

Malachi Zorn had never been interested in acquiring corporations as long-term investments. He left that kind of thing to Warren Buffett. But for the purposes of his current operation he had spent six months and more than a billion dollars buying controlling shares in a number of fast-growing Indian computer companies. In every case, he hid his presence behind a web of shell corporations, even if the decisions about which businesses to buy were entirely his. He then created a holding company named after its apparent major shareholder, a hitherto-unknown entrepreneur called Ashok Bandekar. Even if he personally remained a mystery to the Indian media — a mystery made all the more intriguing by titbits of gossip about his past and present activities that were released into the blogosphere on a regular basis, and invariably then picked up by the conventional print media — Bandekar’s company looked like a typical success story of the new, modern India.

So when the police and security service operatives assigned to cover the Zorn Global launch discovered that Bandekar Technologies had hired the Wax Chandlers’ Hall for three days they saw no obvious cause for alarm. The company itself checked out. The executives invited for interviews by the headhunting company all appeared to be genuine: UK citizens with no criminal records and impressive CVs. The security men who met the interviewees at the front door and checked their identities before letting them in all came from a reputable firm that only hired individuals with spotless records. The receptionist who then made sure that the new arrivals were comfortable while they waited to meet Mr Bandekar had an equally respectable background. And every one of those individuals sincerely believed that they were involved in legitimate business with Bandekar Technologies.

Two anti-terrorist officers, accompanied by a sniffer dog, arrived at the hall and were greeted by Bandekar’s aide Sanjay Sengupta and a member of the hall staff, both of whom were highly cooperative. The officers had no reason to know that Sengupta did not actually exist: his identity had only ever been a cover for Ahmad Razzaq. They were shown through the many areas of the building that were not in use. They saw the conference room where the interviewees waited before their appointments. A series of display panels had been set up there, presumably to impress the prospective executives with the scale and ambition of the company they were seeking to join. Each panel proclaimed a different aspect of Bandekar Technologies’ activities. A Perspex case in the middle of the room contained an architect’s model of the corporate campus planned for a site outside Milton Keynes — the symbol of Ashok Bandekar’s commitment to his European operations. A lighting rig on lightweight trusses illuminated the whole set-up. (The flight-cases in which the lights and all the display materials had been transported to the hall were neatly piled in one of the unused rooms.) At the end of the room a door led into a smaller office, suitable for private meetings like the ones Bandekar was currently conducting.

The officers were told they would have to wait for a few minutes before they could see Bandekar himself. He did not wish any of his interviews to be interrupted since that would be unfair to the candidate he was meeting at the time. But it was not long before the office door opened and a well-groomed young businessman in an expensive suit strode out, giving the small group waiting outside a confident, snowy-toothed smile as he passed. A few seconds later, Bandekar himself emerged. He was a large man, whose substantial girth was carried as elegantly as only the finest Savile Row tailoring can manage.