Питер Джеймс - Billionaire

Elleck nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure.’

‘And the second reason,’ continued Ephraim, ‘is the ten per cent you said you would pay to whichever Jewish groups in the world I told you. Well — I have that list here.’ Ephraim pulled an envelope from his pocket, and passed it across the table.

Elleck stared him in the face. ‘There’s a problem, Issy. Everything went according to plan, except for two things I had not worked out properly. Firstly, as I did not want to let anyone in on what was happening, I had to buy the gold myself. I think I must be getting rusty up in my big office — it’s a long time since I have done any dealing myself. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to buy large amounts of gold quickly without attracting a great deal of attention. So I did not buy nearly as much as I had hoped. Secondly, the world is getting used to short, sharp acts of aggression. I thought gold would have jumped fifty, possibly even seventy-five — possibly more still — maybe up to $100 an ounce...’ He shook his head, finished the last mouthful of sole and took another large sip of wine. ‘But it didn’t. It only went twenty-four. If I had managed to buy all the gold I wanted — which I could have done if you had held off another month, like I had asked you — I would have been okay, even on a $24 rise.’

‘But—’ Ephraim cut in, ‘you told me how wonderful the timing was, how perfectly it all went.’

‘What was wonderful was the timing of the information — the way you got the information through to me. Because of what you told me, I knew exactly when to sell. I was also able to advise my clients, and that has made them very happy. But in terms of my firm making money, Issy, we just didn’t make enough.’

‘But you must have made some?’

‘Sure we have bailed ourselves out of a lot of problems — but I still have a long way to go.’

‘So how much are you going to be able to give to the names on that list?’ Ephraim was starting to sound uneasy.

Elleck stared at him for a long time, then stared down at the ground. He spoke quietly: ‘Issy,’ he said, ‘you know me: If I possibly could, you know that I would, but...’

The head of the Mossad was in a fury when he arrived back at the Intercontinental Hotel. He had declined Elleck’s invitation to dinner and by doing so had terminated, as far as he was concerned, the oldest and deepest friendship he would ever know in his lifetime.

He was more than a little startled when the reception clerk handed him, along with his room key, a package from the pigeon hole above it. No name was on the fat buff envelope, about ten inches long and eight across, just the room number. His mind raced for a moment; no one knew he was staying here, not even Elleck. He never stayed in the same hotel for more than one night, and he used different hotels each time he came to London.

‘You sure this is for me?’ he asked.

‘It was delivered about half an hour ago, sir.’

‘By whom?’

‘Motorcycle messenger. Don’t ask me which firm — there’s hundreds of them.’

Ephraim nodded, took the envelope and walked to the cashier’s desk. ‘Please make my bill up, I have a change of schedule and I’m leaving right away.’ He sent a bell-hop up for his bag. As he would not now be having dinner with Elleck, there was no reason for him to stay in London anyway. He wanted to have a brief meeting with his chief of UK operatives and then, he decided, he would fly on to Paris this evening, instead of in the morning as he had originally planned.

The envelope worried him greatly. Maybe, he thought, it was for a previous occupant of the room, but he wouldn’t have put a large bet on it. It worried him because he did not know what it contained, and it worried him because someone had been able to discover his whereabouts. He climbed into a taxi, sat down, and began to examine the envelope carefully.

After some minutes he decided, with not a great deal of confidence, that the contents of the envelope were not of a nature that would liberally scatter him and the taxi around the two hundred yards or so of Knightsbridge that surrounded them, and carefully slit it open with the top of his pen. It contained an RCA videocassette. A label was stuck to it, which read: ‘MEET ME AT THE MORGUE — starring I. Ephraim.’

He looked at the label, at first in disbelief, then with a grin on his face and then in terror, and he began to shake uncontrollably. There was a note also stuck to the cassette, which he tore off and opened. The note said: ‘You are to be in the bar of L’Hermitage Hotel in La Baule, Brittany, at midday, Saturday. You are to come alone. If anyone accompanies you, or follows you, or if you do not turn up, then one of these will be delivered to every press agency in the world at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’

The note was typed, by an electric typewriter with a plastic ribbon. The paper was a sheet of thin white A4 that could have been bought in any stationery shop in the world. Ephraim studied everything for some clue. There was none. His shaking got worse, and he felt his head become unbearably hot. He jerked the side window down, stuck his head out of the moving taxi, and was violently sick.

Jimmy Culundis, the Greek international arms dealer, lay back in the massive bath tub that was sunk into the floor of the huge bathroom and felt very relaxed. He was in the finest luxury money could buy, from a bath with a built-in temperature control system that maintained the bath water at whatever temperature the occupant selected, to the gold-plated taps, to the expensive soaps, to the climate-controlled room walled in marble and smoked-glass mirrors. It wasn’t unlike the bathroom he had in his house in Geneva, he decided. Nor unlike his villa in Greece; nor unlike his apartment in Paris.

Culundis was in a guest suite in Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh’s private quarters, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Royal Palace in Tunquit, the capital of Umm Al Amnah. It was Friday night, and his private DC-8 had landed him at the country’s airport less than one hour earlier. He ran the soap down his flabby stomach, then, for a moment tensing his muscles, he raised his pelvis up out of the water, and carefully soaped every part of his long, limp phallus, a part of his body of which he was particularly fond and proud — the only part, in fact. He soaped around his scrotum, the inside of his thighs and his thatch of pubic hair, and then dunked everything back into the water. Then he slid his right hand under the water, gripped his phallus, and lifted it up, so that the top of it poked out of the water like a periscope.

Then, pretending it was a periscope, he turned it, first to the right, then to the left; then he stretched it up out of the water, as far as it would go in its limp state, bent it forward like a hosepipe, and started making the sound of machine-gun fire.

Suddenly, he became aware that he was no longer alone in the room; someone was looking at him. He lifted his eyes upwards. He saw a blonde girl, in a thin white dress that was virtually transparent and had a slit from the navel to the ground; she was smiling at him, and had an amused twinkle in her eyes.

‘Abby said you might like someone to scrub your back.’ She leaned forward, and the dress parted completely over her white, slightly tanned thighs. The Greek’s eyes bulged, and he decided that either Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh had curious taste in the way he liked his housemaids to dress, or else the country of Umm Al Amnah was suffering from an acute shortage of ladies’ underwear. Her eyes moved from his, to a spot further down the bathwater. He looked down there too, and then went even redder. His phallus was standing bolt upright, several inches out of the water and, this time, completely unsupported by his hand.