Питер Джеймс: Billionaire

Culundis smiled to himself at the thought of Emir Missh — that he had conquered the man’s country without his even knowing it. He would be mad, mad as hell, for no one would ever believe that he was not in complicity with the Israelis. All the Arab countries would turn against him, as would all the Western World. He was a weak man, thought Culundis, a feeble and weak man; his father, old Quozzohok, was better, he reflected — a tyrant, yes, but at least he had gumption. Culundis knew he could never have walked all over Umm Al Amnah if the old man had still been at the helm. He downed his wine glass, smiled at his wife, and rose from the table.

At four o’clock in the morning, the telephone by the bed rang; Culundis was awake in a second, apprehensive.

‘Culundis,’ he said.

‘It’s Hamid. I’m sorry to call you at this hour.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Culundis to Hamid Assan, his Chief of Staff in Amnah. ‘What’s up?’

‘We’ve been flung out of Amnah.’

‘What?’ Culundis sat bolt upright in bed. ‘What did you say?’

‘Every one of your soldiers has been rounded up, their weapons removed, and they have been put on a plane out of the country. I have to leave in one hour’s time myself.’

‘This is an outrage. What is Missh playing at?’

‘He has instructed me to telephone you to say that the services of you and your men are no longer required, and where would you like them delivered to?’

Culundis sat in the bed, speechless, for nearly a minute. When he next spoke, he was nearly shouting: ‘Is Missh there? I must speak to him myself, at once.’

‘I don’t know where he is; I’m in Tunquit prison.’

‘Give me the number. I’m going to call you right back.’

‘Hold on — I will ask for it.’

There was a pause and then Assan’s voice came back: ‘It’s Tunquit 448 — the Tunquit code is 62 — and the international code for Amnah is 010971.’

‘I must speak to Missh — then I will call you right back.’ Culundis hung up. Throughout the conversation, his wife hardly stirred. She was used to his telephone calls at strange hours of the night.

He began to dial Missh’s private number at the Royal Palace in Tunquit, when the doorbell rang. Puzzled, he put the receiver down. After a few minutes, it rang again, a long positive ring. He wondered who on earth it could be, and looked at his gold Cartier: it was five past four. There was a night security guard on the gate — he would never let anyone past at this hour, and if he needed to speak to Culundis, there was an intercom system by which he could buzz the house. But this was the doorbell. Culundis was baffled; the telephone call from Hamid, followed by the doorbell ringing, was too much for him at this hour. Maybe the security guard needed to speak to him and the intercom was broken, he wondered.

He slipped out of bed, put on his paisley silk dressing gown, which he had bought at Harrods, and walked over to the bedroom window. The view was as always, stunning. It was a view he could never tire of, the little fishing port where he had been born and lived as a child, the tiny white houses. He could see the one where he had lived. The sun was a red ball on the horizon, and the sky was cloudless; it was going to be a beautiful day. There was the steady staccato diesel phut-silence-phut-silence-phut-silence of a deep-sea trawler coming back in after its night’s work; several other smaller boats were also heading in towards the stone mole of the port. There was the smell of sweet wet dew in the air.

Culundis padded downstairs in his bare feet as the bell rang a third time. ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I’m coming!’ He opened the door, just a fraction, and peered round. He saw a short man in a thin, dark raincoat; the man smiled pleasantly. ‘Good morning, Mr Culundis,’ said the stranger, politely.

‘Er — good morning,’ said Culundis baffled.

The stranger forced the door wide open; for a second, Culundis could not quite understand the man’s behaviour, and then he saw for the first time, that the stranger held in his hand a Walther automatic pistol with a silencer fitted to the end. For the first time in his life he felt real fear, an icy chill wind that swept through his veins, pumped into his stomach, down through his bile duct and into his rectum. He shat onto his feet. It probably would not have cheered him to know that this actual gun, silencer, and the bullets inside it had all been supplied by him, as part of a large order, to General Isser Ephraim’s team of Mossad agents.

The man fired four bullets into Culundis’s chest, two of which completely removed his heart. As with all products supplied by Jimmy Culundis, the silencer worked perfectly.

The man from the Mossad closed the front door, walked back to the gate, past the security guard with the broken neck, and drove off into the night. Culundis’s family continued to sleep for three more hours.

At 5.15 on Tuesday evening, Rocq drove the Porsche down the ramp of the multi-storey car park behind Lower Thames Street, nodded to the attendant, and stopped, waiting for a gap in the traffic to pull out into the street. Even if he were looking closely, he would have been unlikely to have noticed the figure in the shadows on the second floor of the concrete buildings who watched the appearance of the car with interest, stop-watch in his hand.

The gap came, Rocq gave a light tap on the Porsche’s accelerator, and the car surged out into the traffic stream. Rocq was feeling extremely vulnerable; he had barely slept the last three nights, and Amanda told him she thought that he was cracking up. He wanted desperately to tell her what had happened in Switzerland, but he didn’t want to frighten her.

He had thought about the incident a million times, and each time he was no nearer a firm opinion. When gold had gone through the $700 mark, Elleck had called him up. He had watched Elleck’s face closely, and thought that Elleck looked strained, under pressure — but there was nothing Elleck did or said that gave him any possible cause to think Elleck might have been involved in an attempt to murder him.

Maybe, he wondered, the Range Rover driver had just been a nutter? Maybe he had accidentally carved him up somewhere around Geneva Airport and the guy had a screw loose and had come after him. He had heard of incidents like that occurring. But it had lasted for several hours — surely the driver’s companion would have calmed him down. It was a possibility and he felt a little comforted by the thought, but not much.

For two days, he had racked his brains backwards and forwards to think of any enemies he might have made. He knew there were people jealous of him, people in the office, but none he believed could be so jealous as to try to kill him. No, he knew each time, it came back to Elleck’s syndicate. It had to be them; and if they had tried once, he had little reason to doubt that they would try again. He thought about going to the police, but he dismissed that idea; he decided they would think he was nuts and, in any event, the British police would hardly be interested in something that happened in Switzerland.

He looked constantly in his mirrors, noting any car that appeared to be staying close behind him. He was paranoid, he realized; but he equally well realized he would have to be a fool not to be. He decided not to stay in his own flat tonight, but to stay at Amanda’s. He couldn’t relax in his own flat, and he knew he was going to end up as a basket case if he had to endure another night without sleep, listening to, and thinking about, every single noise.

It had altogether been one hell of a day, he reflected: gold had continued to rise all through the morning, hitting $700 just before noon. Elleck had called him up to his office and told him he was still convinced it must start dropping, and to hold on until two o’clock in the afternoon. At two o’clock, gold was at $712 and Elleck was a very agitated man. Between two and five o’clock, on Elleck’s instructions, through Johnson Matthey of London, Mocatta, Rothschild, and a number of commission houses throughout Europe, Globalex, Goldilocks Ltd and four other companies that Rocq had established on behalf of the syndicate bought 2,500,000 ounces of gold. The world gold market was not aware of the single buying entity and, by the close of the London market, the price of gold had dropped off to $707. Elleck had buzzed him every half hour throughout the afternoon to ask him how he was getting on, and the only thing that gave Rocq any satisfaction at all was listening to the squirming nervousness of his chairman’s voice. He remembered a couple of weeks ago how he had ventured an opinion to Elleck about the price of gold, and had been shot down in flames. If Elleck wanted to hang himself on gold right now, Rocq was more than prepared to give him all the rope he asked for. The thought cheered him up considerably: maybe, he thought, just maybe, no one was going to kill him after all.