Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘This is a ring I bought for my girlfriend,’ Alex said, past exasperation, ‘it has nothing to do with Mike, or Nicolas Banacharski, or anybody else. I bought it. Me, at random, in a shop. Mike was leaving me in charge of the Banacharski Ring’s website while he went on sabbatical.’

Bree thought: what a mess. None of this made any sense. Another wave of exhaustion hit her. And now, when she thought she’d been bringing a loose end in, she might have been doing the opposite. She decided all she could do was breach it.

‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree said.

‘Carey, yes.’ He added bitterly: ‘Ex-girlfriend.’

‘She the last number you dialled on your cell?’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Alex.

‘Number ending -’ Bree pulled his cellphone out of her pocket and consulted the screen – ‘137 0359?’

‘Give me that!’ Alex said, snatching it back from her. She let it go.

‘She’s on her way here,’ said Bree. ‘I called her. Said you were in trouble and to come. She sounded a little drunk. It was hard to make out whether she was taking it in. But I said you were going to be here. Said you needed help.’

‘What? Why?’ Alex, panicking, even through his tiredness. It felt like a humiliation – even after everything, seeing Carey was…

‘Because you’re in trouble, and you need help.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Dead people. Me. You’re in lots of trouble.’ Bree gave it a moment, looked at her well-bitten fingernails. ‘But you’re right. It wasn’t for you, not strictly, that I called her. I thought she was your connection here. I thought you were going to pass the machine over to her.’

Alex started to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. There’s no machine. You’re here to see your girlfriend. You don’t know what I’m talking about…’

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. He was standing now. Fidgeting with his hands. His cheeks looked like they had been gouged from limestone. He wasn’t acting like someone who had been caught by a government agency trying to smuggle a weapon through a strange country. He was acting like somebody who was unbearably miserable at the prospect of confronting his ex-girlfriend.

Bree made a decision. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go. You don’t need to be here.’

‘But I thought…’

‘Yeah,’ said Bree. She shrugged, but didn’t smile. ‘So did I. This whole thing started as a mess and now it’s a worse one. Go. I know where you are. Go get some sleep.’ Bree did not add that, having been through Alex’s wallet and tagged his mobile phone, she knew how to find him if she needed to. ‘Enjoy Vegas,’ she added.

She watched as he walked towards the wide doors. The security guard watched him walk through, then looked back to Bree, then scratched his gut and rearranged his shoulders. That probably figured. Still no police. Perhaps miracles did happen.

Bree leaned back in the seat, comfortable as she could get, and let her eyes close.

‘Something odd.’ It was Porlock, standing at Red Queen’s desk. Red Queen didn’t remember him having had the courtesy to knock on the door. ‘Look.’

He put a sheet of paper on the chewed red leather of the desk. It was a stock chart, showing a company’s share price falling off a cliff.

‘MIC. Last fifteen minutes. We’ve been watching them – ever since this started. But this you could get on the evening news. The chief investor just dumped all their stock on the market. All of it. It’s bad. A cascade effect. The stock’s toxic.’

‘Is the government invested?’ asked Red Queen innocently.

Porlock looked sarcastic.

‘Every government that buys or sells arms is invested. The consequences could be-’

‘For who? The consequences for who?’

‘Everyone,’ said Porlock, whose usual expression of imperturbability had given way to one that looked almost ironical. Porlock, it occurred to Red Queen, would look ironical aboard the Titanic . ‘This will go through the world economy like a hurricane. Contracts cancelled, jobs lost.’

‘This investor…’ said Red Queen.

‘Nobody knows about him,’ said Porlock. He swung his hand back and forth in front of his chest like a paddle. ‘Nobody knew he even existed until recently. There were so many institutional investors in the company that who bothered to check which was what? Until this started happening, and a lot of forensic accounting was done very fast and in breach of all ethics and international agreements. The simultaneous stock dumps. It looked like a concerted attack. Each of them traced back several layers. A name associated with a network of accounts in Switzerland. Sleeping partner. Seemingly bottomless pockets. If there was a share loose, he bought it.’

‘Nazi gold?’ asked Red Queen.

‘Nothing that simple, I don’t think. Nor that small-time. The Nazis didn’t have that much gold. MIC was in trouble by ’99, sure – not much more than a think tank attached to a logo. There’d been bad press about its wartime history and, like everyone, a lot of investment in new tech that turned out to be imaginary. But it was still an arms company: still big. Still not the kind of thing you take control of with pocket change.

‘The last decade saw it turn into what it is now. Everyone assumed that whoever was buying it knew something others didn’t, so they bought too. Everyone assumed it was just a successful company, which it was.’

‘Who is this investor?’ Red Queen asked. ‘We have no file on him? Seriously?’

‘No. Not one. But his name comes up in connection with Banacharski. He’s called Fred Nieman.’

Red Queen thought. ‘The man who was due to visit Banacharski before he disappeared. Mentioned in the letters.’

‘And,’ said Porlock, ‘the name Banacharski himself used to sign his final letter.’

Red Queen raised one eyebrow. In the windowless room there was a sense of something coming to an end. ‘You think Banacharski’s alive?’

‘Nobody ever found a body,’ said Porlock. ‘And MIC paid him a lot of money over the years. What do you suppose he did with it? Under any number of guises, through third, fourth, fifth, to the Xth-term parties, Nieman’s fronts had been buying shares in MIC steadily since the beginning of 1999. He didn’t work for MIC. He owned it. Had a controlling interest within a couple of years, if you added it all up. Did nothing with it. No record of any involvement in board meetings, not through any of these fronts, and, you know, agencies like ours – governments, senior pols – it’s the sort of thing we’d expect to know. All that happened was the money came in, and made more money, and now it’s gone.’

Red Queen struggled with the thought. Nieman had been buying stock since around the time of Banacharski’s last disappearance. But where would he have got this sort of money? The company had gone up in value by powers of ten since then – but that holding, still… it would have cost.

‘They can’t have paid him that much money. Not nearly that much money. There aren’t more than a handful of individuals on the face of the earth with that much money. And why reinvest it? And why take it out? Why would anybody build it up just to destroy it?’

While he talked, Red Queen moused over the computer. There were jagged red lines on graphs, excitable reporters, flashes of men in dealing rooms with their ties held out sideways from their necks like nooses, shouting. It seemed a wonder planes weren’t falling out of the sky.

‘Never bright confident morning again,’ Red Queen said flatly. ‘Where’s the money gone?’

Porlock shrugged. ‘MIC will be lucky to last until the exchange closes this afternoon,’ he said. ‘No government’s going to risk trying to bail it out.’