Closed Circle (39 page)

"It's a three or four hour trip. Eight or more for me to see home again. And I can take you to Pwllheli. That's on the railway, which you'll be wanting, won't you?"

"Er .. . Yes."

"But not the Holyhead line. So, no danger of running into those brothers Mick mentioned."

"Even so .. ."

"Desmond Rafferty may not come cheap." He winked. "But he comes awful quiet."

"Does he?"

"Oh yes, sir. As the grave."

"I'll pay you ten."

"Fifteen."

"All right. Fifteen pounds."

"Guineas."

I sighed. "Guineas it is."

"Then you have your private cruise." He extended his hand. "Would a four o'clock sailing suit you?"

Rafferty had business to attend to before we left and so had I. Wicklow Public Library was not likely to be mistaken for the British Museum, but it did possess a current Bradshaw, which contained both bad news and good. Whenever we reached Pwllheli, it would be too late for the last train with onward connections to London. But at least I could be sure of catching the first train in the morning. Then, connections permitting, I would be in London by half past two. I left the library, went straight to the nearest post office and despatched a telegram to George Duggan, care of the Alnwick Advertiser.

Have evidence we need to expose them. Meet me London tomorrow. Rose and Crown, Warwick Street, six o'clock. HORTON.

By choosing the pub I had taken him to in September and allocating three and a half hours to possible delays on obscure Welsh branch lines, it seemed to me that I had been as cautious as I needed to be. Duggan would go to the North Pole in search of what I was carrying. He at least would not let me down. Nor would I let him down. We needed each other. As never before.

The weather had deteriorated by four o'clock, rain sheeting across the harbour in a stiff westerly. And the Leitrim Lassie looked to my land-lubber's eye like the kind of craft that should never venture beyond an estuary. But needs must. And Rafferty, resplendent in flapping oilskins, was nothing daunted.

"Sure, it's nought but a squall. It'll blow itself out like one of my wife's tempers. Settle yourself in the cabin and enjoy the trip."

The cabin was aft, separated from the wheel-house by a stretch of deck. As soon as we were under way, I retreated to its relative privacy, took the documents from the bag and laid them out on the small chart table. Several hours of solitude lay before me, with Rafferty busy at the wheel. This was the chance I had been waiting for all day to find out just how much knowledge how much power Charnwood had placed in my hands. As we cleared the harbour wall and set out on our voyage, I lit the hurricane-lamp, hung it from a beam above the table, and commenced another voyage -into the innermost circles of the Concentric Alliance.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

So now I knew. All the actions. All the names. All the steps along the path. Charnwood's secrets were mine, in committee-man's prose, accountant's columns and carbon-copied correspondence: worse than I had imagined, because they contained only cunning and logic, where I had expected to find evil and madness. But megalomania featured nowhere in what the Concentric Alliance had done. It had been shaped in Charnwood's likeness: calm, cautious and calculating, yet always remorseless in its pursuit of profit, and when necessary utterly ruthless.

Its origins lay in Charnwood's mind and in a committee of his leading clients he established in the spring of 1909 to sanction unorthodox investments on their behalf. So far as I could judge from its minutes and resolutions, Charnwood invited its members to take advantage of the political and military connections he had made across Europe during the years he had spent selling weaponry for his father's firm, Moss Charnwood. He believed Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia the previous autumn would lead to a world war within five years. And he maintained that his wealth of contacts would enable him to predict its outbreak to the very month. By accumulating large stock-holdings in the shipbuilders, munitions manufacturers and military suppliers of every affected country, buying gold whenever the price dipped, taking out war insurance however punitive the premium and short-selling war-sensitive shares when the time came, he anticipated that they could all in due course reap not simply a vast profit, but a fortune for life. To achieve this, however, they would have to borrow enormous sums to finance investment on the necessary scale. And they would have to be patient.

Charnwood's clients needed little persuading. Most of them had probably already been won over in private conversations. They agreed to his proposals and to the need for secrecy and forbearance. Charnwood was entrusted with the records of their transactions and assured of their complete confidence. Capital was borrowed and spent. Other members were co-opted. Sub-committees were established in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and Austria, presided over by Charnwood. What he had initially called the Special Investments Committee became one of several Concentric Committees, as he dubbed them. And then, some time in 1912, he made his first reference to the Concentric Alliance, a secret triplet of the two armed alliances into which the European powers had divided.

It was early in 1913, perhaps reflecting the ambitiousness of this new title, that discussion began of something euphemistically described as precipitation. Every financial resource of every member had been called upon to take advantage of the crisis arising from the invasion of Turkey's Balkan provinces by Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro in October 1912. Charnwood's contacts in Vienna had convinced him Austria-Hungary would not tolerate an enlarged Serbia and that war would therefore result from her expansion into Macedonia. But it had not followed. Emperor Franz Josef, supported by his nephew and heir, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had held out for peace. So, as their debts mounted and their earlier confidence began to evaporate, the members of the Concentric Alliance started wondering if they could precipitate events rather than wait upon them.

And now the maggot entered the fruit of their greed. Precipitation was only a last resort, Charnwood said, only a sensible precaution. But the maggot grew. And pierced the skin. In September 1913, Franz Ferdinand announced his intention of visiting Bosnia the following June in his capacity as Inspector-General of the Army. Charnwood's contacts spoke of the dangers of such a visit. If Franz Ferdinand were to be assassinated, a peaceful voice would be silenced and Franz Josef would have no choice but to avenge his nephew. War must then inevitably follow. Of course, if he were not assassinated.. . But why not make sure he was? It lay within the Concentric Alliance's power to do so. Their agents were in effective control of security in Sarajevo. They had penetrated the Black Hand, whose leader, Colonel Dimitrievitch, could be fooled into thinking Austria-Hungary would merely demand expulsion of the ruling Serbian dynasty -something Dimitrievitch himself was eager to bring about if the Archduke died. And they could place their own marksmen in Sarajevo to guarantee whatever happened that he did die.

At every stage of the plan's development, it was dutifully stated that something was bound to happen to render its implementation unnecessary. As a formula for the suppression of misgivings, this may have served its purpose. But nothing did happen. And the plan was implemented. On twenty-eight June 1914, with every last loan drawn upon and every last investment taken out, 'events' Charnwood dryly reported, 'were satisfactorily precipitated." Within little more than a month, they had what they wanted. And the world had war. The threat posed by Colonel Brosch and an unnamed journalist was acknowledged and dealt with in unspecified fashion. No other threat appeared to exist. The Concentric Alliance had covered its tracks.

I scoured the records of the years that followed for some sign of remorse, some hint of collective guilt. But there was none. Some members must have lost their sons. And Charnwood, I knew, had lost his wife. But, if they regretted what they had done, they stifled such sentiments in the face of the profits which flowed into their accounts, fulfilling, indeed surpassing, all their founder had promised. They never again needed to take a direct hand in history. With what they earned from the war from every Dreadnought built and sunk, from every army contract for the supply of bully beef and boots, from every shell fired and every gas canister emptied they could grow fat and wealthier still for the rest of their days. And so they did. Or so, at any rate, they must have thought they would.

But their trust in Charnwood's astuteness grew into a vulnerable complacency. And his astuteness began to fail. Nothing so simple as an assassination could cure the Great Depression. From October 1929 until they petered out in August 1931, the accounts told a consistent story of vanishing capital and diminishing assets. The scale and speed of the losses were as breathtaking as those of the profits. How much Charnwood's clients knew of this was unclear. His letters and reports to meetings reflected only a blithe optimism which he cannot have felt. Why he allowed matters to deteriorate so rapidly was equally obscure. What of his fabled foresight, his legion of expert contacts? It was not as if nobody warned him how questionable his investments had become. The failure of the Credit-Anstalt, for instance, had been predicted more than a month before in a letter from a senior official in the Austrian Ministry of Finance. But Charnwood's only response was to increase his deposits with the bank. He seemed determined to turn a crisis into a catastrophe, a perverse and self-destructive inversion of what he had done in 1914.

No wonder the members of the Concentric Alliance found his posthumous insolvency so hard to believe. Where had all the money gone? Some into the funds he meant to draw on after fabricating his own death, presumably. But the rest? Surely there was too much for poor judgement alone to have devoured. Yet seemingly it had. I had no way of judging the state of these people's finances beyond Charnwood's orbit, but nobody, however rich, could be indifferent to such staggering losses. And they were rich. Rich and powerful. I had heard of most of them. I had read about them over the years their honours and appointments, their good works and grand reputations.

And now I knew on what foundations their glittering careers had been built. Falsehood and fraud were only to be expected. They were the lingua franca Charnwood's clients had spoken and understood. They were the current in which I had also swum. But the war the commissioning of one murder and the precipitation of ten million others was something else. The war was too high a price to pay. I had paid less than most of its victims, yet still the resentment seethed within me as I studied their records and gaped at their profits. They were all as guilty as each other. And I held the proof of their guilt in my hands. Charnwood had given me the means to destroy them. So destroy them I would.

The engine had stopped. How long ago the Leitrim Lassie had ceased to press forward through the high wind and heaving sea I could not tell, but now, certainly, she had abandoned the struggle. Above the creaking of her timbers and the roaring of the waves, I could hear Rafferty moving about on deck. Then there came a rumble of ratcheting metal. He was lowering the anchor. Shading my eyes from the glare of the hurricane-lamp, I peered out through the port-hole. There were a few flickering lights ahead. Could we be off Pwllheli already? I glanced at my watch. It was nearly half past seven. More than three hours had passed since our departure from Wicklow. But storm-tossed though they had presumably been, I could recollect nothing of them. For all that time, I had dwelt in a world apart the hidden world of the Concentric Alliance. I looked down at the documents detailing their every secret, sliding back and forth across the chart table, and I knew I had gleaned enough. Re-tying the string about them, I bundled them back into the bag.

Almost at the same moment, Rafferty lurched through the door, breathing heavily, with water streaming off him. "Holy Mother of God," he declared, staring at me. "You're a calm one and no mistake. I expected to find you sick as a dog and scared out of your skin, not fastening your bag like some doctor who's just called on a wealthy patient."

"Are we there?" I demanded.

"We're off the Welsh coast, sure enough."

"Good."

"About fifteen miles west of Pwllheli." He smiled weakly. "I've anchored in Aberdaron Bay."

"Why?"

"Because there's a gale blowing, in case you hadn't noticed. And because the engine's losing power. Water in the fuel-line, I shouldn't wonder. What with that and a strong tide, we were lucky to clear Bardsey Sound."

"But we did clear it. So, why not carry on?"

"Eager to meet your maker, are you? Look at this." He pulled a bundle of charts out of a locker, spread one of them across the table and pointed to the outline of the Welsh coast. "We're south of the Lleyn Peninsula in a stiff westerly. Between Aberdaron Bay and Pwllheli is this hungry customer." His finger traced the shape of a wide inlet between two sharply defined headlands to the east of us. "Hell's Mouth, they call it. And it wouldn't mind gobbling us for supper, believe you me."

"It looks harmless enough."

He rolled his eyes. "What would you know?"

"I know you agreed to take me to Pwllheli."

"And so I will, when the tide turns and the wind eases."

"When will that be?"

"A few hours, no more. Better late in this world than early in the next, as my sainted mother used to say."

"I have to be in Pwllheli by half past five tomorrow morning."

"And you will be, sir. Trust Desmond Rafferty to set your feet safely ashore well before then. Why, you can dock my wages if I don't. Can I say fairer than that?"

I wondered for a moment if I should ask to be put ashore straightaway. But I had no idea how to get to Pwllheli from Aberdaron on a wet and windy night. It promised to be substantially more difficult than trusting to Rafferty's seamanship. "Very well," I said. "Have it your way."

"And to ease your impatience, I have a bottle of Bushmills aboard. Why don't we ride out the storm over a few drams?" He glanced curiously at the bag I was still holding tightly in my hand. "I'm thinking you needn't be afeared of those brothers bobbing up in Aberdaron Bay. If it's them you are afeared of."