Darke Mission (11 page)

JJ didn't want to meet up with Neil. Partly because he couldn't be bothered, he knew they had little in common, and partly because his mind was full of radiation thoughts, hormone injections, survival and all that jazz. Neil had promised that the meeting would be very short, just intended to establish whether JJ was in a position or not to help the government, and then JJ could be on his merry way.

Robson was true to his word. They met for an early afternoon glass of wine at a wine bar just around the corner from his offices at the Treasury in Westminster. JJ could easily walk there and back to MAM's building in twenty minutes. Though the medical advice was not to drink alcohol while undergoing hormone treatment, apparently the occasional glass was OK. In any event, JJ took the view that a glass of red wine was meant to be good for the heart and that he may as well attempt to keep that organ going for as long as possible given the other health issues dominating his mind and body.

The meeting was indeed short, twenty minutes or so exclusive of the time it took to order, but it was seriously weird. Neil started by asking JJ if MAM had any investments in South Korea. JJ was unlikely to blurt out where any of MAM's investments were to anyone, let alone a slimy weasel like Robson. JJ replied that MAM had been known to invest in South Korean equities and sometimes traded the won on the foreign exchanges but that he wasn't sure if they had any right now. Of course, in truth, JJ knew exactly MAM's position in South Korean assets but he clearly wasn't letting on. This was a white lie, it clearly being for the greater good. Then the Financial Secretary to the Treasury asked if MAM traded gold on a regular basis. That was more of a general enquiry, thought JJ so no white lies necessary. He explained to Neil that MAM often traded in gold, in size, and that in Toby Naismith they had one of the best gold traders in London, if not the entire global financial community. That may have been bigging up Fathead a bit too much but JJ thought it might balance out the paucity of information he'd given Neil regarding MAM's investments. On receipt of the gold information Neil took a sip of his house Chianti Classico and gave a little nod of approval, or so JJ thought.

The meeting ended friendly enough; they shook hands and both went in the respective directions of their offices. Neil said he'd be in touch, JJ hoped he wouldn't but at that moment he had peeing on his mind so he didn't think twice about Neil's comment. In fact, he was so distracted he didn't even bother to ask Neil why the questions!

As JJ walked briskly towards his offices he felt something vibrate in his pocket. He knew it wasn't his willie, the first dose of Zoladex hormones had seen to that; it was his BlackBerry.

“Hey JJ, it's Toby,” said a familiar voice.

“Hi Toby, I'm just on my way back from the Treasury. What's up?”

“Well, you know the FCA, the Financial Conduct Authority, one of those twin peaks regulators that try, on occasion, to prevent us earning a living, or at least a fast buck.”

“Yes, Toby, I know of them. We haven't done anything to get in their bad books, have we?”

“I'm not sure. Compliance gave me a ring and said that one of the FCA's officers had been looking at a selection of hedge fund trades that were done on Friday, 13
^th
December last year. Remember that?”

How could he forget thought JJ. A day that had gone so magnificently for MAM but had ended with an email that was a precursor to a life changing event. “Yes, I remember, Toby,” said JJ, attempting to be nonchalant. “How come we've lit up their radar screen?”

“Compliance wouldn't say but the inference was that we had done a whole lot better that day than virtually any other London based macro fund and the FCA just wanted to check that it was all above board.”

“Have they set a meeting time?” asked JJ.

“Yes, they want to come in on Thursday, around 11am, to see me as the head trader and you as the head of portfolio strategy,” replied Toby.

“OK, that's three days away. I'll be back in ten minutes, we can have a brief chat, but then I need to head off. See you soon.”

With that JJ ended the call, almost not waiting for Toby to say cheerio. Even in his radiated and hormoned body, JJ knew what was afoot. MAM had stolen a march on all the other hedge funds that day, partly because they had a researcher in Wellington, partly because that researcher had a brother-in-law in a Greek political party whose single audience information release was spot on and partly because the three MAM amigos' plan had worked like a Patek Philippe tourbillon. Some overzealous regulator eejit may want to try to make an insider trading case out of this, reasoned JJ but he was determined to ensure that that particular chunk of cow muck was going nowhere near MAM.

JJ's main attribute as a fund manager was his commitment to deep research and analysis. If you read it in
The Financial Times
, then it's too late. JJ distinguished between economic commentators and economists. The former could write well, maybe even knew superficially what they were writing about, could meet deadlines and appear to the man in the street as quite knowledgeable. Proper economists, however, could take on issues and dig deep, eke out robust theoretical underpinnings, undertake detailed analysis and then solid statistical and/or econometric testing. JJ had been mulling over this opinion as he lay on the radiotherapy table that day. While ‘Human' and ‘Spaceman' were playing on Joe Ford's music system he decided he wasn't totally satisfied. He had absolutely no doubt that by the slide rule of traditional medicine, he was getting state of the art treatment. The Royal Marsden was the leading cancer hospital in the UK, maybe even further afield. Dr Van den Berk was justifiably regarded highly by all his colleagues and staff and Joe Ford's RapidArc transmission mechanisms would have made it on to
Tomorrow's World.
After further contemplation, JJ firmly believed that as far as mainstream medicine was concerned he was getting the best treatment around.

The nagging doubt in his head though was triggered by a memory of his first analytical job for MI5. The security services were concerned that OPEC's massive wealth was, advertently or inadvertently, funding some pockets of terrorism aimed at the UK. For every $1/barrel the price of crude oil rose how much of that went to nefarious groups and deadly organisations? JJ was asked to investigate and report back. He was fresh out of university, so his technical analytical brain was fully engaged. Within a few weeks, he had completed a detailed study of the impact of oil on consumer prices, output and employment of the G7 economies plus Russia. For good measure he even built a small econometric model, using vector autoregressive analysis and dynamic optimisation programs which spewed out a ranking of the G7 currencies for any given oil shock. He was pleased with his work and gave it to his boss. She had a brief look at it and asked, ‘What does OPEC do with the money?' JJ nearly collapsed in a mental heap. He was so taken by his efforts at estimating the direct economic impact of an oil price hike on the major economies that he had forgotten completely that OPEC had received a windfall gain and that they had to do something with this gain.

JJ scuttled off back to his desk and worked day and night for two weeks on this question. Different OPEC countries were in different stages of economic development. Many would need to spend their relatively new found wealth on infrastructure like roads, hospitals, schools etc. The more economically advanced, like Saudi Arabia, may have peaked on infrastructure building so their excess cash tended to go into financial assets. US Treasuries were a favourite as nobody thought the US government would ever default, as were some hard commodities like gold, silver, platinum and copper. However there was other stuff. It was impossible to account for every last dollar that OPEC countries received in oil revenue. Saudi Arabia was probably America's closest ally in the Middle East, but Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and fifteen of the nineteen suicide bombers who flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 were Saudis. That operation, heinous as it was, took money, planning, secrecy, and albeit from the coldness of a black ops perspective, expensive skill. By the time JJ had completed his research he gave his superiors an incredibly detailed breakdown of what the key OPEC countries did with their oil wealth. The estimated gap between the revenues and the resulting outflow of cash into real and financial assets, reserves, overseas aid, military purchases etc. was called the ‘funding gap' by JJ. His boss had decided to term it PTF, potential terrorist funds. It was a large enough gap to be well scary.

By the time Brandon Flowers had blasted out the ‘Spaceman' track, JJ had decided he needed to do a bit more research into prostate cancer. The iffy nature of his particular position i.e. locally advanced and not far from metastatic meant that his treatment program had been put together in a bit of a rush. With the nature of that news, the Greek plan, the peculiar Robson meeting and worrying about Cyrus, JJ hadn't properly delved into the wider and deeper issues on the cancer.

Well, it's just as well that he decided to. After Cyrus had gone to bed that night, JJ opened up his computer tablet and got going on research. He usually had his tablet with him and it was not synchronised with any of his work computers so he was reasonably confident that planned or opportunistic prying eyes would not get any information reward. JJ wanted more answers on several scores. First, the side effects of his treatment and was there anything that could be done about that. Secondly, was there any alternative to mainstream medicine as it related to cancer cures.

JJ ploughed through a skyscraper's worth of information. The side effects of both radiotherapy and hormone treatment were not pleasant. The lightweight side effects of hormone treatment that were most common included excessive tiredness, hot flushes like a menopausal woman, weight gain and body hair loss. The more heavyweight side effects included the possibility of liver and kidney toxicity and immune system dysfunction. You were well up the Swanee if the latter three took hold.

After about an hour of not too informative browsing, JJ came across a 2010 article by Heba Barakat of the Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition in Ain Shams University in Cairo. Dr Barakat had conducted an extensive experiment involving forty healthy adult albino rats. To cut a long story and a lot of research short these rats were randomly assigned to different groups with one of the groups given regular doses of Cyproterone acetate, essentially the generic name for the hormone that JJ's abdomen was implanted with. The data from the experiment suggested that the rats who were given nothing but Cyproterone suffered diminished liver function and hepatic oxidative stress. The rats who had been given green tea extract as well both before and during the experiment's procedure, were fine and dandy, both in their liver function and their immune system. The results and statistical analysis attached to this piece of work were impressive by scientific and probability benchmarks. JJ quite liked green tea. Now, he was going to love it.

Over the next few evenings JJ continued to investigate. The side effects of radiation weren't good either. Several bodies of work, JJ hadn't yet decided whether it was good and relevant work or not, said outright that the radiotherapy was as likely to kill you as the cancer. The general opinion from the alternative medicine school of thought was that the radiation stays in your body for a long time and slowly but surely closes down your organs and your immune system. These researchers and commentators agreed that the statistics showing that patients who had undergone the radiotherapy and hormone combo for non-metastatic prostate cancer had a survival rate of 80% plus were misleading. These alternative medicine types claimed, as it turns out correctly, that mainstream cancer statistics counted you as having survived if you lived for five years after your initial diagnosis and treatment. Prostate cancer, however, was more often than not a slow to develop cancer. Even in JJ's locally advanced case, Dr Van den Berk had said he'd probably live for four to five years even if he had no treatment at all. ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics', recalled JJ. This was not good. Apart from concluding that he had to eat even more healthily, take a targeted selection of vitamins over and above the usual suspects, fill up on antioxidants and keep up his gym and martial arts training even if knackered, JJ realised that it was time to supplement Joe Ford's laser assault on his cancer.

After a few more hours of research, JJ came across one seriously interesting human being. One Dr Mirko Beljanski, deceased. Dr Beljanski was a French-Serbian molecular biologist, who died in 1998, seventy-five years old. In the same way that there are proper economists and the rest, there are proper molecular biologists and the rest. Dr Beljanski was a proper molecular biologist. Among his published 133 scientific papers, he produced research which seemed to indicate that an extract from the Amazonian rain forest tree Pao Pereira suppressed prostate cancer cells. This was published in the
Journal of Integrative Oncology
and was widely revered as a major breakthrough on the subject. Even more intriguing though was the link between Beljanski and President Francois Mitterrand of France. In September 1992, it was announced that the President had prostate cancer. The seventy-five year old vowed to stay in power, some were happy about that, many others were not. A year later, Mitterrand was seriously ill with the cancer and it was believed it had gone metastatic. The doctors gave Mitterrand three months to live and towards the end of 1994, in great pain, he succumbed to radiation treatment. Eventually Mitterrand was persuaded to take some of Mirko Beljanski's formulations. Mitterrand's health started to improve, he ate better, felt better and looked better after about eight weeks of consuming Beljanski's products. His political enemies were not happy bunnies. President Mitterrand completed his second term and stayed alive for about another year after that.