The Money Makers (66 page)

Both men were silent as Hatherleigh took the ‘copter up to small aircraft cruising altitude, across the great city and out beyond Heathrow’s thundering airways. A late-arriving jumbo from the States passed close by, leaving Zack feeling like a pedal-cyclist on a motorway.

He knew a few rules about helicopter flights for the nervous. Don’t look down. Don’t think of where you are. Never remember that you’re in a tiny glass egg, a transparent bubble, a speck of foam with only air to lean on.

Zack broke the first rule soon after the passage of the jumbo. And in the giddiness of seeing suburban London spread like a map beneath him, he broke the second rule too. He tried to think about Sarah instead, or about the forthcoming weekend, or about his father’s cash, and the certainty that it would soon be his. None of these comforting thoughts helped, and a buffet of turbulence, which lifted then dropped the little craft, emphasised all too strongly the extent of Zack’s dependence on the unreliable skies.

‘OK?’ asked Hatherleigh, into quieter airspace now and able to relax.

Zack nodded. He didn’t like talking in the helicopter, yelling above the blades, but Hatherleigh always enjoyed it and Zack needed anything to take his mind off his fear.

‘I’m fine,’ he yelled. ‘How are things going at South China?’

It had now been two months since Hatherleigh Pacific had enjoyed control of South China, and Hatherleigh and Scottie had been busy whipping their new acquisition into shape.

‘Good. Shipping side is amazing. There’s a whole damn goldmine there and the lazy sods before us never even bothered to dig. Scottie’s fired all the existing bunch and brought in the best of our own managers from Hatherleigh Coastal. In a couple of years, we’ll be making more from South China’s ships than from our own.’

‘That’s great.’ Zack’s conversation wasn’t too clever when he was frightened.

Hatherleigh’s route was simple. He picked up the M3 motorway out of London, then, just after Basingstoke, he’d follow the A303 west all the way to Devon. The lighted canal of traffic below at least gave something for Zack’s eyes to hang on to in the luminous dark. The shower of rain which gusted over them in London had returned in company and a series of squalls pitched into the helicopter. Hatherleigh made constant minute adjustments to keep on course. Basingstoke passed beneath them and Hatherleigh skipped the southward bulge of the road, to rejoin it somewhere over Andover. Beyond Andover lay Salisbury Plain and the dark pillars of Stonehenge.

‘How about the property side and the bank itself?’ bawled Zack.

‘Property’s great. Land slap-bang where we want it. Our property guys are delighted. Bank’s a different matter. It’ll take time to get it sorted, but we don’t see too much of a problem. So far, we’re all very pleased.’

The helicopter sped on into the thickening night. The weather was getting worse and Hatherleigh ducked lower to keep his eyes on the landmarks beneath. To Zack’s inexperienced eyes, the traffic on the A303 looked very thin or perhaps the falling rain simply swallowed the lights. In any case, it felt a dangerous and friendless journey. Every now and then, Hatherleigh spoke to air-traffic control, requesting and obtaining permissions, soliciting and passing information. To them, this was just another rainy Friday night, nothing to be upset about.

‘Be entering a front, soon. May be a bit bumpy.’

Zack only caught the last couple of words. He didn’t know if Hatherleigh was warning him or just passing on routine information. Zack assumed it was routine, but his pulse rate accelerated anyway. It’d be nice to see Sarah again, to share a hot bath with her. Outside the rain increased. The helicopter left the A303 and headed west across the Vale of Somerset towards the distant fires of Taunton. The wind was strong and gusty, and Zack felt the metal cage around him ride the gusts like a boat on the open sea. They passed over Taunton and the M5, the last bright lights they’d see. As they headed over the Brendon Hills to Exmoor, there’d be a few clusters marking villages and scattered dots for farmhouses; otherwise only the endless sighing black of forest, night, and open moor.

Ovenden House lay south of Exmoor, but Hatherleigh always enjoyed spinning over the moor before wheeling south to Ovenden. Tonight was no exception despite the weather, and Hatherleigh focused furiously on the dark land below. If he strayed too high, he risked losing visibility in the low-lying cloud; too low and the lightless peaks of Exmoor could rise to meet him.

‘Did you find out where South China’s extra profits were coming from?’ yelled Zack, desperate to keep his brain occupied with anything except where he was.

‘Yes. From the roulette wheel, every penny.’

‘Speculation?’

‘Yes. They played a pretty dangerous game from the look of it. Loaded up on some tax gimmick - RosEs it’s called - that your crowd is pushing hard at the moment. Is RosEs one of your brainwaves?’

‘I had some input,’ said Zack, not wanting to take the credit for something that Hatherleigh would be certain to disapprove of.

‘Yes, well, it certainly encouraged South China to take risks that they shouldn’t have taken.’

‘At least they came out on the right side.’

Hatherleigh glanced sideways at Zack. It was old­fashioned of him, he knew, but he didn’t like the culture of instant wealth, and he had a hunch that Zack had more to do with RosEs than he let on. Hatherleigh’s glance found Zack, lit up by the instrument panel, pressing his angular frame into the padded seat. He looked nervous. Hatherleigh looked ahead again, eyes raking into the darkness ahead, fingers sensing every tug on the helicopter’s frame. He nodded.

‘River Exe below us now. We’ll follow it south to Ovenden.’ Then turning his attention back to business, he added, ‘Yes, we’ve closed down the casino, but apparently we can’t shut down the trading rooms altogether, much as I’d like to. You’d understand all that better than me.’

There was a sudden flash, which Zack, in his fear, immediately assumed came from some major fault with the helicopter. He would have leaped from his seat, except that his seat belt caught him. As a second flash lit the sky, he realised without much reduction in his anguish that the helicopter was fine, but the rain clouds were producing bolts of lightning and hurling them in fiery poles to earth. Zack was sitting amidst the fireworks of giants. By now, he was in a state of naked terror. He would never, ever travel this way again. He’d sit in eternal traffic jams if he had to. He’d walk if he had to. He’d cross England on a pogo-stick. The helicopter followed the rushing river below, chased by the fury of the thunder and the screaming lightning. Zack wanted to continue talking, anything to distract his attention.

‘You’ve checked their books carefully have you? I know our guys were surprised at how greedy South China seemed to be.’

Hatherleigh’s eyes strayed once again from the unmarked way ahead to Zack’s taut face.

‘Yes. We’ve checked their books.’

Zack nodded. He felt like vomiting. Hatherleigh glanced again. Was Zack worried by something? Something apart from the lightning, that is?

‘You could ask your guys to send us a list of transactions,’ said Hatherleigh. ‘That way, we could check off what you sold us against what South China bought. Seems like a sensible precaution to take. Good idea.’

Zack nodded in feeble assent. He could imagine the bitching and moaning that that kind of request would cause on the Weinstein Lukes trading floor, but a client was a client and he’d get Hatherleigh what he wanted.

Just then a flash of lightning seemed to explode directly in front of them. Simultaneously, a downdraught of wind snatched the helicopter and threw it down, causing Zack to lose his belly somewhere in the black­ ness above. The black lift shaft carried them on down, until Zack’s fingernails cut into the seat cover. Another dart of lightning lit up a bristle of treetops at what seemed no distance away. If they’d been rocks on a lee shore, Zack couldn’t have been more frightened. In his terror, he almost felt the first branches sweeping against the base of the helicopter, sucking them down into certain death. They were still moving downwards fast.

‘Look out!’ he cried.

Hatherleigh didn’t take his eyes from the rain-blotted screen. But with his right hand he thumped his passenger and pointed. In the midst of the Ovenden House woodland, a white-painted H was lit up. Hatherleigh dropped the helicopter on to the landing pad with the gentlest of impacts.

‘We’re here,’ said the viscount. Beneath the feeble shelter of Zack’s city raincoat, the two men ran across the grass to the welcoming stones of Ovenden House.

4

Matthew entered the lift. It had a corrugated rubber floor, metal walls and a rubber buffer running right round the compartment at waist height. The compartment was perhaps twenty feet long, ten feet wide and twelve feet high. A plaque on the wall indicated a maximum carrying capacity of thirteen thousand five hundred kilos. Thirteen and a half tons. Two hundred people.

‘Get a lot of elephants down here, do you?’ asked Matthew.

The security guard shook his head.

‘Bullion. Gold and silver. The loading bay’s not a secure area. That means that whenever we need to transport anything, we take an armoured truck downstairs. It uses this lift.’

A security camera in the ceiling winked as Matthew looked at it. The security guard pressed the down button on the lift and spoke simultaneously into a video intercom. Unseen colleagues in the control room verified his face and voice. They released a lock on the lift and it moved slowly down. It was six twenty-two in the morning.

The Madison offices in London are architecturally unremarkable, except for one thing. They are nearly as deep as they are high. There are seven storeys above ground, four larger storeys below.

The first underground level is dedicated to the canteen, a gym, some storerooms, the mailroom, a sickbay. A few other bits and bobs. Nothing exciting.

Below that level, there’s a floor devoted to mainframe computers, back-up phone switchboards, emergency generators, data storage, and tapes of all trading-room phone calls. The entire level is capable of being sealed off in the event of fire, flood, or terrorist attack The floor is important, but, important as it is, the next two floors below ground hold something of far greater worth.

Madison boasts the world’s largest custody business.

The idea of custody is simple. If you buy a few bars of gold, you don’t want to dig a hole in the ground to store them, but you don’t want to leave them knocking around your desk either. So you come to somebody - Madison for instance - and ask them to look after your gold for you. Madison is happy to oblige. They charge you a fee. Pop the bullion in their vaults and everyone’s happy.

The third floor below ground is given over to the admin staff who look after the vaults. But Matthew was headed for the floor below that. The vaults themselves. Belial had been right. There is a well-kept secret at Madison, and Matthew had only just been inducted.

The vaults are guarded by a single door. The door is guarded by a triple lock. Each lock is released only when a certain combination has been correctly inserted. One set of combinations is passed from security guard to security guard on a fortnightly shift pattern. The second set of combinations is passed between police officers belonging to the Metropolitan Police Force’s Valuable Commodities Unit, known as ValCom. The police officers also change on a fortnightly basis, but the shifts are out of sync with those of the Madison security guards. The third and final set of combinations is passed down amongst Madison vice presidents on a weekly basis. All three sets of combinations are changed every six weeks, but again, out of sync, so that one combination is altered every second week.

Matthew’s promotion meant he was down on the vault duty rota. He would be on duty for a total of four weeks this year. This week. Again in about a month’s time. Then again, a couple of times in autumn, after his father’s deadline had expired.

Belial’s suggestion was madness, but Matthew couldn’t get it out of his head. He wasn’t going to do anything today. Nothing this week, even. Nothing at all, except look and listen. Belial’s suggestion was almost certainly insane, but there was nothing illegal about looking.

Four floors below street level, the lift came slowly to a halt. The security guard pressed the intercom again and asked for the doors to be opened. The control room verified his request and released the doors.

There wasn’t much to see. A concrete passageway, wide enough for a lorry, ran from the lift to a corner about sixty feet away. The passageway was lined with foil-insulated pipes and festoons of cables, a metal cupboard housing some kind of electrical control station. In the ceiling, cameras blinked on and off, monitored from the control room upstairs. All pictures were recorded and stored for a minimum of six months.

The security guard with Matthew didn’t pause at the view.

‘The vaults are through here,’ he said, pushing his way through a small door in the main passageway. ‘You need to report down here at six thirty every morning this week and seven o’clock every evening. Don’t be late or get hit by a bus, because we can’t open or close the vaults without you.’

The passageway ended in a circular glass booth. The guard pressed a green button set into a control panel and the glass wall on their side slid open.

‘This is the vault-user identification chamber. You step inside. The door will close. There’ll be a flash, which means it’s taken a photo. Then you press the grey wall panel with your right hand. The panel will record your fingerprints, then let you out. Oh yes, and you’ll be weighed as well. If you walk out of here with a bar of gold stuffed up your trousers, we’ll know all about it.’