Billionaire

3

From the time Baenhaker’s Volvo had slewed into the deep ditch beside the motorway to the time the ambulance arrived, a mere thirty minutes had elapsed. During that time, the police had halted all traffic, put up accident warning signs, cleared glass and metal off the carriageway, re-started the traffic, and given Baenhaker, who appeared to have stopped breathing, the kiss of life.

‘Forget it, he’s a goner.’

Police Constable Harris looked up at the ambulanceman despairingly; it was the second bad smash he’d been to this morning. ‘He’s got a pulse!’

The ambulanceman took Baenhaker’s wrist; after a couple of moments he nodded, and the team went into action. Twice, during the process of separating the wreckage of Baenhaker from the wreckage of his car, his heart stopped. Twice, the team restarted it.

‘Don’t know why we’re bothering,’ said Jim Connelly, the ambulance driver. ‘There’s no way he’s going to make it through.’

The rest of the crew agreed with him. Probable fractured skull, femur and ribs, probable ruptured spleen, possible fractured spine, massive blood loss from internal haemorrhage, punctured lung and massive lacerations; and that was without looking too closely. But they kept on trying; less bits than were left of Baenhaker had been reassembled into perfectly acceptable human beings in the past; not often, perhaps, but enough times to make their efforts with every accident victim worthwhile. Eventually, they hoisted him into the ambulance and, with fluid pouring into his veins, pumping oxygen via a breathing machine and giving him a cardiac massage every time his pulse faded, raced him, with little optimism, to the West Middlesex Hospital.

Three years earlier, Alex Rocq had also been smashed to pieces, when his life had collapsed. Although his wounds had not required the surgeon’s knife, the scars that remained were deeper than any surgeon’s knife could have inflicted. The first disaster had been when his wife of less than two years had walked out, accusing him, not entirely inaccurately, of being more in love with his work than with her; the second disaster, within weeks of her leaving, was when the stockbroking firm, for which he had slaved for five years, and which had just made him their youngest-ever partner, went to the wall.

As the partners themselves were personally liable for the debts of the firm, Rocq lost everything he owned: his Paddington mews house, his car, and all his savings. He also lost his Membership of the London Stock Exchange, with little chance of regaining it for a long while, if ever.

So at the age of twenty-eight, after ten years of training, experience and dedication, he was out of a job, out of a marriage, out of a home, out of money and fresh out of prospects. As Amanda pulled his fly zipper back up, he thought back about all the turbulence, all the knocks and blows, and the despair; Amanda looked up at him and smiled, and he smiled back. He thought about how, now, three years on, the pieces all seemed to be slotting back together very nicely.

She leaned up and kissed him; he kissed her back, looking over the bridge of her nose at the road ahead. The Volvo that had been on his tail seemed to have vanished. He wondered idly for a brief second where it had gone, because he hadn’t seen any turn-offs; then it went completely from his mind. He slid his hand up inside her skirt, pushed his fingers down inside the top of her tights, and slid them deep down into her silk panties; she breathed in sharply, and ran her tongue over his nose.

He was already starting to feel horny again; it was a long time, he reflected, since he had felt horny so often, a long time since he could remember feeling almost permanently horny, the way he did now. Too damned long. He didn’t ever want to have bad times again, didn’t ever want to be poor again, didn’t ever again want to go through the hell of the last three years.

Amanda began to blow a sweet warm hurricane into his ear. He saw a patrol car racing up the westbound carriageway, blue lights flashing, headlights on. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance, siren screaming, was tearing up the road; somewhere back there there must have been an accident, he figured.

Rocq pulled the Porsche up at the high kerb in Knightsbridge, and Amanda opened her door. He looked at her. ‘Would you consider me forward if I asked if you’d like to come out and have a drink tonight?’

She grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My mother always warned me about strange men.’ She hoisted her soft Enny overnight bag from the rear seat.

‘Maybe if I write and ask nicely?’

‘Maybe!’ She grinned again, blew him a kiss, shut the door and stepped, with the careless abandon that only a very pretty girl can get away with, out into the thick lunch-time traffic.

Rocq turned to watch her; she had already reached the safety of the traffic island in the middle of the road. She turned, saw he was still there, and smiled again.

Rocq put the Porsche into gear and pulled back out into the traffic. He drove slowly, in a contemplative mood. He went around Hyde Park Corner, down Constitution Hill, the Mall, then along the Embankment, heading towards the City. At the end of Lower Thames Street, he cut through Mark Lane, into Fenchurch Street, and turned left into Mincing Lane. For the first time in two years, there was an empty parking bay in the street; not only that, it was slap outside the front entrance to Number 88. Right now, he decided, he really did not have a lot to grumble about.

The man standing on guard outside the front door was wearing a uniform that would have made the full battle-dress of a Brigadier look like a boiler suit. It was a tribute to his physical strength that under the full weight of the several yards of braid, the tonnage of glistening brass buttons, the acreage of immaculately blancoed webbing and the battery of medals, he was able to remain upright.

‘Good afternoon, Sarge,’ said Rocq to Retired Sergeant-Major Horace Bantram, the security guard and live-in caretaker.

‘Good afternoon, Sir, nice one today, Sir,’ he said to Rocq. Then, as he always did, with the knuckle of his index finger he pushed his nostrils sideways and sniffed loudly. ‘Smells like rain later, though, Sir,’ he said.

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t,’ said Rocq, walking swiftly past him. He had learned, a long time ago, the folly of engaging Sarge in a conversation about the weather: it had cost him an entire morning. He walked past the discreet sign, in the shape of a gold ingot, with the words GLOBALEX LTD engraved on it in small block capitals, through the revolving door, and down the white marble corridor, past the receptionist, Mrs Deale, a smart woman in her early forties. She gave him a brief smile of recognition whilst struggling hard, with considerable dignity, to hold her grip on a switchboard which sounded as if it had gone berserk.

He took one of the four elevators up to the fourth floor, and stepped out into a carpeted corridor. Opposite was another sign on the wall, again in the shape of an ingot; it read: GLOBALEX METALS DIVISION. Rocq looked at his watch; it was just on two o’clock.

He walked down the corridor and turned left into his office. It was an extremely large room, in the centre of which was a massive oval console around which sat twenty people, each with two telephones, an intercom, a computer terminal and a small flat work-top containing a switchboard with one hundred telephone lines, known as a Dealer Board.

Globalex Limited was one of the largest commodity broking firms in Britain, with additional branch offices in Zurich, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and New York. The company dealt in all types of commodities, from foods, such as soyabean, grain, barley, sugar, cocoa, coffee and frozen pork bellies to materials, such as plywood, rubber, cotton and wool; to minerals, such as tin, copper, lead, zinc and precious metals, such as silver and gold.

Commodities are basically just raw materials, and the world commodity markets began life simply as places where raw materials in wholesale quantities could be bought and sold. From these, developed futures markets. With massive price fluctuations in raw materials — depending on supply and demand in any given year, or part of a year — and international currency swings, users of commodities, in planning their end products, need to insure against massive rises in the price of their raw materials; similarly, producers of commodities need to insure against massive price drops. Out of these two needs came the practice of ‘buying long’ — agreeing to buy a commodity on a specific date in the future, often three months, for a specific price. If the commodity then rose in price, the vendor would still be obliged to sell the product at the price agreed upon three months before. The purchaser is protected against a price rise, but loses out if the price has in fact dropped in the meantime. Also out of the two needs came the practice of ‘selling short’ — agreeing to sell a commodity on a specific date in the future, for a specific price. This protects the producer against a drop in price; however much the price of the commodity may have dropped by the delivery date, he is covered by having sold it at a prearranged price.

Whilst the producers of raw materials and the manufacturers who use the raw materials make up an important part of the world commodity markets’ clientele, there are also numerous speculators, who invest in commodity futures but have no interest whatsoever in the end products themselves. They trade purely in paper, and have almost always sold on the paper before the delivery dates are due. Not many punters want to have twenty thousand tons of soya-bean meal delivered to their back yards.

The attraction of the commodity market to the speculator, both institutional and private, is the ability to make far higher profits in a short space of time than are usually attainable on the stock exchanges. This is for two reasons. The first is the high rate of fluctuation of the price of commodities. The second, and more important, reason is the gearing: in buying commodities, the purchaser is only required to pay a deposit, normally ten per cent of the total price; if the purchaser does not take delivery of the goods, but sells them on or prior to the delivery date, he is not required to pay up the balance of the price. In effect, this means that he is able to gamble with ten times more money than he actually has. If the commodity rises in value ten per cent, he ends up doubling his money; but the risk is in proportion. If the commodity drops ten per cent, he will have to find and put up ten times his original stake. Fortunes are made every day in the world’s commodity markets; equally, many men are bankrupted every day.

Most of the twenty people in Rocq’s office were, like Rocq, account executives; their job was to act for the clients of Globalex, buying and selling for them according to their clients’ instructions and, equally, advising and keeping their clients up to date on all conditions which might affect the commodities that interested them. Six of the brokers were girls, two of them Japanese. At the head of the oval console was a fiery red-headed girl order clerk who was firing questions out across the console in a broad cockney accent and firing answers back down the telephone receiver that she brandished about as if it were a dagger.

There was a hub of activity, the likes of which Rocq couldn’t remember seeing for a very long time. After-lunch lethargy, combined with the generally quiet state of trade at the present time, normally made early afternoons the dullest of times, but today was different. Every desk except his own was attended, and all the brokers were talking earnestly into both their telephones at once, taking new calls and writing down instructions and orders furiously.

Lester Barrow, a short fat man in his late forties — an old age for this high-pressure job — immensely cheerful in spite of two near-fatal heart attacks in the last three years, turned to Rocq as he entered. ‘Here comes Early Bird.’

Rocq grinned a short, rather pained grin.

‘Been carving yourself some fat worms?’ Barrow’s chirpy voice cut through the general hum of action.

‘I’ve been to the dentist all morning,’ lied Rocq. It was an old trick he had learned many years before: if you have to make up an excuse, make up one that evokes sympathy. Not, he knew, that it would cut much ice in here. He was well aware that none of the people in here knew the meaning of the word ‘sympathy’; they didn’t know the meaning of any word that wasn’t in the Dow Jones Index. The pressure of the work gave them little time to know anything else. In spite of the activity there was a feeling in the office of a lull before a storm. It happened frequently at this time in the afternoon, with many of the large exchanges in the world closed, and everyone waiting for the New York markets to open.

Communications play a vital part in an international broker’s job. The London offices of Globalex were the central hub in a highly sophisticated network of telephones, telex and computer links, that cost Globalex over £100,000 a month in electricity and call charges alone. There were direct links to the offices in Zurich, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and New York, as well as direct telephone lines to every major client throughout the world. Modern communications had reduced the entire world to one large trading floor and, with changes in technology occurring almost daily, international commodity broking was a fiendishly expensive game to stay in.

In order to keep overheads in line with the volume of trading, the account executives received a modest basic income of £10,000, with their opportunity to earn large sums coming from a direct percentage of the brokerage fees Globalex charged its clients for every order, whether it was buy or sell. It was not uncommon for a Globalex account executive to earn two to three times his basic salary in a good trading year.

All commodities are traded in minimum units called ‘lots’. A ‘lot’ of gold is one hundred ounces, for example. At $498 an ounce, one ‘lot’ of gold was worth $49,800. The brokerage Globalex charged on one lot of gold was $25.00 and the account executive’s share of that was $6.25. It needed a great many lots to pay the phone bills for the office and the American Express bills of the account executives, but at $833 a ton for copper, $7,856 a ton for tin, $404 a ton for lead, $526 a ton for zinc, $653 a ton for aluminium, $2,880 a ton for nickel, $197 an ounce for platinum, $4.23 an ounce for silver, and $498 an ounce for gold, it did not take many lots for a deal to get up into the one hundred thousands — or Long Ones, as Gary Slivitz, who sat next to Rocq, called them — the millions, or Big Ones as Slivitz called them, and even, on occasions, the Wide Ones, which were billions.

‘What did you say?’

Rocq wasn’t quite sure whether Barrow was talking to him or to whoever was at the end of the telephone receiver he was holding in his left hand. Reading Rocq’s mind, Barrow lifted the telephone away from his ear.

‘Been to the dentist.’

‘How much did you sell him?’

Rocq decided Barrow probably wasn’t joking: Barrow, like most here, lived, ate and breathed metals. Anything that existed beyond the revolving door of 88 Mincing Lane and outside of the portals of Plantation House, just across the road, which housed the London Metal Exchange and the Gold Futures Market, as far as Lester Barrow was concerned existed for the sole purpose of buying and selling metals through Globalex and, where possible, through the able personage of Lester Barrow himself. The New York light lit up on Barrow’s Dealer Board; he hit a button and grabbed the second receiver. Almost immediately, now holding telephones to both ears with one hand, he began to write with the other hand.

Rocq took his seat, between Gary Slivitz, who appeared to be playing his Dealer Board as if it were a space invaders machine, and the permanently miserable Henry Mozer, who was performing the deft art of writing with one end of a pencil whilst picking his ear with the other end. ‘What the heck’s going on, Henry?’ Rocq asked.

Mozer pulled the pencil out and turned to him: ‘Where the hell have you been — down a hole in the ground?’

‘I’ve been to the dentist.’ Rocq deliberately grimaced as he spoke.

Almost every light was flashing on Rocq’s Dealer Board.

‘What did you say?’

‘I’ve got a frozen mouth — can’t talk properly.’

‘What you been doing?’ shouted Slivitz. ‘Kissing polar bears?’

Rocq decided to abandon his excuse for not turning up to the office until two. He was unpopular enough as it was. The past two years had been lean years for most metal brokers, but he, completely by luck, had tumbled into half a dozen of the best accounts Globalex had ever had: Sa’ad Al Rahir, a bored, thirty-seven-year-old Kuwaiti who played the metal exchange through Alex the way most people play a roulette wheel, and who would think nothing of buying and selling three or four hundred thousand pounds worth of whatever metal particularly took his fancy in a single week. Louis Khylji, the immaculate Iranian food snob and wine connoisseur, who daily gambled with more than just petty cash from the many hundreds of millions his late father had removed from the Ayatollah’s claws. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh, the playboy son of Sheik Quozzohok, Emir of Amnah, the tiny oil-rich state which had seized independence from the United Arab Emirates. Baron Harry Mellic, the Canadian son of an immigrant Hungarian lumberjack, who had arrived in Canada in 1938, prospered, and bought a thousand acre lumberyard in the Yukon. It wasn’t a bad investment in its own right, but Baron Harry Mellic’s father, Joseph Zgdwimellik never did rue the day he allowed Rio Tinto Zinc to come and do a spot of test drilling; it turned out his lumberyard was perched slap on top of the then third-largest uranium bed ever discovered. When the old man died, his son, Harry, decided that a shorter name and a smart title would befit the inheritor of one and a half billion Canadian dollars very nicely. There was Joel Syme of the Country and Provincial Investment Trust, who had a portfolio in his charge of some £160 million and turned a good percentage over, annually, in metals, through Alex Rocq. And there was Dunstan Ngwan, the Nigerian who had made vast fortunes out of buying up out-of-date drugs and selling them to the hospitals of emergent Third-World nations. Ngwan rarely turned over less than £1 million a month through Globalex, via Alex Rocq.

The picking up of all these clients had, in the first instance, been just luck. There was a rotation system among the brokers for new enquiries, and each of the above had arrived on Rocq’s due dates. This had been assisted not a little by Rocq’s generous gifts to the switchboard operator. His skill, however, had been to hang on to them. He had done so not so much by his ability to produce results, which were only just above average, but far more by his ability at getting them laid, which apart from money was the only interest they all had in common. Sa’ad Al Rahir liked seventeen-year-old schoolgirls. Louis Khylji liked black men and yellow women. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh liked blonde women; whilst looks mattered, his main interest was quantity. On his, fortunately for Alex, infrequent trips to London, he liked to have at least ten girls fixed up, all together. His favourite passion was his own particular version of Blind-man’s-buff: he would be led, blindfolded, into a room full of naked blondes, grope his way around them, seize one and make passionate love to her then and there. Afterwards, he would try to guess her name. If he got it wrong, he would be led out, and play the game again. This would go on until either he got the right girl or he collapsed with exhaustion. As for the other three, Baron Harry Mellic was a rubber freak, Joel Symes liked being beaten, and Dunstan Ngwan seemed to like anything.

This little group Rocq termed his ‘A’ team. Below them, he had a hundred lesser clients, whom he ranked in diminishing order; at the bottom of the pile was Sidney Chilterley, whose account normally stood about $1 over the $7,000 minimum that was required to have an account at Globalex.

During the past two years, the other brokers in this office had earned an average commission of £12,000 on top of their annual salaries of £10,000; the volume of Rocq’s ‘A’ team was such that he had netted an average income over the past two years of £105,000 a year. After tax and overheads, such as call-girls’ fees, which Globalex was not interested in splitting with him, he had stashed away some £53,000. By lucky investments, he had managed to turn that sum into £90,000, which he had sunk into down payments on a flat in Redcliffe Square in London, and a cottage in the village of Clayton, in Sussex.

Whilst everyone else drove their company cars and worked a rigorous five-day week, he drove a £32,000 Porsche and spent two afternoons a week on the golf course. He might have been the blue-eyed boy of the board room, but in this office, where the legend ‘success is not everything — even your best friend must fail’ hung like the blade of a guillotine in the air, his lack of popularity was not altogether surprising.

He looked at the battery of flashing lights, and then at the Reuter Monitor video screen, on which, by entering a code, at the tap of a button he could call up the price of any commodity on any market in the world, as well as foreign exchange rates, share prices, and a continuous update of all world news and general information.

The Reuter Monitor system, apart from being connected to all the world’s commodity exchanges, receives data input from hundreds of banks, bullion dealers and brokerage houses who use the system as well. Rocq tapped a button for a read-out on the latest metal prices.

‘Bloody hell. Gold up nine dollars,’ he said. ‘Over the five-hundred. What happened? Did Moscow nuke Washington?’

‘Almost as good.’ Slivitz talked over the mouthpiece of his two telephones. ‘Remember in 1981 when the Israelis blew up Iraq’s nuclear power reactor at Osirak?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well they’ve just gone and done it again.’

‘Shit.’ Gold moved up another dollar. ‘When?’

‘’Bout three hours ago. Reckon you lost yourself about thirty-five clients since then. Moses has been going apeshit trying to find you.’

Moses Rondell was Rocq’s direct boss; relationships between the two were not good at the best of times, ever since he had overheard Rocq’s description of him as having metal balls.

‘Reckon you’d better stop talking and start buying,’ said Mozer, ‘or else there isn’t going to be anything left for you to buy.’

Rocq punched out the code for World News on the Reuter terminal. The green computer-typed words on the screen told him of the Israeli raid on Osirak, gave the Prime Minister of Israel’s reasons for this second attack, and gave the Iraqi Foreign Minister’s fury at this second outrage, and the destruction of their almost completely rebuilt reactor.

Rocq next pushed a button on his switchboard marked Tor 2. It was virtually the only button that wasn’t flashing. It automatically dialled Baron Mellic’s home number in Toronto. The Baron did not have an office; he worked from a massive penthouse overlooking four motorway junctions on the outskirts of Toronto. Mellic Construction Corporation had built the fifty-seven storey apartment block on the top of which the penthouse was perched. Mellic had furnished the penthouse by going to the furniture floor of Downtown Eatons, one of Toronto’s largest department stores, and ordering the entire floor. To further amuse himself, he ordered all the fittings as well, including the signs and prices, and had the entire penthouse laid out as if it were the furniture floor of Eatons.

Toronto was five hours behind London. It was only half past nine there, and Mellic was a late riser; maybe he hadn’t heard the news yet, hoped Rocq. He had.

‘What kept you? Were you delivering the missiles for Israel personally?’

‘I’m sorry, Harry.’

‘You’re sorry? I’m sorry too. How much have I lost while you’ve been humping some broad?’

‘Not a lot — and I haven’t been humping, I’ve been at the dentist.’ He paused. ‘Anyway — gold’s only gone ten bucks.’

There was a noise from the other end of the telephone; to Rocq’s untrained but accurate ear, it was not unlike the sound of a Hungarian Baron scraping himself off the ceiling of a penthouse.

‘I tell you, my friend,’ said the Baron, ‘if I bought you a hooker for every hundred dollars you’ve lost me this morning, you could screw your ass off twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life, and not get through half of them.’

‘There’s still time, Harry; better buy right now.’

‘Right now? Too late, you shmuck — it’s going to start going down.’

‘No — it’ll go fifteen — sixteen at least; if there’s any retaliation, then it’ll go through the roof. We could be on the brink of a major war — if that happens, it’ll be over the thousand mark by the end of the week.’

‘What’s September trading at?’

‘Spot’s $509. September’s trading at a $6.00 premium to Spot: $515.’

‘Gold closed at $498 on Friday. You said it had gone ten bucks — Spot should be $508, not $509.’

‘It just went up another buck while we were talking.’

There was a pause while the Baron vented a mouthful of air into the receiver. ‘So you reckon Spot’s going to go to what? Twelve? Fifteen?’

‘I reckon at least fifteen, and probably a bit higher than that — if nothing more happens.’

‘Okay — buy me one ton. September.’

Rocq whistled to himself. One ton. Thirty-two thousand ounces. Three hundred and twenty contracts. Globalex charged a commission of 25 cents an ounce on gold, and he got ten per cent of that. He tapped some figures out on his calculator. He had just made himself £444.

‘And you’d better sell out at the right time, you shmuck — don’t want you leaving me high and dry.’

‘You can rely on me, Harry.’

‘I’d rather rely on a fucking mongoose.’ The line went dead. Rocq paused to think for a moment. Thirty-two thousand ounces was a large amount of gold. The average total daily volume for London was only one hundred thousand ounces.

He hit the button on his Dealer Board for the Globalex New York office. It answered immediately:

‘Steve Rausch, Globalex.’

‘What’s gold running September?’

‘Hi, Alex, how are you?’

‘Busy.’

‘You hear the one about the Russian in New York, wants a broker?’

‘Fuck or knit?’

‘Yeah, you heard it.’

‘You hear about the three old men discussing their wives?’

‘One’s losing his taste, the other his memory?’

‘Yes.’ Having exhausted their latest supply of jokes, they got down to business.

‘September’s $514/$516.’

‘Buy me three hundred and twenty Seps at the market.’

‘Wow — who’s that for?’

‘Mind your own business. Work it gently — it’s for one of my big ones, and he’s already not too happy. If you get a good execution, I’ll look after you.’

‘Okay, Alex. Take it as done.’

‘Good lad.’

Rocq hung up, then called Baron Mellic back, confirmed to him that he had bought the gold and advised him that he was transferring $1.6 million from his deposit account at Globalex to pay for the ten per cent margin. Mellic grunted, and hung up.

Rocq thought for a moment about the easy life of the super-rich; about how true it was, the expression that ‘money makes money’. The Baron hadn’t had to do a thing; just pick up a telephone and state an amount. One ton was the amount he had stated: thirty-two thousand ounces at $515 an ounce. Sixteen million dollars’ worth of gold. If it rose another $15, that would be a cool $480,000 profit, and the Baron wouldn’t have had to stump up one cent above the money he already had on deposit and earning him interest at Globalex. Long before the September delivery date, when the balance of the sixteen million would be due, the gold price would have peaked out and begun to slide back down; before the slide happened, Rocq would have closed out the Baron’s entire position and credited his account with the profit.

He could understand the Baron being angry at his inefficiency in being out of the office at the time of such a crisis. He knew he should really have an assistant, but he preferred to carry the whole can himself. Like many account executives, he kept the identity of his clients a closely-guarded secret. He started to tap on his calculator keyboard. If he had bought within minutes of the news of the attack, he could have got in right at the bottom — $8, $9, maybe even $10 earlier, and added a quarter of a million to the Baron’s bundle.

Gold is one commodity that is almost certain to rise whenever there is trouble in the world. It always retains an attraction to the individual investor because behind every paper currency in the world are the gold reserves the paper represents, and there is an inherent mistrust in the value of the paper. Governments can make the paper money of their countries worthless overnight — it has happened many times in the past, Vietnam being one of the most recent examples of paper money becoming one hundred per cent worthless. If the banks of the country of which the currency was issued would not give credit for the paper, then the banks of no other country would. There is little use in being a millionaire if it is all in a currency which can no longer buy anything. No government would ever make gold worthless, because someone, somewhere, would always be willing to accept it in return for food, goods, shelter or services. It is an international marker and holds its value against all other currencies.

In theory, if the United States of America were wiped out, or taken over by the Soviet Union, the mighty dollar bill could become a meaningless document overnight. The only Americans, however rich they might be in theory, who could buy anything at all elsewhere in the world, would be the ones that had gold. Gold is the only currency that is universal — that everyone, everywhere, will always accept, just as they did long before paper money was ever invented to save gold being lugged about; when the going in the world starts to look bad, it is gold that everyone wants to buy.

There is, in fact, surprisingly little gold in the world; all the gold that has ever been mined would fit easily inside a cube fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot — the size of a not particularly large house. The illusion that there is more comes from the amount of gold plated articles there are around, and the fact that gold is extremely malleable: from a single ounce, fifty miles of gold wire can be produced.

In spite of this small amount of gold, an enormous volume is traded in the world money markets each day; many times all the gold in the world changes hands, on paper, in the course of each year. In times of international tension, the public traditionally begin to horde, the speculators stop selling, and a shortage is created. With the addition of a vast amount of extra buyers, there is only one way the price at such times can go: up.

Rocq had a not dissimilar conversation to his terse one with the Baron, with the five other members of his ‘A’ team, interrupted by earfuls of abuse from a good thirty of his lesser clients. A number of the accounts he had were discretionary accounts — he had full power to buy and sell as he thought fit, within the individual budgets — and normally these clients left him to get on with it. But not today.

The loudest earful of all that Rocq received was from his smallest punter, Sidney Chilterley. He telephoned Rocq, instructing him to buy one ounce of gold when it was at $517, and then telephoned him and ordered him to sell it when it reached $520, making himself a gross profit of $3 — a net profit, after brokerage, of $2.75, and a commission of $0.03 for Rocq. Rocq was so fed up with him that he didn’t bother to remind him that the minimum handling charge for any single transaction was $10, thus rendering Chilterley’s net profit of $2.75 into a net loss situation of $7.25. Before Chilterley had bought the gold, his account with Globalex had stood at $7,002 exactly. It now stood at $6,994.75 — exactly $5.25 below the minimum required to maintain an account at Globalex. Rocq looked forward, to turning down Chilterley’s next order until he had received a cheque to rectify the inadequacy of his account. Chilterley was part of an unsuccessful experiment at Globalex to develop a business out of small punters.

For a few moments the lights on his switchboard stopped flashing. Rocq opened the Yellow Pages directory, thumbed through it, and then dialled the number of an Interflora florist. ‘I want to send ten pounds worth of cut flowers to the following person: Amanda Lowell, Garbutt, Garbutt and Garbutt, 292A Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge. Message: “Missing you madly, are you free for dinner?”.’

He hung up. Slivitz looked at him. ‘Another satisfied customer?’

‘What do you do with yours at night, Slivitz? Stick it out the window and try and screw the world?’

Slivitz’s phone rang before he could reply. He glared at Rocq as he answered it.

‘You sure picked a good morning to play truant,’ said Henry Mozer.

‘Unfortunately, Henry,’ said Rocq, ‘the Israelis forgot to tell me their plans.’