Billionaire

8

The white golf ball climbed gracefully through the air, high above the manicured fairway, and seemingly high above the peaks of the mountains that surrounded the course at Crans Montana, in the Swiss Alps. The man who stood on the eleventh tee, peering over the top of the lacquered head of his three wood at his ball’s flight, was short and plump. He wore a bright red Lacoste T-shirt, green tartan trousers, white shoes, a yellow peaked cap, and was festooned with heavy, vulgar jewellery. As his ball dipped down towards the fairway, it was momentarily obscured from his vision by a cloud of Bolivar smoke that belched out of his mouth and out of the damp stump he held clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth.

The ball bounced onto the green, ran forwards towards the pin and stopped what appeared, from where they were standing, to be only inches from a hole in one. Jimmy Culundis, the multi-millionaire Greek arms dealer, chuckled, removed the stump from his mouth and spat onto the ground. His companion, a tall man with a handsome, if slightly weak face, dressed in a cream silk shirt, paisley cravat, yellow cashmere V-neck cardigan and well-cut beige trousers, frowned at the perfect shot, and then glared down at the puddle of spittle on the ground. Slightly embarrassed, he looked behind him; the Moroccan Ambassador to Switzerland, the French Foreign Secretary, the French Commercial Attaché to Switzerland and the Couve de Meurville stood behind them with their battery of caddies, patiently waiting for them to move on, and with expressions of undisguised disgust on their faces.

Claude Louis Santenay Jarré du Charnevrau Ducarme de Louçelle, fifteenth Viscomte Lasserre, beamed a crushing aristocratic expression at the Greek, which, without words, told Culundis that the Viscomte approved neither of the shot nor the spitting.

‘Shot!’ said the Viscomte in a curt, grudging tone.

‘Good, hey!’ said the Greek, twiddling his finger in his ear.

The Viscomte placed his ball, and took his four wood. He cracked the ball high and hard over to the right, and it dropped neatly between the roots of a fir tree about eighty yards to the right of the green. He pushed his club back into his bag and, pulling their trolleys, the two men set off. They had no caddies because they wanted to talk, and did not want an audience; for it was here at Crans Montana, home of the Swiss Open Championship, that the two men met once a month during the summer months, to discuss their business.

Neither of them stood out particularly from any of the other rich people who hacked and bashed their way around some of the most exclusive kilometres of cultivated grass in the world, neither in appearance nor in standard of play. The Greek’s handicap was nine, the Viscomte’s twelve. The backgrounds of the two men could not have been more dissimilar. The Greek was the son of a twelfth generation lobster fisherman; when he was born, his family owned a single-storey cottage with no running water and no electricity. When the Viscomte Lasserre was born, his family owned Chateau Lasserre, a massive grey and white stone chateau, set in front of a two hundred acre lake, in a seventeen thousand acre estate which included fifty-five acres of cinquième cru vines. To most people, Chateau Lasserre was possibly the most beautiful of all the chateaux in the Médoc region of France. To all Frenchmen, its claret was, without doubt, one of the worst. The current Viscomte’s grandfather had, some sixty years previously, upon discovering that fewer and fewer people in France would buy his wine, succeeded in selling the entire output for one hundred years to an English shipper who knew that with a smart name, an old year and a cheap price, there would be no shortage of punters in the English restaurant trade.

The Greek, like many sons of fishermen, had gone into shipping. But whereas that other man from his country, Stavros Niarchos, had gone in for tankers, Jimmy Culundis had gone in for vessels for gun running. At first it had been on a local scale, providing boats to carry guns into Turkey, but soon he built it up into an international business, illegally shipping at first guns and ammunition, then graduating to all types of warmongering hardware, from armoured vehicles to jet fighters. His clientele comprised mainly terrorist organizations and guerilla outfits which legally no one was allowed to supply, or which were politically sensitive. He shipped guns to the IRA, gunboats to Israel, uranium to Libya.

It took him a mere five years to graduate from being the carrier to arranging the entire deals from start to finish. By the time he was thirty-three years old, he had completely equipped the armed forces of nine African countries, three Arab countries, and six South American countries. There was scarcely a terrorist in the world that had not at some time carried a weapon purloined from Jimmy Culundis.

Right from the very start, Culundis had always taken great pains to conceal his clandestine activities behind a carefully-maintained respectable front, although now it was a front that was in the process of crumbling fast. For over twenty years he had been one of the world’s leading bona fide arms dealers, and had been trusted widely by many governments. But stories of the murkier side of his business had been coming to the surface in many parts of the globe. The British Sunday Times Insight columns had plucked truckloads of skeletons from his closets, as had the Washington Post. So that at the age of fifty-three, he had been blacklisted by most of his major clients; and whilst there was still plenty of business for him in supplying the more dubious of customers, the massive empire he had constructed had lost the support of his biggest punters, and was in grave danger of collapsing.

Culundis walked onto the eleventh green, and smiled with satisfaction when he saw his ball was a mere six inches from the hole. He stood and watched the Viscomte take three shots to extricate his ball from between the roots of the fir tree and then, with his next shot, drop it neatly onto the green, about eight feet from the pin. He walked up to Culundis.

‘I give you the hole.’

The Greek grinned and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. ‘Two up!’ he said.

‘You’re playing well, Jimmy,’ said the Viscomte. ‘You don’t give me a chance.’

‘I can’t make any profit out of doing business with you, Claude — this is the only way I get to eat!’

‘If you can’t make a profit out of the prices I let you have goods at,’ grinned the Viscomte, ‘then you are in the wrong business.’

The Greek shrugged his shoulders, and stopped by the twelfth tee. He looked with more than a little envy at the Viscomte, the chief executive of Lasserre Mondiale, one of the largest private companies in the world. Claude Lasserre had it cushy, he thought. Straight in at the top. Not for him those early days of battling to build up a business from scratch. Sailing blacked-out boats into pitch dark bays in the middle of the night, never knowing when a battery of searchlights might blaze into life, floodlighting them in the empty sea as the guns pounded at them until they had sunk. Lasserre had never had to do a bloody thing, he thought. Ever since the Fourth Viscomte had bought his family’s safety through the French Revolution by supplying arms to the revolutionaries, the Lasserre empire had flourished without a hiccup. Today it had many tentacles, all to do with the business of killing: Lasserre Aerospatiale, which manufactured military specification jet helicopters and short-range strike jets; Lasserre Nautique, which manufactured gunboats and navy-specification submersibles; and Lasserre Industriel, which manufactured a vast range of pistols, machine guns, mortars and artillery guns, bullets, shells, grenades, land and sea mines, and also was one of the French Government’s principal nuclear weapons contractors.

In spite of the vast amounts of money the Lasserre empire earned him, the Viscomte was not a man for stashing his bundle idly away in the coffers. He liked to see his money work; he liked to see it multiply. Lasserre was a great believer in commodities as a way to make money grow, and there was one commodity-broking firm in whose abilities he had particular confidence, both in the boss and the calibre of those beneath him. The man was Sir Monty Elleck, and the firm was Globalex. Although based in London, he had always found that the performance of the firm more than made up for the nuisance of having always to deal at a distance.

‘I received a telephone call last night,’ said Culundis, bending down to push his tee into the grass and lay his Titleist ball on top; he grunted as he stood up again. ‘From no less than Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh of Uram Al Amnah.’

The Viscomte froze for a moment, and his face went white. He stared at Culundis. ‘From Umm Al Amnah?’

Culundis nodded. He stepped back, removed his driver, took one short practice swing, then hit the ball badly; it travelled only a short distance, hooking sharply to the left, and fell into the rough.

‘What was he calling about? The mines? Jimmy — was he calling about the mines?’

‘No, no. Relax, Claude, it wasn’t the mines.’

The Viscomte played a two-hundred-and-forty-yard drive straight down the centre of the fairway; it went over the centre marker pin and fell down, out of sight in the dip, into the perfect text-book position. He put his club head on the ground, and leaned on it. ‘What did he want?’

‘He thinks there is trouble brewing; he wants to make sure his family stays in power.’

‘What sort of trouble? A coup?’ Lasserre went even paler.

‘He seems to think so.’

‘That would destroy everything.’

‘So we have to make sure there is no coup.’

‘And how do we do that?’

‘I’m flying there tomorrow for the weekend.’

‘I can think of places I’d prefer to spend my weekends.’

Culundis shook his head. ‘You’d be hard pushed. That man has got the best crumpet in the world, and I mean that. In the world!’

‘Maybe he should spend more time thinking about his neck and less about his genitals.’

‘That’s what I am going to discuss with him.’

‘Well, I hope you remember to.’