Carver

3

MI6 headquarters, Vauxhall, London

‘ All right, then, tell me the worst,’ said Jack Grantham as he strode into the meeting room. ‘What’s that grinning money-grubber been up to now?’

He slapped a file down on the table top, pulled out his chair with an energy that suggested limitless depths of pent-up irritability, and sat down.

Half a dozen staff were already in place. They looked at one another with raised eyebrows and quizzical expressions. After a decade of MI6 heads who were essentially political placemen — their every word calculated to avoid accountability; their only desire to tell Number 10 exactly what it wanted to hear regardless of the actual facts — Grantham’s cantankerous frankness took some getting used to.

‘Are you referring to our former Prime Minister?’ asked the amused, languid voice of the second most senior officer in the room, Piers Nainby-Martin, a thirty-year veteran of the Service, educated at Eton and New College, Oxford.

‘No, Piers, I’m referring to Simon bloody Cowell… Yes, of course I mean the Right Honourable Nicholas Orwell, one-time member for the constituency of Blabey and Trimingham, now fully occupied feathering his nest. What’s this I hear about his new business venture? Some kind of investment fund for the stinking rich… Come on, let’s be having it.’

Another officer, Elaine McAndrew, a bespectacled, mousy, bluestocking type in her thirties, stood up and pointed a remote control at a large plasma screen: ‘This is footage from last night…’

The screen came to life with grainy shots of a lavish outdoor party. A large circular dinner table, decorated with a splendid floral centrepiece, had been set beside a spotlit swimming pool. At the far end of the pool stood two silk-draped pavilions. Within one of them, two uniformed chefs stood behind a spread of whole lobsters, spectacular king prawns, a perfectly pink joint of roast beef, golden glazed chickens, silver bowls of pasta, rice and salads of every description, and a pair of chafing dishes whose fragrant, spicy contents would have graced a three-star restaurant. In the adjacent pavilion, a barman was ready with premier cru wines and vintage champagnes, European, Asian and American beers, and a selection of single malt whiskies for those who preferred spirits.

‘This is the Castello di Santo Spirito. It’s an estate in Tuscany, about ten kilometres from Siena, owned by an American called Malachi Zorn,’ the woman continued.

‘The American speculator?’ Grantham asked.

‘That’s right, sir, yes.’

Grantham harrumphed. ‘His speculations appear to have been successful, then.’

‘Yes sir, he’s believed to be worth in excess of fifteen billion dollars.’

There was a shuffling of papers from down the table and a voice piped up: ‘Fifteen point three, to be precise, according to the latest Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest individuals.’

A grimace of indifference tinged with disgust crossed Grantham’s face. ‘So what was the occasion?’

‘A dinner party, sir,’ said the female officer. ‘For guests of similar wealth.’

The camera turned to look back up a flight of stone steps towards a country house. From the champagne glasses whose rims were occasionally visible at the bottom of the picture it appeared to be attached to one of the wine-waiters. The camera came to rest on a man. His black suit was perfectly cut, but artfully crumpled, and his white dress shirt was tieless, its top three buttons undone to reveal a tanned, hairless chest. A group of guests — Grantham counted nine men and women — were following him down the stairs, like children trailing the Pied Piper.

‘Mr Zorn, I presume,’ said Grantham.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s the story with him, then?’

Nainby-Martin took over: ‘Could you pause the video a moment, please, Elaine?’ As the image froze, he glanced down at a file in front of him. ‘Malachi Vernon Zorn. Born in Westchester, New York, in 1970. His father was a banker, his mother a full-time housewife. Malachi was the only child. Educated privately at Phillips Exeter Academy, then went up to Harvard to study mathematics, for which he had a phenomenal aptitude. As a boy he was also an accomplished horseman, played a lot of tennis and was a competent yachtsman. So far, so conventionally privileged. But then came an unexpected twist. Both his parents died: mother first, then the heartbroken father.

‘Zorn was in his final year at Harvard, but walked out without graduating. He proceeded to hit the New York party circuit, apparently set on throwing away every penny of his inheritance as fast as possible. Aside from occasional mentions in the gossip columns, no more was heard of him until 1995, when he set up a small company called Zorn Financials. It was a one-man band. Just Zorn, alone in an office, surrounded by screens, essentially placing bets on a variety of financial markets.’

‘Any market in particular?’ Grantham asked. ‘I thought most of these people were highly specialized: particular commodities, currencies and so forth.’

‘Absolutely,’ Nainby-Martin agreed. ‘And what’s more, they tend to use other people’s money. Young Zorn, however, took positions without any apparent regard for the type of market, or its location, or the nature of the play. And he did it by risking every penny he had, all the time.’

‘Sounds like a typical death wish to me,’ said Grantham. ‘His parents had left him alone, nothing to live for. He was just tempting fate to get him, too.’

‘That’s certainly a theory,’ said Nainby-Martin. ‘And the rest of his behaviour seems to give it a certain credence. Once Zorn started making big money, he spent it seeking thrills: seriously fast cars, speedboats, skydiving, mountaineering expeditions to the Himalayas, all that sort of thing. An adrenalin junkie, you might say.’

‘So how did Nicholas Orwell enter the picture?’

‘Ah well, a year ago, Zorn let it be known that he was thinking of going into business in a more conventional way, setting up a hedge fund called Zorn Global that would accept investments from exceptionally high-net-worth individuals. He was contemplating a minimum stake of one billion dollars. And the man he had in mind to act as his personal ambassador to the world’s super-rich was Nicholas Orwell.’

Grantham laughed to himself. ‘Orwell must have loved that idea.’

‘He’s not shown any sign of objecting,’ Nainby-Martin replied drily. ‘Our information is that Zorn offered him a fee of five million dollars, plus the same again for his charitable foundation.’

‘So he’s doing this for charity? How very noble.’

There were stifled sniggers round the table at Grantham’s acid sarcasm.

‘Quite so,’ said Nainby-Martin, maintaining an impressively straight face. ‘But in any case, rumours of Zorn’s new fund went round the smart set in an instant. In no time people were practically begging to be allowed to give him their cash.’

‘In this financial climate? Aren’t they all hanging on to their money for dear life?’

‘Apparently not. The problem for the rich appears to be that there’s nowhere to put their money. Stocks and commodities are all over the place, property values are going nowhere and interest rates on savings have been rock-bottom for years. They’re looking for a magician who can buck the markets.’

‘And Zorn is happy to oblige.’

‘Precisely.’

‘So this event in Italy — I assume it was aimed at possible investors? Orwell does the schmoozing, Zorn takes all the money?’

‘Something like that.’

Grantham nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see. Let’s carry on with the show.’

Zorn and his guests started moving down the stairs again. The men of the party were dressed in more formal variations on Zorn’s dinner suit. The women, by contrast, wore dazzling couture gowns in silk and lace, decorated with jewels worthy of a pirate’s treasure trove; a description that in some cases was disturbingly close to the truth, given the dubious means by which their men had come by their fortunes. Through this select little group flitted a man known the whole world over for the bright, shiny charm of his smile and the deceptive plausibility of his words. He strode jauntily to the front as they all descended the steps and exchanged a few words with Malachi Zorn.

‘Aha!’ said Grantham. ‘Nicholas Orwell himself, the very man I was

…’

Grantham fell silent as he peered, frowning more closely at the video. He waved at McAndrew. ‘Pause it!’ Then he got up and walked towards the screen, stopping just a few feet away. He stared intently for a few more seconds, and then tapped his forefinger against the screen, directly over the motionless image of a blonde, whose slender elegance stood out from the other women there, despite all the time and money they had put into perfecting their appearance.

‘I’ll be damned,’ murmured Grantham to himself.

Behind him there was another shuffling of papers and a voice said, ‘If you give me a second, sir, I think I should be able to identify her.’

‘No need,’ said Grantham. ‘Her name’s Alexandra Vermulen. Born Alexandra Petrova. She’s Russian, age around forty. Also known as Alix. Fascinating woman.’

‘You sound as though you know her well,’ Nainby-Martin remarked.

Grantham said nothing. He was thinking back to the only time he had ever met her: at a funeral in Norway, saying farewell to a good man who had made one bad mistake. And then he thought of a time before that, and the events that had linked him to Alix through the man who had loved her, Samuel Carver.

‘No,’ Grantham finally replied. ‘I can’t say we’re particularly close.’ For a moment he sounded uncharacteristically wistful. But then, to his staff’s relief, he snapped back to his usual, acerbic style: ‘But one thing I do know, from my experience, is that whenever that woman enters the picture, trouble’s never far behind.’

Tom Cain

Carver