Текст книги "48 Hours"

Автор книги: Jackson J. Bentley

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48

HOURS

A City of London Thriller

J Jackson Bentley

©Fidus Publishing 2013

Second Edition (re-edited & formatted for tablets)

First published on Smashwords by Fidus Publishing in the United Kingdom 2011

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Write to Fidus Books at: Fidus Publishing, PO Box 304, Rossendale, BB4 0FP

Email us at: [email protected]

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Cover Design by Altered Images, original photo by manandhiscam altered and used under Flickr Creative Commons License Deed/attribution; see license at www.flickr.comphotos/manandhiscam

Acknowledgements & Authors Note

For authenticity, I have kept locations and places exactly where they appear in reality. Obviously in any work of fiction it is necessary to have fictional locations but where this has been done the fictional locations are situated on real streets or in real areas of London. Most buildings given a historic background exist and can be seen by walking around London. One is fictional and it is for you to find out which one.

I have taken very few liberties with the transport arrangements mentioned in the book, and most journeys can be travelled as described. Believe me, I have travelled many of these routes hundreds of times.

I am grateful to the experts in gems, firearms, physical combat, loss adjusting, insurance and banking who freely and enthusiastically give their time to allow us authors to maintain authenticity.

I reserve my most grateful thanks for Sue W, my editor, who has proof read and improved all of my books since my first book was published by Macmillan in 1994.

Finally I acknowledge the assistance given by Fidus Books on taking the City of London Thrillers into electronic format for the Kindle.

J Jackson Bentley, London.

Prologue

Threadneedle Street, City of London, Wednesday, 11am

The rain was persistent but not heavy. It drizzled down like sugar onto strawberries. At first the tiny droplets sat on the wool worsted of my suit as if on a newly waxed car. Then, within seconds, capillary action sucked the water into the fabric until it became saturated. I hadn’t moved far along the slick pavement before the rain had soaked through the lining of my jacket and into my thin summer shirt.

It was still warm, and the rain that hit the warm concrete paving vaporised, sending a thin mist swirling around the feet of the people rushing for cover. The skies were darkening by the second, but not as rapidly as the mood of the commuters struggling to unpack pocket sized umbrellas that took longer to erect than Ranulph Fiennes’ Arctic tent.

A Starbucks coffee shop was quickly looming on my left. The dull green lighting scheme seemed to brighten as the contrast with the naturally lit street increased. I stepped into the doorway and shook the excess water droplets from my jacket in much the same way as a wet dog shakes its sodden pelt. The windows in the shop were already steaming up, and a long line of men in ruined silk ties and women with flattened hair queued to order a serving of comfort in a cup.

I waited patiently as the machines coughed and spluttered out order after order, sounding like some geriatric patient in a hospital waiting room. The rich, dark coffee odour was thick in the air. There was no need to ingest the caffeine. You could just breathe it in.

My spirits lifted as I held the hot cup in my hands and blew gently across the surface of my Caramel Macchiato, as if my breath produced some super cooling breeze that would make the scalding brew instantly consumable. With no tables available I propped myself up against a shelf and set down my drink next to a blueberry muffin.

I sighed and let the tension flow from my body. I was about to lift my cup and see how many layers of skin the superheated concoction would dislodge from the inside of my mouth when I heard three successive beeps. A text message had arrived on my BlackBerry.

I took the BlackBerry from my pocket immediately, as we all know it is important that you don’t offend your mobile phone by ignoring it, even for a few seconds, and so I flicked a couple of buttons to reveal the text message:

“Mr Hammond,

If you do not pay me £250,000.00 in the next 48 hours, I will kill you after noon on Friday! Check your emails for instructions.”

Chapter 1

Starbucks, Threadneedle Street, London. Wednesday, 11:10am

I was still wondering which of my certifiable friends had sent the text message when the phone beeped again, this time sounding a long single throaty tone. I had an email. I crushed the last of the muffin into my already full mouth and struggled to chew as the cake dehydrated my mouth to the extent that swallowing became almost impossible. I thought I might choke, and then when I read the email, I did.

“Hi Josh,

OK, here is the deal. You pay me £250,000.00 (details of bank account to follow) within 48 hours and you get to live. If for any reason I don’t get that money you die by noon Friday. I appreciate this is a shock and perhaps you are wondering if I am serious. Please see attached photos.

Regards,

Bob

PS: Usually blackmailers tell you not to call the police etc. etc. This is both boring and unproductive as people always do. Feel free to call the police or anyone else you care to, the fact is it will take you 48 hours to persuade them that this isn’t a wind up and by then you will either have paid me or be awaiting your fate.”

I sipped my coffee nervously, the base of my glass cup tinkling against the ceramic saucer as I waited for the attachments to open. The phone told me that there were two pictures to display; josh1.jpg and josh2.jpg. It took a while, but they slowly began to appear. Line by line, left to right, the pictures were revealed. The process reminded me of the old BBC teleprinter, revealing the soccer scores as they happened on the TV screen on a Saturday afternoon.

The first picture was a head-and-shoulder close up of me walking along the street. It had been taken less than an hour earlier, and I appeared to be looking straight at the camera. I thought it was rather a good picture of me. Anyone who knew me would instantly recognise my fair hair with its tousled style, the blue eyes in my clean-shaven face, and the lean, muscular build I had acquired as a result of playing in a local squash league. The definition was so good I was sure I could actually see wispy hairs growing out of my ears. Bob, my new friend, had also rather worryingly photo-shopped red crosshairs onto my forehead.

The second photo was equally sharp, and showed me sitting in a client’s office earlier that morning. I seemed to be leaning back in the chair, one hand scratching the back of my head. I recognised my shirt, the one I was still wearing. The buttoned cuff had ridden up a little as I stretched, showing my watch. This one had a target superimposed onto my back.

The fact that the background of both photographs was out of focus suggested to me that the depth of field of the camera lens was narrow, which suggested a long telephoto lens had been used to take the snaps. Clearly I had no recollection of being photographed, but these days even small compact cameras had zoom lenses capable of magnifying sixteen times without having to resort to digital zooming. The photographer could have been some distance away when he took the pictures. If a camera could shoot me so easily without my being aware of it, I wondered what else could, and I didn’t like the answer to that question.

While I was examining the photos a seat became free by the window, and I sat down. I won’t be sitting by any windows after Friday noon, I thought. I looked at my BlackBerry again and tried to work out what information I could glean from these brief messages.

Firstly, I thought, it could still be a joke, but that seemed less likely now. Secondly, someone had clearly been following me and clearly they could have attacked me at any time during the morning. Like most of us going about our daily lives, I was vulnerable whilst I was unaware of any threat. Thirdly, the relatively paltry sum of money that had been requested in exchange for my life was almost impossible for me to raise, but not quite, although how I could gather those funds in just forty eight hours was a concern. Finally, Bob was not worried about me calling the police; either that, or he was bluffing. Unfortunately, I had to assume that he was right. I could easily waste much of the next forty eight hours in police stations begging to be taken seriously if I’m not careful, I thought.

So what to do? Pay up or wait and see?

I am, by nature and training, a decisive man and so I quickly concluded that if I began the process of raising the money straight away, then at least I was keeping all options open. I didn’t have to actually hand it over if I didn’t want to, after all.

Unthinking, I wiped the condensation from the inside of the glass window with the side of my balled right hand and saw that the rain had stopped. Bright rays of August sunshine were cutting through the clouds, seemingly spotlighting individual Londoners going about their business. Now that the sun was beating down again, the smiles quickly returned to the faces of the pedestrians and they looked as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

I did. I had forty eight hours to live unless I could raise a quarter of a million pounds.

Chapter 2

Dyson Brecht Loss Adjusters, Ropemaker Street,

London. Wednesday, 12noon.

I heard a clock chiming the noon hour as I sat outside Toby Baker’s glass walled office. The church clock tower bell had been discordant and tuneless for as long as I could remember, but no-one ever seemed to do anything about it. The old doorman we’d had when I started this job years ago told me that it had never been the same since it had been damaged during the Blitz, so it was the Germans’ fault. Ironic, since my company was founded by a German and an American.

My eyes were fixed on Toby’s office, where the morning meeting was breaking up and individuals were gathering their papers and belongings. There was a round of ritual handshaking and fake smiling, with everyone putting aside the bitter arguments of the morning for the sake of maintaining the prospect of an amicable settlement. Toby ushered out his guests and looked at me with a puzzled expression. To be fair, I rarely sought him out in person. We had even conducted my annual review over the phone whilst we were both just a mile apart in Dubai.

As the last of his guests walked towards the bank of elevators I stepped into Toby’s office and closed the door behind me. Toby sat at his desk, leaned back in his mega expensive stressless office chair, and visibly relaxed. He placed his hands, fingers interlocked, on his ample stomach.

Before I had a chance to speak, Toby screwed up his face as if he was in pain and said, “You’re here to hand in your notice, aren’t you?”

“No,” I replied instantly. “It’s more important than that.”

The expression on Toby’s face slackened and a possible smile crossed his lips on its way to becoming a smirk. “Nothing’s more important than that, Josh.”

I slid a sheet of letter sized paper across his desk. There were four items printed on it: the text message, the email text and the two photographs. Toby lifted his Armani glasses off his nose and rested them on his head as he squinted to read the text without the help of his prescription lenses. After a moment he laid the paper flat on the desk. His expression seemed halfway between a smile and a frown.

“Surely this is a joke?” he said, clearly unconvinced. I did not reply in words, but simply shook my head.

“No. Maybe not, then,” he said as he took a second look at my printout.

Toby was by far the brightest man I knew, only a year older than me at thirty four years of age. Most people assumed he was actually older, as his dark hair was already showing signs of greyness at the temples. His expensive glasses framed deep brown eyes which always seemed to twinkle with a hint of mischief, but he could be deadly serious when necessary. He wasn’t particularly well qualified, but he was so well informed on every subject that he gave the impression of brilliance, tempered by laziness. Not one for unnecessary exercise, or any at all if it could be avoided, Toby was often described as ‘larger than life’, a polite way of saying that he was borderline chubby. He liked to research everything to death. If he met a quantum physicist in a bar he would study quantum physics for days on the internet, in libraries and in magazines until he could converse intelligently with his bar buddy, should they ever meet again.

It is this love of detailed research which has made him such a brilliant loss adjuster. Along with a photographic memory, his research enables him to know as much about an insured loss as the insured. By the time a paint manufacturer attends a settlement meeting for an insured loss relating to a fire at his factory, Toby will have found out what products were mixed to make the paint, their flammable qualities, the appropriate regulations for safe storage, the factory regulations relating to fire protection and safety, and the current market price for the paint produced.

Toby believes that knowledge is power, and he has been proved right so many times that most of the major insurers rely on him to ensure that they never over compensate their customers. Despite his hefty fees, the money he saves his clients every year swamps the sums he commands in payment for his services.

After another few seconds glancing at the printed sheet, he sat forward in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He looked me in the eye, his expression signalling to me that he had already come to a conclusion.

“Do you want my advice?” I nodded. “OK, this is what we do.”

I took notes on a yellow legal pad faintly lined in blue, each page serrated along its length so that it could be torn out and filed. By the time he had finished speaking I had a long list of ‘to do’ items. He spoke slowly, in his quiet and reassuring voice, and I jotted down what he said almost verbatim.

1) Your flat may be small but in Greenwich it still has to be worth £250k, and as you own it outright, you can raise a £200k loan on that, try Roddy at Chartered Equitable, he’ll get your application processed fast and at a preferential business to business interest rate.

2) You have at least £50k in accrued bonuses, paid holiday leave and expenses due by the end of the year, I’ll get those advanced.

3) The mortgage will take weeks and so you will sign a promissory note in my favour, using the flat as collateral and I’ll loan you the £200k from my partners account for 60 days.

4) I’ll call the my contacts in the City of London Police, the Metropolitan Police will be too slow to act, and I should be able to get you in to see someone today. Tell them everything, including your plans to raise the cash.

5) I want you watched 24/7 to see if we can spot your blackmailer. I suggest you call Vastrick Security, tell them to bill the firm, we can sort out the costs later. I want someone on your tail by the time you leave the office tonight.

6) I’ll cancel my afternoon and do some research, this must have happened before and if it has the insurance companies will know about it.

When he had finished speaking he asked me to read back the list, which I did, with Toby elaborating further on each point I recalled. By now Toby was sitting upright, his glasses back on his nose. He was staring intently into my face.

“Josh, it’s taken me ten years to train you, to get you to where you are now, so don’t you dare waste all of that effort by getting yourself killed, all right?”

I assured him that averting imminent death was already a priority for me, and on that note we parted. We both had things to do, if I was to live long enough to see West Ham losing yet again on Saturday.

Chapter 3

Hong Kong Suite, City Wall Hotel, London: Wednesday, 2pm

The hand that clutched the gold Cross fountain pen was not that of a young man; it was heavily veined and had a mat of dark hair across the back of the hand spreading down each finger as far as the knuckle. The fingers were long, slim and well-manicured. Nor was this a manual worker’s hand. At each wrist was a crisp white double cuff, held together with simple gold cufflinks in the shape of a square. The Egyptian cotton shirt from Thomas Pink in London was tailored to the wearer’s needs, and so the cuffs were perfect in length and the left cuff was cut more generously to accommodate the heavy bracelet and case of the watch that banded its wearer’s tanned wrist. The time on the Breitling Old Navitimer Mecanique displayed two o’clock as the writer signed off the letter with a flourish. The signature read Bob, but Bob was not the name of the writer. It was a simple, common and unremarkable nom de plume.

‘Bob’ checked his BlackBerry, but found nothing worthy of his interest, and set it back down on the antique desk that was part of the exquisite furniture which adorned his five hundred pounds per night suite. Opening the drawer, Bob revealed six mobile phones, each with a white label adhered to its rear. He picked the phone with the label that read “Josh”, reinserted the battery and switched it on. It was time for another message.

“Josh,

Hi, it’s Bob again. Just a reminder that time is at a premium. I hope that you realise the seriousness of your position. If not, you will get a reminder later today. Best not to wear your favourite suit for the next 24 hours.

Bob.”

The man pressed the send button on the unregistered Nokia pay-as-you-go phone, bought with his grocery shopping at Sainsbury’s yesterday. When the message had been sent he switched the phone off again, removed the battery and laid it in the desk drawer between another Nokia carrying the name Richard and an Ericsson phone labelled Sir Max.

Bob stood up and walked over to the bed, where he bent down and retrieved a briefcase from underneath. The case was black leather and as anonymous as the phones. It was monogrammed with the letters PD. Not that these were his initials – they weren’t, they were simply the first two adhesive letters he had randomly alighted upon from the sheet of adhesive gold leaf letters supplied with the case. He clicked open the case and laid it on the red Oriental silk bedspread over the likeness of a Chinese dragon picked out in golden thread. Inside was an odd looking gun – perhaps rifle might have been a more accurate description. The gun had a shoulder stock, eighteen inch barrel and a bulky magazine. Bob checked the magazine with its odd projectiles and replaced it in the briefcase. He was unconcerned about leaving his fingerprints or DNA on the gun or the case as, in common with ninety nine per cent of the population, he knew that the authorities did not have his biometric details on record.

Bob walked across the deep pile carpeting and slipped into his Burberry mackintosh. It was London, it was August, and rain seemed inevitable. Carrying the briefcase, he exited the suite and headed towards the West End to do a little shopping before his five o’clock appointment.

Chapter 4

City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London: Wednesday, 2pm

I sat in the lobby on an old carved wooden bench in the historic building that housed the City Of London Police, and which probably had not changed much in the last hundred years. Unlike London’s busy Metropolitan Police stations, this station was quiet, and the occasional uniformed policeman who passed by me was exceptionally smartly dressed. The plain clothes police here would have looked at home in a bank anywhere in the City.

A man approached the bench. He was smiling. I took in the smart suit, the pale blue shirt with the cutaway collar and the dark blue woven silk tie. My contact looked like a Conservative politician. He was perhaps in his mid-thirties, rather tall, with short cropped hair and steel coloured eyes He came to a halt in front of me and so I stood. The man extended his hand.

“Mr Hammond.” It was said as a statement. “I am Inspector Boniface; perhaps we could talk in my office.” I accepted the invitation to follow the Inspector to his room, and we walked side by side along a sterile corridor with walls half tiled in sickly green glazed tiles which would not have looked out of place in a Victorian public lavatory. The woodwork was dark stained and equally gloomy.

The policeman followed my gaze, and seemed to read my mind. “Awful, isn’t it? But we can’t change it. This is a listed building and the interior fixtures are of historic interest, apparently.” His tone of voice suggested that he didn’t share that viewpoint. I rather liked him already.

We reached an office with a half glazed door and walls. The glass was ridged with bevelled vertical strips that were frosted to permit light transfer to the corridor without invading the privacy of the office’s occupants.

The policeman ushered me inside, where the modern office furnishings and technology appeared starkly incongruous. This was a room that Sherlock Holmes might have used for consultations. The outside windows were glazed with the same small opaque panes of glass used elsewhere in the building, and they were raised at least four feet from the ground, so that no-one could see out or in easily. The radiator was of the old hospital column variety, and set in the back wall was a black painted Victorian fire surround and grate.

I sat down in a modern chrome and leather swivel chair, and he took his place in a matching chair on the opposite side of the modern beech desk. At the invitation of Inspector Boniface I retold my story so far, even though it was obvious that the Inspector was familiar with events to date. When I had finished speaking I waited hopefully for his response. A look of resignation crossed the Inspector’s face, and I guessed what was coming.

“Mr Hammond, I have to be honest with you here. I’m not sure that there’s very much we can do to help you yet.”

“You mean until after I’ve been killed?” I replied. The tension in my voice was tangible.

“Not exactly, although I realise that this must be rather upsetting.”

“Upsetting!” I felt anger rising inside me. “Upsetting is losing your house keys. Being killed for no reason whatsoever is a little more than upsetting.”

“I really do understand,” the Inspector sympathised. “The problem is this; you have received an anonymous threat by text, which may or may not be a sick joke. I know you don’t see it that way, but we have no evidence to suggest it could be anything more serious at this moment in time. From this Police Station alone, the City of London Police have had to handle over a thousand death threats of all kinds in the City since the banks were bailed out by the government. Some were very specific, others were very graphic, but they all came to nothing, despite time and effort spent trying to find the culprits. As a result, it is our official position that such threats are almost always made by people who are simply letting off steam.” He paused for breath, and to gauge my reaction. “However, I accept that your threat may be a little more credible because it asks for money and because you have clearly been specifically identified and targeted. With that in mind, I propose the following.

First, I’d like you make a detailed statement – while you’re at home this evening will be fine – outlining the threat and naming anyone you can think of who may harbour unfriendly feelings towards you. Concentrate on your business dealings to begin with. For example, your pursuer could be an insured person whose claim you reduced or rejected. Second, we sit you down with a high tech specialist who will try to track the person threatening you by tracing his electronic communications, and third, we will help you with the transfer of the money, being sure to electronically tag it and trail it. That, at least, should help to keep you safe, if the threat turns out to be credible.”

The Inspector was interrupted by three short beeps from my BlackBerry. “Perhaps you’d better take a look at that, given the circumstances,” he suggested.

I took out the phone and glanced at the message. I felt my heart rate increase as I recognised the source. I looked up at the Inspector before saying, “It’s from him.” I read the message out loud. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I felt more afraid than I wanted to be.

“What the hell does that mean? Don’t wear your favourite suit!” I bellowed in the direction of the policeman.

“Josh – er, may I call you Josh?” I nodded. “Whilst you work in the City, you live in Greenwich, and there is very little chance of me persuading the Metropolitan Police to arrange twenty four hour protection for you on the basis of these threats today. We simply don’t have the manpower, for a start. So, let’s stick to the plan for now. Go home and make your statement, being as thorough as you can. Come here first thing tomorrow morning and we’ll see what we can do. The tech guy you’ll see tomorrow is an outsourced sub-contractor and not a police officer, but he is excellent at his job and he will be able to help. Until then, I believe you’ve been told that you will be accompanied by a private close protection operative, is that correct?”

I answered in the affirmative.

“Good. Look, Josh, I’m sure that this is nothing to worry about. It’s probably just an unbalanced individual who has neither the capacity nor the will to hurt you. Try not to worry unnecessarily, and tomorrow maybe we’ll be able to track him down and lock him up, if we have to.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Bob knew exactly what he was doing when he allowed only forty eight hours for the whole process. His forecast about my experience with the police was right on the money. How much else was he right about?

I shook hands with the Inspector, who placed his hand on my shoulder, smiled and told me again not to worry.

I was signing out of the building by writing my name again in the visitors’ book when an attractive young woman in a tailored grey business suit approached the desk. The jacket was short and fitted at the waist, and sat above a skirt which was short enough to be interesting, yet long enough to be modest. She had shapely legs and wore low heeled shoes, which made her just a little shorter than me. I guessed her height at around five feet eight, give or take an inch. Under the jacket she wore a plain white blouse, buttoned just low enough to reveal a hint of cleavage. There was a fine gold chain around her neck, with some kind of stone set in the pendant. When my gaze eventually moved upwards to her face, I saw an auburn shoulder length bob framing high cheekbones. She appeared to wear very little make up, and it was my opinion that she didn’t need it, anyway. She had a friendly smile and incredible hazel eyes, and she was looking directly at me.

“Josh Hammond?” she enquired in a crisp Home Counties accent.

“I am indeed,” I smiled as I shook her outstretched hand.

“I’m Dee Conrad of Vastrick Security,” the young woman responded, “and I am your bodyguard.”