The Labyrinth of Osiris (28 page)

William thought of that family tree now as he looked down at the document in his hand. Twenty-five years ago he’d been crushed by his father’s ingratitude. Today, having long ago abandoned any hope of gaining the old man’s good favour, he was more sanguine about his reaction. He’d neither been looking for nor expecting approval. Rather, the document had been about throwing down a gauntlet. Putting his head above the parapet and alerting not just the old man, but the board as well that he was ready to start flexing his muscles. And his father knew it. Hence his fury. With a sudden thrill of understanding it struck William that his pa was frightened of
him
. The old bull elephant raging at the appearance of a younger, healthier rival in the heart of the jungle.

He turned, holding the thought, ready for the denouement.

‘I want more control, Pa,’ he said, unable to hide the tremor in his voice. ‘I’ve asked you before, and now I’m asking you again. You can’t go on for ever. It’s time to start handing over the reins. I’m ready.’

His father’s eyes burned fiercer than ever, the transparent rubber of the oxygen mask misting as he panted into it.

‘Never,’ he croaked.

‘It’s time, Pa. It was time a while ago.’

For a moment the old man just glared at him, his chest heaving. Then, slowly, deliberately, he lowered his oxygen mask, his eyes never leaving William, his monstrous weight looming at him across the desk like a boulder about to topple. The ticking of the clock seemed to deepen as though picking up and amplifying the tension in the room.

‘It’ll never be time!’ Nathaniel Barren snarled, raising a baseball-glove-sized hand and slamming it down on the desk’s leather surface. ‘Do you understand me, boy? You will never lead Barren Corporation. Not now, not ever. You haven’t got it in you. Never have, never will. And the sooner you get used to that idea, the better.’

He clamped the mask back to his face, heaving for breath. William stood silent in front of him. He’d always known it would be a waste of time, that his father would never yield, but he’d needed to bring it to a head. Assure himself the path he was taking was the only one open to him. He’d wanted to leave it a bit longer, move a few more pieces into place, but after the coked-up idiot he’d made of himself in the board meeting he felt a need to assert himself. Hence the document. And hence this meeting. The start of the endgame. He felt curiously light-headed.
You
are
strong. You
are
in control
. He stood a moment longer, forcing himself to hold his father’s furious gaze. Then, with a nod, he turned, walked across to the door and opened it. As he stepped out into the corridor he looked back.

‘She’s dead, Pa,’ he said. ‘Dead and gone and she ain’t coming back. It’s only me now. I’m Barren. And that’s an idea
you’d
better start getting used to.’

His father’s voice thundered across the room as he closed the door. ‘Over my dead body!’

‘My thoughts exactly,’ murmured William.

Outside the door he leant a moment against the panelled wall, breathing heavily, gathering himself, then walked back through the mansion and down the grand staircase, past the sombre faces of his ancestors. Stephen was waiting at the bottom.

‘I trust your meeting went well, sir.’

‘Pretty much as expected, Stephen. Pretty much as expected.’

The butler made no response to this, just stood impassively. William threw a glance back up the stairs, thinking of the day his own portrait would hang there, taking its rightful place in the Barren roll of honour. At the head of the Barren roll of honour. Then, clapping Stephen on the shoulder, he went out to his car and sped off down the drive. He hadn’t touched the coke. Some highs just came naturally.

I
SRAEL

On the drive back up to Jerusalem, foot to the floor so as not to be late for his meeting with Dov Zisky, Ben-Roi put in an urgent call to George Aslanian at the Armenian Tavern. Yes, George confirmed, the Armenian word for gold,
vosgi
, could indeed be employed as a proper noun, as well as a regular noun or adjective.

‘It’s like . . . what’s a Hebrew example? . . .
Chaim
or
Ilan
. They can be used as names, or as the words for “life” and “tree”. Same principle.’

Which left Ben-Roi with a quandary. If the word Rivka Kleinberg had left indented all over the desk blotter in her apartment was actually a name rather than a specific reference to gold, then maybe the whole Barren/Romanian-gold-mine thing was a complete red herring. And if Barren was a red herring, maybe the Nemesis Agenda angle was too. Maybe half the leads he’d been chasing weren’t leads at all. For a panicky moment he saw his entire case, or what little there was of it, unravelling in front of his eyes.

It passed swiftly. As he spooled back over the evidence, the dark, rocky mass of the Judaean Hills slowly closing in around him as the road curved and climbed, he saw there were still more than enough connections to suggest he was on the right track, even without the
vosgi
one. The photocopied articles on gold-smelting he’d found on Kleinberg’s desk; the atlas bookmarked at a map of Romania; that British mining engineer who’d fallen down a hole in Egypt.
How the hell did that fit in?
Half a dozen signposts to reassure him.

As a rule, detectives distrust coincidences. In this instance, Ben-Roi concluded he
was
dealing with a coincidence. An unlikely one, certainly, but a coincidence nonetheless. Rivka Kleinberg had been interested in a trafficked Armenian prostitute whose name translated as ‘gold’, and at the same time, either because of something that prostitute had told her, or for a completely different reason, she had also been interested in a gold-mining operation run by Barren Corporation. The only other interpretation was that he
was
on completely the wrong track, and all the
other
connections were coincidental. And if there’s one thing a detective hates more than a single coincidence, it’s a collection of them.

By the time he came into Jerusalem and turned on to the ring road towards the Old City, he’d gone over and over it all and was satisfied he was on solid ground. He hadn’t moved forward but, much to his relief, he hadn’t gone backwards either.

One thing was for sure – he’d certainly earned a cold beer.

Putin’s Pub was right at the eastern end of Jaffa Street, within sight of the Old City walls. A long, narrow space with a bar down one side, booths along the other and a back room with a dancefloor and projection screen, it used to be called Champs. A few years back, new owners had come on board and given the place a Russian-themed makeover: new name, new decor, new choice of beers and spirits. Despite the facelift, the place retained a general air of retro seediness, and, also, a general lack of clientele. In all the years he’d been coming here, Ben-Roi had never once seen it more than half full, and when he walked in tonight – fifteen minutes late – there were only six people present. An attractive middle-aged woman sitting on a stool chatting to the barman, two younger women in one of the booths and, in the other, Dov Zisky and a muscular, tanned man sporting a tight white T-shirt and diamond ear-stud. Ben-Roi bought himself a bottle of Tuborg and slipped into the seat beside them.

‘Joel Regev,’ said Zisky, introducing his companion. ‘My computer-expert friend. Thought he might as well come along and talk to you direct.’

Ben-Roi shook hands with the man, who had the grip of a bodybuilder and looked about as far from the stereotypical computer geek as you could possibly get. He and Zisky were cradling bottles of Staropramen and sitting almost leg to leg, which made Ben-Roi think maybe they were more than just friends. They didn’t say anything, and Ben-Roi didn’t ask.

‘Dov tells me you work in cyber security,’ he began, glugging a mouthful of Tuborg.

Regev nodded, sipped from his own bottle. His biceps were huge, the left one decorated with a tattoo: a dagger with a rose curling round it.

‘We advise companies on network protection,’ he explained. ‘Malware intrusion, hacking, that sort of thing. We also do some computer forensics work for you guys. We’re advising Russian Yard on a cyber-fraud case at the moment.’

His voice was deep, masculine, the polar opposite of Zisky’s effeminate drawl. For a moment Ben-Roi found himself staring at the two of them, wondering about the dynamic of their relationship. If indeed it was a relationship. Across the table Zisky’s mouth tweaked into a barely discernible smile as if he could read the drift of his thoughts and was amused by them. Ben-Roi took another swig of his beer – nice and cold, refreshing – and made a show of focusing his attention on Regev.

‘Dov said you knew something about a group called the Nemesis Agenda.’

‘A bit,’ replied Regev. ‘What I’ve picked up from contacts and on the net. We actually did some consulting for one of their victims about six months back, big defence and security contractor down in Be’er Sheva. Nemesis had hacked their system, infected it with a virus that melted every hard drive on their network. Shut them down for the best part of a month.’

He glanced at Zisky, thumb flicking at the lip of his Staropramen bottle.

‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but at the time I couldn’t help thinking good luck to them. According to the Nemesis website, the company was doing business with some pretty unpleasant regimes, supplying them with landmines, interrogation management systems’ – he lifted his hands and flicked inverted commas in the air – ‘for which, read torture equipment. I can’t say I felt particularly good about myself helping to get them back up and running again, but then what do I know? I’m just a lowly computer nerd.’

Ben-Roi sensed movement beneath the table, thought Zisky might have been giving his friend a reassuring pat on the thigh. He couldn’t be sure, and didn’t try to look, although again, he caught a flicker of amusement on Zisky’s face.

‘I’ve printed some stuff off the web that might be helpful,’ continued Regev. ‘A couple of articles, a few chat-room threads –’ he nudged Zisky, who produced a manila envelope and handed it to Ben-Roi – ‘but to be honest, most of it’s just supposition. Hard facts about the Agenda are pretty thin on the ground. It’s what makes them so interesting. No one really knows anything about them. They’re not like, say, Wikileaks, where it’s common knowledge who’s behind it. The guys who run Nemesis are shadows, completely invisible.’

Ben-Roi opened the envelope and had a quick flick through the sheaf of papers inside. ‘So what
do
we know?’

‘Well, they’re good,’ said Regev. ‘You could start with that. The authorities have been trying to pin them down for years now – we’re talking some of the best cyber-brains in the business – but the Agenda have always managed to keep one step ahead. The only real lead anyone’s got is their website, and they’ve been extremely clever about keeping that out of reach. They host on offshore servers, proxy servers, ping servers, mirror off different servers, switch servers the moment anyone starts getting close to them. They also seem to be using some pretty sophisticated anonymizing technology.’

He clocked the bewildered look on Ben-Roi’s face and laughed.

‘Ignore the geek-spiel,’ he said, waving a hand. ‘All you really need to know is that no one’s ever managed to shut the Nemesis website down. And no one’s ever managed to get behind the website to the people who are actually running it. These guys are seriously tech savvy.’

‘And they’re targeting multinationals, big business?’

Regev nodded. ‘Specifically multinationals involved in dodgy dealings. Third World exploitation, illegal polluting, corporate malpractice. Organizations with skeletons in the closet, basically. Nemesis gather the evidence, put it out there on the web, the public pick it up, the press . . . Trust me, it’s caused a lot of companies a lot of problems. Big problems.’

Pretty much the picture Mordechai Yaron had painted earlier that day.

‘Apparently they have different cells in different countries,’ said Ben-Roi.

‘That’s one theory,’ acknowledged Regev, ‘although so far as I’m aware no one’s ever proved it conclusively. We’re pretty certain they started out in the US – there are various small, rather complex technological indicators to suggest that’s the case. I won’t bore you with all the details – there’s some stuff about it in there.’ He tapped the envelope.

‘And there does appear to be an Israel connection,’ he went on. ‘Several of the people who’ve been targeted by the group claim they were using Hebrew words, and there seems to have been a disproportionate number of incidents on Israeli soil. It’s not exactly definitive, but it would suggest they’ve got a presence here. Whether it’s a cell, or a splinter group, or the original people simply relocated’ – he shrugged – ‘there’s no way of saying. Nor whether they’ve got people in other countries. They’ve got a contact e-mail on their website – routed round a dozen different ghost addresses on a dozen different servers, so again effectively untraceable – which would suggest that at least some of their information is coming from insider tip-offs. And the fact that everything gets channelled through a single website points to some sort of centrally organized structure. How it’s organized, though, and who’s organizing it, and how many people are part of it, and where they’re based . . .’

He gave another shrug and downed the remainder of his beer. Ben-Roi asked if he could get him another, but Regev held a hand over the top of his bottle, as did Zisky. From the room at the back came the muted babble of football commentary, highlights of that evening’s Haifa derby, Maccabi versus Hapo-el. Ben-Roi was a Maccabi man and would have liked to catch the game, but for the moment he zoned it out and focused on the discussion in hand.

‘I was talking to someone this morning and he was saying these Nemesis people aren’t just hackers. Apparently they’re breaking and entering, using weapons, physical violence. More like Mossad than whistle-blowers, was how he described it.’

Regev smiled. ‘That’s possibly a slight exaggeration. It’s not like they’re going around assassinating people. Or at least not that I’ve ever heard of. But yes, they are ruthless. Violent, too, when the mood takes them. In that sense they’ve definitely upped the ante over the last few years.’