The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter 7

  Michael flung his bag onto the bed. The Katowice Metropole was only ten minutes from his new office. He followed the bag onto the bed. Usually the exhilaration of executing a deal would be flowing through him long after the event. Those who said that the buzz of buying a company was better than sex were wrong. The buzz was the same, but the high you got from doing a deal lasted longer, much longer. This time it felt different. The buzz wasn’t there. A dark, heavy feeling had settled in its place.

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  It was eight thirty the following morning. He studied the building’s entrance from the rear of the Audi, windows open to let in some air. The tension of the last few weeks had left him. Eight hours of solid sleep had stopped the adrenalin flow in its tracks.

  Cars pulled in off the slip-road to fill the adjacent companies’ car parking slots. It was eight forty-five. No one had walked through CEE Outsourcing’s entrance. The buses that were used to ship in the majority of the call center staff from the center of Katowice had not yet turned up. He glanced at the building. Something was missing. He couldn’t nail it down, and so pushed it aside.

 
What kind of sloppy operation have I bought? It’s nine a.m. and no one’s shown up yet.
Eastern European working practices were not necessarily what Michael was used to in London, but this was worse than he’d been led to believe. He jumped out of the car and strode over to the building’s entrance.

  Michael approached the sizeable glass security doors that guarded the building. Expecting them to slide open as he approached, he narrowly missed slamming into them, the doors remaining firmly shut. He cupped his hands above his eyes and gazed into the building.

  No tall, attractive receptionists. No five meter long, polished steel reception desk. No security guard. No flat-screen televisions gracing the walls or immaculately arranged furniture. He turned away from the door, glancing upwards, certain that he’d gotten the wrong building.

  It was then that he noticed it. The something that was missing. The wiring that held the flamboyant CEE Outsourcing logo above the entrance. It dangled haphazardly, like disjointed pipe cleaners, from above the door.

  The glass was strong. Not even a tremor as Michael smashed into the door with his fists. His mind didn’t register pain, the anger inside him overwhelming any instincts of self-control.

  “BASTARD. You FUCKING BASTARD. BASTARD, BASTARD, BASTARD.”

He hammered on the glass until his throat was raw, fists bloodied. Blood mingled with dust, smearing the surface in a ruddy brown film.

  As the urge to tear Lawrence Sharp apart evaporated, the fury that Michael had unleashed, he turned upon himself. As much as it depleted his strength, it sapped his will more. Michael sank to his knees, sloped forward, forehead thudding against the glass. A penitent man.  

Chapter 8

  The room buzzed like a giant slot machine parlor in a Vegas casino. The static murmur of hundreds of simultaneous phone conversations, from the trading floor, completely blocked out by inch-thick soundproofed glass. He stood facing away from the luxurious office suite he inhabited, marveling at the degree to which the investment banking world had changed in only thirty years. Now the world of finance revolved on electronic impulses whizzing round the world at the speed of light.

  “Augustus,” the voice, sharp and authoritative, came from the comfortable brown leather couch right angled behind him, “if I may interrupt your musings for a moment, we really need to agree on the format for the next meeting.”

  “Of course, Sir James, forgive me. I was just thinking things through.”

  “Kennedy will be nominated on September the fifteenth. Our members would find it most enlightening to become aware of her views before her confirmation by the Senate,” said Sir James.

  Augustus resisted the urge to bite at his thumbnail. As the European chairman of one of the world’s leading investment banks, it was usually he who made other’s squirm as though they were under a microscope. Sir James Hardcastle, past Beirsdorf chairman, largest individual shareholder, and a former British Foreign Secretary, had been Augustus’s late father’s oldest and dearest friend. Augustus knew what was coming.

  “Listen, you great blubbering fool.” Attaining his seventy-eighth year had blunted none of Hardcastle’s tyrannical nature. “You need to snap to it. Our credibility’s on the line.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Augustus, “I’ll approach Mrs. Kennedy immediately through Washington. I’m sure she will make herself available.”

  “Not even Clinton was able to say no to us. Just get it done.”

  “Of course. Don’t let me detain you any longer,” said Augustus, desperately trying to get the man out of his office.

  Augustus watched the door close and once alone, despite his rather corpulent size, swiftly maneuvered himself behind his desk and accessed the Group’s secure and encrypted intranet system. 

  He sourced the appropriate contact details and dialed the number in Langley, Washington, DC.

  “Douglas Speak,” the voice answered at the other end of the line. Augustus suppressed the schoolboy temptation to shout, “But my name’s not Douglas.” The deputy director of the CIA was not known for his sense of humor.

  “Douglas, it’s Augustus. Sir James would like Elisabeth Kennedy to be at the September meeting. She’ll be making the keynote speech. Please take care of the invitation in whatever way you deem most appropriate and let me know as soon as you have confirmation.”

  “Okay, Augustus, I’ll get back to you.” The line went dead.

Never one for small talk, Douglas
. As he replaced the receiver in its cradle, his mobile rang.

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh, it’s you. How do you know anything has … happened?”

  “My people saw Hardcastle leave. He looked pleased with himself, which is probably a first. So will Kennedy be there or not?” Rivello said.

  “Well, we’ve invited her. It would be very unusual and certainly unwise for anyone to turn us down,” Augustus said defensively.

  “Listen, Augustus, this is far too important to be left to chance. Deliver Kennedy. If you don’t get to meet her and to build some kind of rapport with her, then everything I’ve planned for will have been a complete waste of time. I guarantee you that I’ll not be the only one left with a bad taste in my mouth. Got that?”

  Not for the first time during the evening, Augustus was left with a churning feeling in his gut.

  “I’ll do what needs to be done.”

  “Okay, and no more of this soft soap upper class British bullshit. You need to be straight with me, Augustus. We’ve been here before, remember?” The line went dead.

  Augustus, his quite significant bulk sinking into the back of his Chesterfield armchair, was perspiring profusely. Yes indeed, he did remember. Despite his utmost desire to forget that he had ever heard of Jay Rivello.    

  More than two years before. It had been Agnello’s. Sitting alone on the narrow terrace adjacent to the pavement. He found himself sitting opposite an unexpected guest.

  The casually dressed man sat facing him, hair cropped, perhaps around forty-five, a few years younger than Augustus. The hair had been allowed to grey and framed features that were striking more for their angularity than for their looks. A thin mouth and stilted, unnatural smile sat on his face. A pale complexion did nothing to complement the overall picture. 

  “Excuse me. There are plenty of other free tables here. Would you mind moving on?” Augustus said with unmistakable impatience in his tone.

  “How are you doing, Augustus, old chap?” said the man with an edge of sarcasm, whilst resting a rather expensive-looking digital camera on the circular tabletop.

  Augustus scoured his memory but could not come up with a name to fit the face.

  “I suspect that when we have finished this conversation your tone may have lost its edge,” he spoke again.

  “What on earth are you talking about,” Augustus said, his arm swiftly rising to summon the waitress. “If you don’t move on immediately, I will ask the waitress to call the police.”

  “Take your head out of your ass, Augustus, and take a look at this,” the man said, proffering the camera facedown so that Augustus could see the viewing screen. The steely grin had gone.

  Augustus, startled by the stranger’s air of menace, had to squeeze his paunch under the table as he leant forward to see whatever was on the viewing screen. It took him half a minute before the coughing fit lifted and he was able to breathe deeply again, although tears smarted in his eyes.

  “There’s another five loaded up. Press this lever to flick through them and try not to cough yourself to death before I’ve had a chance to tell you what I want from you.”

  Augustus limply flicked through the images. Depicted in each image were one, sometimes two girls, clearly borderline age of consent, bound and gagged and either tied with restraints to a rack affixed to a wall or hanging by their wrists from a rope suspended from the ceiling. Needless to say, they weren’t wearing much in the way of clothing. The raw red welts on their thighs, abdomen and breasts and the excruciating pain etched on each face dispelled any doubt that this was merely soft S&M play. In one he could just make out a familiar fuzzy Cyrillic script at the bottom right hand corner of the wall.

  Although the images would have been enough to make most people gag, Augustus’s choking fit had instead been triggered by the sight of his own rather puffy, white and ungainly figure, completely naked, riding crop in hand taking center stage in the foreground of each picture.

  “How …” was about all he could muster before the other man talked over him.

  “The wonders of modern technology. No more A4 prints clumsily stuffed into grubby brown envelopes. You’ll find the video even more compelling. Augustus, even I, who have a reputation as something of a ladies’ man, found some of the things you were doing to those girls repulsive. The one in the last picture barely made it out alive. I would imagine that if my video collection ever saw the light of day, they would lock you up and throw away the key.”

  “What do you want?” said Augustus, failing to disguise the tremor in his voice.

  “Beirsdorf Klein is currently finalizing a large corporate finance project in Poland, close to Katowice in the south of the country. The parent company is Hungarian, a textile company, one of the largest private companies in Eastern Europe.”

  “Vass Textile Holdings. They’re building one of the most extensive textile production facilities in Europe. We’re leading a syndicate to provide a loan of just over two hundred million euros,” Augustus said. “What of it?”

  “I want you to pull the financing deal. I want them knocked out cold,” the man said.

  “Should we choose to walk away at this stage, no other finance house will touch them. They’ll become tainted goods overnight. Vass will have to file for bankruptcy as they’ve been financing the project through a temporary loan facility until the syndication was complete. The factory’s half finished. Their suppliers will tear them to pieces!”

  For the first time during the meeting, Augustus observed what appeared to be a genuine smile flicker across the other man’s face.

  “We’ll get sued,” was Augustus’s closing comment.

  “That’s your problem,” said the man, “but what you need to decide is do you want to piss off a client and fend off a lawsuit that will cost you personally very little, or would you rather spend the rest of your pitiful life in the pedophile wing of a maximum security prison. Wondering when you’ll find powdered glass in your Cornflakes, or a razor blade embedded in your soap?”

  The man, Augustus subsequently found out, was Jay Rivello, and when he’d put it like that, Augustus knew that he didn’t really have much choice.

Chapter 9

  Today was undoubtedly the most important in Elisabeth Kennedy’s life. She applied a thin line of lipstick. A dab of blusher on each cheek and she was all set. The driver opened the door. She lifted her black, leather briefcase from the seat beside her and climbed from the limousine.

  “Thank you, Joe. You’ll be here when I return?”

  “Sure, Mrs. Kennedy, I ain’t going nowhere,” he replied.

  Elisabeth was fifty-seven years old. For a woman, she was tall at five-ten. An athletic build, not thin, but certainly not overweight. Bright blue piercing eyes were framed by attractive, although sometimes severe looking features that were amplified by the positioning of her long, fair hair in a tight bun. In Elisabeth’s position, it did not do to appear to be too feminine. The navy blue trouser suit and black Ballet court shoes completed the no-nonsense look that she had perfected over her thirty-five-year career.

  Stepping through the rear entrance of the White House was significantly less glamorous than strolling along the gradual sweeping path through the gardens on the other side of the building. As the security detail handed back her ID and Elisabeth emerged from the body scanner, the only thought passing through her mind was what she could possibly say to President Ian Gilmore.

  “Mrs. Kennedy, a great pleasure to see you again,” Juan Gonzalez, special assistant to the president, greeted her warmly, firmly shaking her hand. This time she did not flinch as she noted the rounded stump of his missing index finger. Juan and Elisabeth had met previously at an interdepartmental conference and his souvenir from Iraq had taken her by surprise.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Juan. Please feel free to lead the way,” Elisabeth stated, inwardly nervous at the meeting that lie ahead. Just because people believe you to be constantly composed and in control doesn’t mean you can’t be shaking like a leaf inside, she thought, noting a twinge of self-rapprochement at her schoolgirl nervousness.

  She followed Juan up the stairs to the first floor of the West Wing and was led to what Juan called the Treaty Room.
  “I’ll inform the president that you’re here. He has a tight schedule today, so please don’t be disappointed if the meeting lasts for no longer than thirty minutes.”

  “I am sure the president is a very busy man, Juan, but thank you for letting me know,” she replied.

  When Juan reappeared five minutes later, he smiled and beckoned to her with a nod of his head announcing her presence to President Ian Gilmore as she stepped across the threshold of the most famous room in the world.

  The president, tall, mid-sixties, yet with a full head of salt and pepper hair, sat in a straight-backed leather armchair facing the door. He stood as she entered the room.

  “Mrs. Kennedy, thank you for making the time. Join me,” the president offered as he gestured to the couch positioned at right angles to his own chair.

  They shook hands as he continued. “I’m surprised that we haven’t bumped into each other before, although I’m certainly familiar with your appearances on television,” he said with a faint smile on his face.

  Elisabeth wasn’t sure if this comment was back-handed criticism, genuine appreciation or merely an attempt at small talk.

  “Mr. President, it’s a great honor to meet you, please call me Elisabeth.” She lowered herself onto the couch, sinking into it.

  Although tall, she felt a full head smaller than the president and therefore slightly uncomfortable. She assumed that this was the purpose of the seating arrangement.

  “As Juan I’m sure told you, I have a busy schedule, so let’s get down to business. Bill Oakley’s due to finish his fourteen-year mandate as chairman of the Fed in July this year.” Elisabeth nodded. “While it’s possible for the chairman to have his term extended, Bill’s won’t be.”

  “I don’t fully understand,” said Elisabeth, “Bill’s one of the most successful Fed chairmen we’ve ever had.”

  “To a point. But he’s at least partly responsible for the fact that we may be about to enter the worst recession we’ve had since the Great Depression.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but, with all due respect, I have absolutely no idea why I’m sitting here.”

  Ian Gilmore leant in towards her, looking intently into her eyes.

  “I want you to be the next Fed chairman, Elisabeth. I have no doubt that your nomination will receive full Senate ratification. I need to know if you want the job.”

  It had been a long, long time since anyone had said something to Elisabeth that had left her completely speechless. It occurred to her that it had probably been when her husband had calmly told her that he had terminal cancer. She hoped that the shock that she felt was not visible and momentarily wished that she had applied more blusher to her cheeks in the back of the limo.

  To her great relief, the president broke the silence.

  “Before you say anything, please let me continue. You’re here because I have no doubt in my mind that I will spend the rest of my first term as president working very closely with the next Fed chairman. As I said, Elisabeth, it’s very likely that this person will be you. I need to know that we’ll be able to work together. You’re top of the list. Over the last eight years as his deputy, you have acted as a foil to some of his more, shall we say, ‘laissez faire’ tendencies. You appear to be a fan of curbing the market’s wilder impulses. If we don’t shore up the banks, we’ll be picking up the pieces for a long time to come.” The president nodded in Elisabeth’s direction.

  “I agree, Mr. President, of course. We need to recapitalize the banks before it’s too late. It may push us into recession, but if we continue to procrastinate in the vain hope that the markets will correct themselves, I hate to think of what might happen. What I’m trying to say, Mr. President, is that if you provide me with the tools, I’ll do all I can to fix the problem.”

  “I’ll make sure you get whatever you need. Your decision fills me with great confidence. There’s one final hurdle you’ll need to overcome before your appointment can be confirmed.”

  “And that would be …?” Elisabeth arched her eyebrows.

  “You’ve heard of the Bilderberg Group?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, “but I’ve never had any form of interaction with them. Although I’ve wondered now and again to what degree the rumors were true.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you to decide when you meet them. Bilderberg doesn’t have as much power as some of the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. However, it does have considerable influence. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Despite her awareness of the Group’s existence and some of the tales she had heard regarding its membership and powerbase, she was surprised to be having this discussion with the president.

  “You’ll be contacted by one of their membership in the next few days. His name is Augustus Goodfriend. He’ll invite you to be keynote speaker at the next Bilderberg Group annual conference. September fifth, the Kulm Hotel in Saint Moritz. You should be there.”

  “Yes, Mr. President, I’ll make appropriate arrangements.”

  “Thank you, Elisabeth. Once again,” the president said as he rose to a standing position, “it’s been a great pleasure to meet you. I look forward to seeing a lot more of you in the future.” This last as he accompanied her to the door and, with a relaxed smile, bade her farewell.