Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (51 page)

‘
The prospect daunts me not at all
,’
he murmured gently, and lifted her
chin.

They washed off the salt and the sand, crowding together into the
thick, perfumed steam of the shower cubicle and afterwards they lay
together on the patchwork quilt in the darkness with the sound of the
sea as background music to the plans and dreams they wove together.

Every time they both descended to the very frontiers of sleep, one of
them would think of something vitally important and prod the other awake
to say it.

‘
I've got to be in London on Tuesday.
’

‘
Don't spoil it all, now
,’
she
murmured sleepily.

‘
And then we're launching Sea Witch on the 7th April.
’

‘
I'm not listening
,’
she whispered.
‘
I've got my fingers in my ears.
’

‘
Will you launch her - I
mean break the bottle of bubbly and bless her?
’

‘
I've just taken my
fingers out again.
’

‘
Jules would love it.
’

‘
Nicholas, I cannot spend my
life commuting across the Atlantic, not even for you. I've got work to
do.
’

‘
Peter will be there, I'll work that as a bribe.
’

'That's unfair
pressure,
’
she protested.

‘
Will you come?
’

‘
You know I will,
’
you sexy bastard. I wouldn't miss it for all the
world.
’
She moved across the quilt and found his ear with her lips.
‘
I
am honoured.

‘
Both of you are sea witches
,’
Nick told her.

‘
And you are my warlock.
’

‘
Sea witch and warlock
,’
he chuckled. 'Together we
will work miracles.
’

‘
Look, I know it's terribly forward of me, but
seeing that we are both wide awake, and it's only two o'clock in the
morning I would be super ultra-grateful if you could work one of your
little miracles for me right now.
’

‘
It will be a great pleasure
,’
Nick
told her.

Nicholas was early, he saw as he came out of the American Consulate and
glanced at his Rolex, so he moderated his pace across the Place de la
Concorde, despite the gentle misty rain that settled in minute droplets
on the shoulders of his trench coat
.

Lazarus was at the rendezvous ahead
of him, standing under one of the statues in the corner of the square
closest to the French Naval headquarters.

He was heavily muffled against the cold, dressed all in sombre blue with
a long cashmere scarf wound around his throat and a dark blue hat pulled
down so low as to conceal the pale smooth bulge of his forehead
.

‘
Let's
find a warm place
,’
Nick suggested, without greeting the little man.

‘
No,
’
said Lazarus, looking up at him through the thick distorting lenses
of his spectacles.
‘
Let us walk.
’
And he led the way through the
underpass on to the promenade above the embankment of the Seine, and set
off in the direction of the Petit Palais.

In the middle of such an inclement afternoon they were the only
strollers, and they walked in silence three or four hundred yards while
Lazarus satisfied himself absolutely of this, and while he adjusted his
mincing little steps to Nick's stride. It was like taking
Toulouse-Lautrec for a stroll, Nick smiled to himself . Even when
Lazarus began speaking, he kept glancing back over his shoulder, and
once when two bearded Algerian students in combat jackets overtook them,
he let them get well ahead before he went on.

‘
You know there will be nothing in writing?
’
he piped.

‘
I have a recorder in my pocket,
’
Nick assured him.

‘
Very well, you are entitled to that.
’

‘
Thank you,
’
murmured Nick dryly.

Lazarus paused, it was almost as though a new reel was being fitted into
the computer, and when he began talking again, his voice had a different
timbre, a monotonous almost electronic tone, as though he was indeed an
automaton.

First, there was a recital of share movements in the thirty-three
companies which make up the Christy Marine complex, every movement in
the previous eighteen months.

The little man reeled them off steadily, as though he were actually
reading from the share registers of the companies. He must have had
access, Nicholas realized, to achieve such accuracy. He had the date,
the number of the shares, the transferor and transferee, even the
transfer of shares in Ocean Salvage and Towage to Nicholas himself, and
the reciprocal transfer of Christy Marine stock, was faithfully
detailed, confirming the accuracy of Lazarus
’
other information. It was
all an impressive exhibition of total knowledge and total recall, but
much too complicated for Nicholas to make any sense of it. He would
have to study it carefully. All that he would hazard was that somebody
was putting up a smoke-screen.

Lazarus stopped on the corner of the Champs Elyse
e
s and the rue de la
Boetie. Nicholas glanced down at him and saw his shapeless blob of a
nose was an unhealthy purplish pink in the cold, and that his breathing
had coarsened and laboured with the exertion of walking. Nick realized
suddenly that the little man was probably asthmatic, and as if to
confirm this, he took a little silver and turquoise pill-box from his
pocket and slipped a single pink capsule into his mouth before leading
Nicholas into the foyer of a movie house and buying two tickets.

It was a porno movie, a French version of Deep Throat entitled Gorge
Profonde. The print was scratched and the French dubbing was out of
synchronization. The cinema was almost empty, so they found two seats
in isolation at the rear of the stalls.

Lazarus stared unblinkingly at the screen, as he began the second part
of his report. This was a detailed breakdown of cash movements within
the Christy Marine Group, and Nick was again amazed at the man's
penetration.

He drew a verbal picture of the assemblage of enormous sums of money,
marshalled and channelled into orderly flows by a master tactician. The
genius of Duncan Alexander was as clearly identifiable as that
flourishing signature with the flamboyant A and X which Nicholas had
seen him dash off with studied panache. Then suddenly the cash-flow was
not so steady and untroubled, there were eddies and breaks, little gaps
and inconsistencies that nagged at Nicholas like the false chimes of a
broken clock.
Lazarus finished this section of his report with a brief summation of
the Group's cash and credit position as at a date four days previously
and Nicholas realized that the doubts were justified. Duncan had run the
Group out along a knife-edge.

Nicholas sat hunched down in the threadbare velvet seat, both hands
thrust into the pockets of his trench
-
coat, watching the incredible feats
of Miss Lovelace on the screen, without really seeing them, while beside
him Lazar
us took an aerosol can from his pocket, screwed a nozzle on to
it and noisily sprayed a fine mist down his own throat. It seemed to
relieve him almost immediately.

‘
Insurance and marine underwriting of vessels owned by the Christy Marine
Group of companies.
’
He began again with names and figures and dates,
and Nicholas picked up his own trend. Duncan was using hi
s own c
aptive
company, London and European Insurance and Banking, to lead the risk on
all his vessels, and then he was reinsuring in the marketplace,
spreading part of the risk, but carrying a whacking deductible himself,
the principle of self-insurance that Nicholas had opposed so vigorously,
and which had rebounded so seriously upon Duncan's head with the salvage
of Golden Adventurer.

The last of the vessels in Lazarus recital was Golden Dawn, and Nicholas
shifted restlessly in his seat at the mention of the name, and almost
immediately he realized that something strange was taking place.

‘
Christy Marine did not apply for a Lloyd's survey of this vessel.
’
Nicholas knew that already.
‘
But she has been rated first class by the
continental surveyors.
’
It was a much easier rating to obtain, and
consequently less acceptable than the prestigious at Lloyd's.

Lazarus went on, lowering his voice slightly as another patron entered
the almost deserted cinema and took a seat two rows in front of them.

‘
And insurance has been effected outside Lloyd's.
’
The risk was led by
London and European Insurance. Again, Duncan was self-insuring,
Nicholas noted grimly, but not all of it.
‘
And further lines were
written by
–‘
Lazarus listed the other companies which carried a part of
the risk, with whom Duncan had re-insured. But it was all too thin, too
nebulous. Again, only careful study of the figures would enable
Nicholas to analyse what Duncan was doing, how much was real insurance
and how much was bluff to convince his financiers that the risk was
truly covered,
and their investment protected.

Some of the names of the
re-insurers were familiar, they had been on the list of transferees who
had taken stock positions in Christy Marine.

‘
Is Duncan buying insurance with capital?
’
Nicholas pondered. Was he
buying at desperate prices. He must have cover, of course. Without
insurance the finance houses, the banks and
in
st
i
tut
i
ons which had loaned
the money to Christy Marine to build the monstrous tanker would dig in
against Duncan. His own shareholders would raise such hell - No, Duncan
Alexander had to have cover, even if it was paper only, without
substance, a mere incestuous circle, a snake eating itself tail first.

Oh, but the trail was so cleverly confused, so carefully swept and tied
up, only Nicholas
’
knowledge of Christy Marine made him suspicious, and
might take a team of investigators years to unravel the tortured
tapestry of deceit. In the first it had occurred to Nicholas that the
easiest way to stop Duncan Alexander was to leak his freshly gleaned
suspicions to Duncan's major creditors, to those who had financed the
building of Golden Dawn, But he realized that this was not enough.
There were no hard facts, it was all inference and innuendo.
By the time the facts could be exhumed and laid out in all their
putrefaction for autopsy, Golden Dawn would be on the high seas,
carrying a million tons of crude. Duncan might have won sufficient time
to make his profit and sell out to some completely uncontrollable Greek
or Chinaman, as he had boasted he would do. It would not be so simple
to stop Duncan Alexander, it was folly to have believed that for one
moment. Even if his creditors were made aware of the flimsy insurance
cover over Golden Dawn, were they too deeply in already? Would they not
then accept the risks, spreading them where they could, and simply twist
the financial rope a little tighter around Duncan's throat. No, it was
not the way to stop him, Duncan had to be forced to remodify the giant
tanker's hull, forced to make her an acceptable moral risk, forced to
accept the standard Nicholas had originally stipulated for the vessel.