Blood Money (15 page)

*

Just behind her someone says “Excuse me, miss? Do you know where Albion Road is?” Rebecca stops to take a glance behind her. The baseball capped man in the white van she's just passed is partially sticking his head out of the open window and is waving a road atlas at her.

“Albion Road, which way is Albion Road?” He lifts the map up again and makes eye contact. Her immediate thought is ‘Oh, for goodness sake…' but she isn't in the habit of being rude. They've made eye contact now, so she approaches the van to see if she can be of assistance.

“Can you show me where I am? I really appreciate your help luv, got m'self a bit lost and I'm supposed to be doing a job.” He's holding the map below his rugged face. She approaches the van and positions herself side-on so they can both look at the road atlas at the same time.

As she's looking for the distinctive shape of Finsbury Park on the open page, the map gets forcibly tugged away from her hands and she's inexplicably punched hard in the throat with something he's got in his hand. The blow to her windpipe stuns her, knocking her head backwards. Shocked by the impact she coughs at the pain coming from her neck. It's then that she feels the warm wetness running down her chest. Her head feels faint, her body suddenly feels incredibly heavy and her legs buckle beneath her. The van pulls away quietly as she slumps to the pavement. The last thing she's aware of is the enveloping darkness.

It's happened in almost total silence. When John looks up, he's puzzled to see Rebecca crumpled on the pavement. He strides over to help her to her feet and then sees an expanding pool of dark sticky liquid appearing from beneath her downturned face. Dropping to his knees he lifts her body only for her to head limply hang downwards. His hands are awash in her thick warm blood. Lying Rebecca onto her back, the reality of the situation hits him. Her unmoving glassy eyes stare upwards. Her motionless mouth is silent. John tries to shut the wide gaping slit in her throat whilst he checks for her pulse. At first he thinks he can feel something weakly struggling to exist then as the seconds pass he can feel it no longer.

No one's around to help. Wiping the blood from his hands he dials 999 to call for an ambulance, but by the time the woman on the other end of the line has understood the nature of the problem and his location, he knows there's no hope. He tries desperately to hold the wound in her neck closed with one hand whilst giving her chest compressions with the other.

Some people walking past the nearby petrol station start to come over and begin gathering around. He ignores them and continues his relentless efforts to resuscitate her lifeless body.

He has an awareness of ambulance men pulling him away, separating Rebecca from his grasp in order to put her onto a wheeled stretcher.

Engulfed by shock, he's barely conscious that a uniformed policewoman is driving him to a nearby hospital. He finds himself sat in a small, white room with someone beside him. Oblivious to the passing of time, at some point a doctor comes in and confirms what John already knows to be true.

He checks John's relationship to the deceased and then asks for him to formally identify her remains.

Later, he's told that a coroner will be examining her body to confirm the official cause of death. Following the coroner's report, her remains will be kept in the hospital mortuary until he makes the necessary arrangements with an undertaker for her collection.

The policewoman softly asks him for details of Rebecca's next of kin. She makes a record of the mumbled names that come from his lips. Taking his cell phone out from his pocket he tries to retrieve some phone numbers but his hands are shaking uncontrollably. She takes the phone off him and scrolls up and down the list, finding the numbers that match the names she has written on her pad.

A jubilant Mark Harvey picks up the phone to speak to his boss. “Alexis, about the Woodward International rumour we discussed…” As soon Mark uses the word ‘we' Alexis knows they're talking about a winner, “I bought as many as I could, all low-key and spread across as many brokers as possible.”

“And may I ask if you're calling me for any particular reason?” the fund manager enquires with an air of pomposity.

“I thought you'd like to know that their PR Company has just issued an announcement as follows: The Board of Woodward International Plc notes the recent movement in the Company's share price and can confirm that it has received a preliminary approach, which may or may not lead to an offer being made for the Company. The Company is therefore deemed to be in an Offer Period for the purposes of the Takeover Code.”

“How many? How many?”

“All told, we've got 13,637,921. Buy price varies from £2.52 a share to £3.06. We're still doing the math but it looks like we got in early enough to see a 32% increase in value, so the profit is in excess of £12 million!”

Alexis closes his eyes as a broad smile rapidly spreads across his wide pock-marked face. He clenches both fists and arches his back, thrusting out his ample stomach like a rutting pig in spasms of climactic ecstasy. After a moments silence, Mark Harvey hears the fund manager roaring “Yes, yes,
YES!!!!
You beauty! Champagne! Sally!
Get me some fucking Champagne!
”

In the office next door, Alexis's pretty secretary leaps out of her chair and sprints to fetch him a chilled bottle of vintage Krug and a single crystal flute.

It's rare for more than a few days to pass-by without her having to hand him one of these catastrophically expensive bottles and on each occasion she knows the contents will be flowing in under a minute.

The Senior Portfolio Manager is still waiting patiently on the other end of the line; however he now has diminishing expectations of getting any sort of positive acknowledgement from his boss. He'd hoped for a ‘Well done Mark!' or a ‘Great job Mark!' but Alexis ends the call without so much as a word. His secretary has now appeared and his only priority is to begin swilling down the bubbly nectar as quickly as possible.

As a young man in his early twenties, when he'd made a modest amount of profit it gave him delicious feelings of fulfilment, similar to having had a good win on the horses. Indeed he found trading just as addictive as any other form of gambling. The more profit he made, the more he wanted. Over time, his brain's tolerance to its opiate-like euphoric effects shifted. The only way to keep getting the highs he craved-for was for the size and number of his winning trades to keep increasing. When he reached the memorable milestone of making his first ‘single trade' one-million-pound profit the endorphin rush it gave him had an intensity of pleasure greater than anything he'd ever experienced before.

Up in his private office on the third floor Alexis's delight at today's success is soon tempered by thoughts and plans to do even better in the very near future. Having already necked half the bottle, he re-fills his champagne flute with yet more Grand Cru and as the myriad of fine golden bubbles dance themselves upwards Alexis begins to self-critique his current business strategy.

‘Things are going well, but I really need to crank it up another notch. So where's the progress going to come from? What's the next step? Time to decide…More people? More offices? -No…organic growth takes far too long. I need better results now. Of course, what I should really do is leverage my biggest asset as far as it can possibly go.'

Picking up the phone, Alexis calls Eddie. “Good, you're back then yeah? Were there any problems this morning that I should know about?”

“Everything's been concluded satisfactorily. Nothing untoward to report. Clean and trouble free, as always.”

“Excellent! Pleased to hear it. Now, I was just thinking about how to improve things a bit further. I was wandering if you could remember where that phone engineer friend of ours lives?”

“Yes, I've got his address to hand.”

“Do me a favour. Bring him in to see me. –I'm sure he can improve on what I've already got. Oh, and gently does it Eddie. We have a saying in Greece: He is my friend whilst I am in need, but my enemy once I am happy.”

“Understood.”

Alexis ends the call, confident that he's about to get things moving forward again. There's no need for any further introspective analysis.

The buzz from the Woodward International killing is starting to fade but he's still in the mood for staying on a high. Deciding that he deserves a mid-morning ‘treat', he discreetly swivels his chair to face away from the office door.

His chubby fingers reach into his jacket pocket and he pulls out a small plastic package. He opens it and taps half the contents onto the back of his left hand. Taking care not to spill any of the fine white dust he reaches once more into the same pocket for a cut-down length of drinking straw and after a quick glance over his shoulder has confirmed the coast to be clear, he takes a quick initial snort, inhaling hard to propel a small amount of the powder into the back of his throat. Initially it burns uncomfortably, but his nasal passages soon numb and he puts his head down to hoover-up the rest. Reclining back in his chair he feels anaesthetized for a second, then a rush of pure energy hits him and he explodes off his seat. With his heart feeling like it's doing 1000 beats per minute he's overcome by a feeling of total invincibility. For ten minutes, the rich Greek flies through the skies above London, soaring effortlessly like an unstoppable rocket ship.

Once the initial intense euphoria falls away, a feeling of paranoia germinates inside his head. ‘I should be doing much better than I am. If it weren't for everyone holding me back who knows how much more successful I could have been by now? I know they're all against me, criticising, sniggering, and plotting. But I'll take them all on and one day I'll see to it that the whole world pays me the respect I'm due.'

All of his hedge-fund rivals tell him to his face that they think he's odd remaining in the heart of the square mile. They joke at how unfashionable and stuffy he is, but it's Vasilakos who is laughing now. He resolutely stays right where he is so he can tap into the richest vein of information that exists for miles around. Being located midway between the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square and Lloyds of London in Lime Street is an act of pure genius. By having the equipment up on the roof linked to the supercomputer down in the basement he's able to listen-in on hundreds of conversations about upcoming takeovers and mergers, not to mention pre-announcement discussions on dividend forecasts, impending profit warnings and imminent end of year results.

Feeling a drip coming from his nose, Alexis firstly checks it's not blood before giving himself a good squirt of decongestant spray to prevent his sinus's feeling blocked-up and dry for the rest of the day. Over the next 10 minutes he finishes the champagne whilst he waits for his heartbeat to come back down to normal levels. Picking up the ‘phone, he asks Sally to get Josh McHenry (Kronos's in-house software programmer) to give him a call.

Invariably working from home at his stylish Notting Hill townhouse, Josh writes and amends the C++ code for the Cray, a programming language which is exceptionally fast and packed with high-level features. On a regular basis, Alexis calls on the programmer to tweak their existing game-theories, and by keeping KATA fresh, Alexis ensures that the money keeps rolling-in despite a constantly changing economic environment.

Everyone at Kronos is fully acquainted with KATA, the set of quantitive trading algorithms that are used every day to automatically and semi-automatically trade stocks. But there are in fact two pieces of software that he's created for Alexis and the second piece of software is something that only he and McHenry know about. Of course, McHenry will never tell anyone about this ‘other' programme because he has far too much to lose: such as a young family, a pretty high-maintenance wife and a beautiful weekend retreat in Surrey. You see, McHenry and Vasilakos have a mutual understanding. If McHenry breaks his code of silence, Alexis will have Eddie break the necks of each and every member of his family, starting with the smallest.

McHenry calls Alexis back, fully expecting fresh instructions.

“Josh, the last lot of mods that you did on my ‘personal software' seem to be working great. Giving preference to calls recognised as city business phone numbers has reduced the volume of time-wasters and has doubled the leads I'm getting. Now I want you to make another tweak by building in a facility for me to red-flag any particular numbers I wish to identify as ‘priority-1' business phone numbers.”

“I see where you're going on that, and it'll be pretty easy to implement. I'll build in a feature after each new number you review allowing you to flag it if it was useful. Over time you'll build-up a database of known contacts, the longer it runs the more useful it'll get. How's that for you?”

“You've got the idea. Now, secondly and most importantly I want you to do something about recognising when two callers are conversing together. I keep getting a few of these each week, where both the caller and the recipient are within my cell. When this happens, rather than having to listen-in on the individual sides of the conversations separately I want to be able to hear both sides together just like they'd have actually happened. Can you do that for me?”

“Well, I should think so. I won't be able to use telecommunication data protocols, but I can write some code to recognise if any calls start and finish within seconds of each other. To guarantee a match I'll then run a record of the pattern of talking periods to listening periods. If both calls match like jigsaw pieces within say a 95% fit then I'll combine the data and save it as a new file, deleting the two original phone calls.”

“Excellent Josh, as soon as you can with that. Hush-hush as always, I'm sure you know what would happen if…well; I don't need to remind you, do I?”

*

Set-up on the roof of 60 Lombard Street, hidden from view are two illegal radio receivers. Unlike a legitimate telephone exchange which both receives and transmits conversations, Alexis's wholly unlicensed set-up is limited to listening-in on mobile phone calls.

When you make a call on your mobile, a small radio transmitter inside the phone sends a radio signal in every direction, some of which is then picked up by the nearest base station. A handset's range is limited by the power output of its own transmitter and the sensitivity of the base station's receiver. Mobile phone technology relies greatly on line-of-sight transmissions, so any building, hill, or other landscape feature has a tendency to partially block the signal, leaving a ‘radio shadow'.

Being unable to process any more than about 130 mobile phone calls at any one time, during peak times Alexis is keen for his system to ditch unlikely ‘new' callers and give preference to listening-in on conversations from known city businessmen.

*

A muscular, shaven-headed man dressed immaculately in a smart suit leaves his car and walks across the road towards an unloved end-of-terrace house. In one strong arm he carries a sledge hammer; in the other he carries a pair of bolt cutters. Smart black-leather shoes stride across broken paving slabs as he approaches the scruffy front door, with its flaking paint and rotting sill. Dandelions and brambles fight for control over the front yard whilst traffic from the busy road is coating the windows with a thick layer of dirt.

Eddie rings the doorbell and after a few seconds (having put the security chain on) a nervous looking man with silver hair opens it and peers cautiously through the narrow gap. His twitching eyes widen as he recognises the uninvited caller. “Not you again! Why can't you
piss off and leave me alone?!
”

Eddie puts a large shoe between the door and the door-frame to prevent it from being shut, then he puts his face close enough to the opening to ensure he's heard. “I didn't expect you to invite me in.”

The householder, a man in his fifties, is one Alan Sadler. He barges against the door with all his strength but fails to force it shut. He does however succeed in making Eddie wince in pain as his Italian leather shoe takes the full force of the impact. “Now that ain't very polite, is it?” he says, thankful that the rotten bottom of the door is as soft as it is. Swinging the heavy bolt cutters up to the chain Eddie only needs apply a gentle squeeze on the long handles to cut through it with ease. Realising he is now powerless to stop the thug from entering the house Alan panics and turns tail. He reaches the small kitchen at the rear of the property and scrabbles to find the right key to unlock it.

It proves to be an exercise in futility as Eddie has already caught up with him.

“Calm down Alan! No need to shit yourself! I ain't going to hurt you. Promise. -But you are coming along to see my boss. He only wants a little chat, probably got a few ideas for some improvements to them receivers. If you play fair you'll be in for another tidy pay cheque I'm sure. C'mon, you know it makes sense, come quiet and we can both have an easy day.”

The wiry little man knows exactly who he's dealing with and knows he's no alternative other than to follow Eddie to the front door and compliantly get into the black BMW 7-Series parked just across the street.

Even if he could escape, there's not much point since Eddie clearly knows where he lives. And the next time Eddie comes a-calling, he wouldn't be quite as friendly, so it's best to do as he's told.

Alan Sadler began an apprenticeship in electronics in 1976 and after working for several different companies he joined Mobaphone in the early 90's as a phone mast engineer. The pay was better than he was used to but he hated getting grief off people who were concerned about the cancer risks from radiation and stuff. But it was a job and he was grateful for it.