Blood Money (6 page)

“Thank you for being so candid. So there might or might not be a Greek organized crime link. If we assume for a moment that the kidnappers knew your family in Athens were unlikely to pay-up, is there anyone else who they might plan to make contact with, a wife or a girlfriend perhaps? A person close to you who you'd trust to make a ransom payment on your behalf?”

“Well…err…actually…” Alexis is feeling suddenly uncomfortable. This is the only point in the interview where the fund manager begins to stumble and falter about how best to reply.

“To be honest, I'm not sure who else, hypothetically speaking, would have paid any ransom demand. I didn't have that on my
‘to-do list'
of things to arrange.”

“Sorry Mr Vasilakos, but that doesn't sound right. Are you saying that there's no one close to you, no one you trust who could pull together the funds to pay a ransom demand?”

“Detective, I think I've answered the question already. Repeating myself is not only wasting my time but police time. Are we done yet?”

“I think so Mr Vasilakos. I appreciate you assistance, you've been very helpful.”

Alexis's patience under questioning has clearly worn-out and since they now have all the answers they need, John terminates the interview.

*

With the Fund Manager done with, it's the bodyguard's turn to be questioned and once Alexis has left the room, his brawny guardian takes over the vacant seat. New tapes are loaded into the recorder and Eddie Slater gets his caution. Eddie assists the policemen, giving short but clear answers. He comes over as being more than just Alexis's ‘muscle', he's undoubtedly an intelligent man, it's just that he controls his emotions tightly and keeps his responses as brief as possible.

In this session, it's Bill's turn to pose the questions. John sits back and watches, trying to understand the tough guy's complex psychological make-up.

Straight away, John can tell that something with Eddie just isn't right, it's not just that he's cold, serious and sober, there's something else that doesn't quite fit.

Then it occurs to him that any normal man, after being on the receiving end of such a violent attack would show signs of shock or distress. But at no point does Slater display a twitch or a fidget or any sense of fear or anxiety. Under the circumstances he should be displaying any number of human emotions, but this guy's so chilled he's ice-cold.

Responding minimally to all of Bill's questions, the bodyguard explains he too hadn't noticed anything different that Monday morning. The routine he follows each week had run completely to plan. Additionally, he makes a point of explaining how he makes it his business to constantly check for people following him as he drives and hadn't observed anyone doing so prior to the attack. And he too is either unable or unwilling to provide a useful description of the assailants.

Once he'd got his boss safely inside the Savoy Hotel, Eddie had merely stood guard on his employer and kept an eye on the TV and internet for news of the incident as the rest of the day unfolded. Predictably, Eddie also denies having any connections to organised criminals.

*

When John and Bill get back to Bishopsgate Station they examine all the testimony they've gathered and try to build-up a likely sequence of events that would fit everything discovered to date. Perhaps the attackers had no need to follow the Mercedes for any distance. If they'd done their homework properly, they'd have known exactly what route the black Mercedes took each and every Monday morning and they pretty much would have known exactly when it would arrive at his headquarters. Everything seemed to make most sense if you assumed the assailants were professional criminals and they'd prepared themselves well.

After all the analysis is over, Bill and John agree that the most likely scenario is that it was an attempted kidnapping by organised crime (most probably Greek) with the prospect of a highly profitable pay-off. If it had just been an assassination it would have been done with far greater subtlety, with fewer people and less hardware.

Having spoken with the Fund Manager face to face, John can now empathise with Rebecca's feelings on Alexis Vasilakos. He's comes across as a particularly ruthless and sharp individual; a man whose life revolves around making money, without care for family or apparently, friends.

Guilty of insider dealing…probably. Could it be proven? -Hell no…with a man this devious you'd stand more chance of nailing a jelly to a wall.

Alexis smiles smugly, congratulating himself on how he's turned things to his advantage. In an unusual show of physical activity he slowly paces the floor alongside his office windows, occasionally stopping to take a sip of coffee whilst observing the insignificant people walking up and down Lombard Street way down below.

The press conference had been skilfully orchestrated and his performance in-front of the cameras had been exemplar, -as good as any polished politician.

The realities of yesterday were that he'd been cowering in the back of an armoured limousine praying that he'd live to see another day. But in the press conference, a highly edited version of the events had miraculously transformed him into a hero. An upstanding man, viciously attacked by organised criminals -bravely thwarting their wicked plans.

Alexis habitually re-writes history, preferring to believe in his own massively distorted version of events.

By shunning interpersonal relationships, both with family and friends, he's effectively cut himself adrift from the realities of everyday life. Fifteen years ago he set himself on a course toward the mental equivalent of a black-hole and five years ago he passed its event-horizon. There can be no going back to normality for someone who believes he now holds a divine right whether people who cross him should live or die.

He considers the way in which he selects what shares to buy and sell to be a masterstroke of genius. The involvement of the men who actually put together the computer hardware and developed its software are now barely a memory at all. It was he alone who created the electronic brain that continues to work so tirelessly down in the bowels of the building day and night, feeding on an immensity of data. Digesting a digital mountain, analyzing and sifting, searching and assessing. And every morning he reaps the fruits from his very own tree of knowledge. He truly has to be the smartest man on the planet. And soon…he will surely be the most successful man on the planet too.

Alexis finishes his cup of coffee and brings his daydreaming to an end. It's time to return to the small matter of making serious amounts of money, so he leaves the office and uses the lift to descend three floors.

Walking across the gleaming tiles he goes over to the far corner of the foyer and slipping behind the reception desk he approaches the plain, steel door. He stands just to its right, in front of a small wall-mounted box positioned at his head height.

The machine scans Alexis's right eye, creating images of the detail-rich intricate structures of his iris. Its technology represents the ultimate in biometric security. Iris textures are completely independent and unique, even between cloned animals or genetically identical twins. This particular model even uses spectral analysis to distinguish that it's definitely looking at actual iris tissue, avoiding the possibility of anyone trying to fool it with anything as amateurish as a super high-resolution digital photograph.

An almost inaudible bleep is followed by a mechanical clunking noise as multiple bolts mounted within the door retract in synchrony. Then, without human assistance, the door opens smoothly inwards to reveal a simple stone staircase leading down into a well-lit subterranean vault. The pretty young woman behind the reception desk barely glances across at Alexis. She keeps herself busy, avoiding eye contact with her lecherous boss in case it's wrongly interpreted by his twisted mind as a flirtatious glance.

Security is highly important to Alexis, and keeping the contents of the basement protected is paramount. Taking advice from industry experts, he selected a stainless steel door that was impossible to force and had no apparent points of weakness. The reinforced steel frame had then been anchored into a similarly reinforced wall and by marrying it with the ultimate in biometric access control he'd created a supremely secure facility to house the things he treasures most dear.

Only after careful consideration had he decided that it would be prudent for a second individual to have access down into the basement…just in case anything unforeseen ever happened. Eddie is the only one he trusts never to come down here unless specifically instructed to do so; therefore his bodyguard became his ‘back-up man'.

Of course, the human element of any high security system is always its weakest point, so if anyone were to ever force Alexis to open the door against his will he would simply use his left eye and a silent alarm would trigger the bank's attendant security staff to respond immediately.

As the Greek begins to descend the stone stairs he hits his palm against a metal pad built into the wall to his right, triggering the door to close behind him.

*

The full size of the basement underneath 60 Lombard Street is the same as that of a couple of tennis courts, but you wouldn't realise this as almost all of the available space is taken up with a megalithic bank vault. It dominates the subterranean chamber and leaves little more than a wide corridor in-front of it.

Once installed, bank vaults such as these are simply too substantial and impervious to be removed, so despite no longer being an essential facility for the work carried out in the rest of the building, it remains in-situ, like an impenetrable cold-war nuclear bunker.

In the halcyon days of the PSB, the vault in front of Alexis would have been in permanent use.

Credit cards only started appearing in Britain in the late sixties, debit cards by the mid eighties. Prior to that, money had been pretty-much unsophisticated. Everything was either notes, coins and cheques. Pay-day meant paper-money stuffed into little brown envelopes, handed out by a payroll clerk once a week. To supply every employer with this volume of cash required banks to hold a lot of paper money both behind each teller's counter and also inside vaults such as this one.

And it was because of such large cash and gold reserves that so many daring heists occurred in post-war Britain.

But nowadays, the smart way to steal from a bank is to hack into its computer network and rob it ‘electronically'. If done competently there's every chance of it never even being discovered, let alone that the perpetrator will be tracked down, caught and convicted.

*

Completely ignoring the huge round door to the vault Alexis instead walks past, approaching a substantial-looking computer sited on the far side.

Behind the everyday flat-screen monitor and the standard keyboard is a state-of-the-art supercomputer of surprisingly modest size considering its processing power. To a casual observer its unremarkable looks reveal nothing of its stratospheric capabilities. The Cray CX1000 system is in geek parlance a ‘dense' and ‘supremely powerful' piece of hardware. Because of its jaw-dropping cost, only very wealthy institutions that need extreme processing power to manipulate massive amounts of data in (relatively) short periods of time will ever own one. Suitably demanding problems to employ them on are the mapping of animal and plant genomes and for complex long range weather predictions.

Alexis submits his password and opens an electronic folder named with today's date.

Examining the distillations of the last 24 hours worth of processing, Alexis spends just twenty minutes scrolling through the summarised information and electronically highlighting a few lines that appear to be of particular interest. Now he plugs in a USB memory pen and saves the data onto it. Safely removing the device, he slips it into his jacket pocket. Then logging-out, Alexis rises from his seat and walks away from the digital brain, leaving it to continue tirelessly with its never-ending labours. He puffs, pants and perspires his way up the stone steps until finally he reaches the steel door.

The act of leaving the basement is far simpler than the requirements for entering. Catching his breath, Alexis glances across at a CCTV monitor screen that shows him what's on the other side, then satisfied that ‘all is well' he presses his clammy hand against a large mushroom-shaped button mounted on the wall, triggering the door bolts to retract once more. Without the superfluous need for human effort, it slowly and automatically opens, allowing Alexis to step through into the back of the reception area once again. Seconds later, the portal closes behind him.

Taking the lift back up to his lavish office on the third floor he walks behind his antique mahogany desk and slumps down into his comfortably padded executive chair.

Slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, he retrieves the small memory pen and inserts it into a vacant USB socket on the front panel of his floor-standing computer. He now scrutinises his monitor screen to further examine the little gems of information that the supercomputer has isolated for him.

Half an hour later, a smugly smiling Alexis walks out into the bustle of the upper trading floor. He approaches the first of his four Senior Portfolio Managers to hand out his instructions for the day.

David Pritchard has been at Kronos for almost two years having been head-hunted from a prestigious Investment Bank. Alexis admires him for his confidence and intelligence, and it doesn't hurt that he also knows the British manufacturing sector like no one else in the Square Mile. Most of his contemporaries would be satisfied in just having a pretty good understanding of the largest fifty or so UK manufacturing companies, but David has an in-depth and up-to-date critique on all of them, thanks to an astonishing retentive memory and an unquenchable thirst for information. Pritchard's remarkable cranial faculties and 10 years of being the leader in his field means that he now commands a remuneration package that would make the British Prime Minister weep with envy.

Already deeply engaged in a heated conversation with a subordinate, Alexis approaches unsighted from behind so he can listen-in on Pritchard dressing down the employee.

“Never double-up on a bad trade, you prick. Learn to take your losses like a man!”

The subordinates' mouth opens, but before he can utter a sound ‘DP' is already cutting him off with further biting criticism.

“You should have known better than to try and catch a falling knife. You've just lost a small fortune because you picked the wrong time to go against the trend. –If you'd only learn to read the market properly you wouldn't have got yourself into this mess. But you young fuckers always think you know best, don't you?”

The man's head hangs low and he can only look at the carpet in shame. “Look, I don't mind you being a first-class asshole, but whilst you're at work don't be a first-class fucking idiot!” The man in front of Pritchard tries once more to rebuff the attack, earnestly protesting that he thought he could halt the fall in value by buying big and reversing the downward slide.

There is no way Pritchard is going to be challenged by such impertinence. “Look you little dick-splash, what is it that you don't understand? You almost overstretched your remit. Your parameters are fucking simple. You run £50 million; maximum position is 10 percent. You're allowed to be eighty long, twenty short, if you're not sure then you work closer to sixty five / thirty five. If you break these rules by as much as a penny I'm going to bust you apart…Got that pea-brain?!?” David could be a snarling, sneering ball breaker when he needed to be. The young man in front of him is doing well to be still standing after receiving such a tongue lashing. Most people in his position would have collapsed into a blubbering heap by now.

Tapping him on the shoulder David glances round and immediately breaks off from chastising his subordinate. Alexis likes to see ‘his boys' handing out bollockings to juniors, it maintains the natural order of things and helps prevent upstarts with balls as big as melons from bankrupting the entire organisation. He leans closer and whispers in DP's ear “Agile Automotive, my dear boy”.

Startled, David visibly twitches, then turns round to face Alexis square-on. He now pauses before making his response, “Sound track record, secure order book and looking good for a better than expected dividend….” He knows he has a very good handle on this 3rd tier supplier to the British car industry, and yet from experience he knows that Alexis must have some snippet of information, some detail that even he hasn't heard about.

David moves away from his team to allow Alexis the space to divulge the golden nugget that he's so clearly uncovered. “I've heard something. Certain accounting irregularities have been occurring since their new FD was appointed two years ago. They also appear to have been understating their levels of debt and have hidden several oversights of expenditure in their corporate affairs division. Once word gets out they'll be blood all over the carpet…. and we both know how easily rumours are spread…” The fat Greek raises a single bushy eyebrow in a knowing glance.

The smile on Pritchard's face widens to a grin. “I think it's about to go a bit pear shaped for Agile in the very near future!”

“I believe it's called ‘the law of the jungle' David…-Short them hard. I want it to look like a fucking seal clubbing. I'll give you one hour, then I'll make a few ‘phone calls to confirm whether this rumour is true or not.”

David doesn't need telling twice. Whether or not there's any foundation to his claim, Alexis is about to start some city gossip that will cause Agile Automotive's share value to bleed like a haemophiliac outnumbered in a sword fight.

The other Senior Portfolio Manager on this floor is an egotistical stuffed shirt by the name of Mark Harvey. He is the expert in the banking, insurance and financial services sector. Mark has an unerring ability to read people as easily as he reads balance sheets and he always comes out top when discussing economics and finance with his peers due to sheer weight of intellect and experience.

He also has the extremely annoying ability to validate this superiority by speculating successfully in the markets, making stellar-like returns from the seemingly outrageous punts that he takes. And under no circumstance is he shy about telling everyone how much money he's making, and he uses every opportunity to swagger and strut about the place like a puffed-up peacock.