Payback (25 page)

Barton
’s chilling reply blew away all the phoney urbanity of earlier. ‘There was plenty of gleaming equipment, but no autocues in your rent boy’s dungeon. Remember? But you’ll see that for yourself. There’s a player in your suite.’

‘
What are you saying?’ Elkins had gone white.

‘
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I’ll spell it out for you, Mr Elkins.’ Barton now manifested an aura of pure malevolence. ‘I’ve read the draft report in your laptop. And it’s not saying what I want. Again, for the avoidance of doubt, a USB stick containing what I do want you to file is in your room. You take that and then tweak it
only
to match your own normal style. Your first unfortunate draft has already been deleted from your machine. Replace it with the new one, use all your influence to ramp my share price...and your wife, children and employers don’t get to see your interesting... hobby.’

Elkins
was traumatised. He knew, he just
knew
he should have come out years earlier. His marriage might just have survived it then, and the children would have been too young to be hurt by it. And now it would not matter a jot anyway. There were several openly gay and bi colleagues at the office. But his mistake had been in still hiding his sexuality. It was an age, generational thing. What was happening now was something he had feared for a very long time. He had nowhere to go. That was already clear to him in those first seconds. Barton was good. Very good. And not being the suicidal type, Elkins’s only options were to do as Barton instructed, or ring his wife straight away. The firm, ironically, would probably be OK for him refusing blackmail in order to protect the integrity of his reports for them. And the kids were no longer kids, but mature, liberal-minded people. But his wife...

This
was the crunch. Ring his wife, or file a stock recommendation with which he did not agree?

The
decision did not take long. ‘You get away with this just once, Barton. I’ll file your garbage. But never, ever expect anything from me again.’

Barton
did not smile, and had no air of triumphalism. ‘I promise. I’m a man of my word.’ He offered his hand to Elkins, who took it with a look of incredulity. Though it beggared belief, it was clear that despite what he was doing Barton did indeed consider himself honourable. A man of his word. That insight scared Elkins almost more than the crude blackmail. Without question, the man was capable of the most sophisticated self-justification: the self-delusion freeing him to do anything he wanted. He had become that most dangerous of animals. A powerful man completely devoid of conscience.

*

Lydia nestled in Tom’s arms. ‘I don’t think you should agree to it,’ she said.

‘
You and me both. But someone’s got to stop him.’ He had been completely open with her, feeling a little show of selfless heroics would not go amiss. She had just told him everything about the Warriors and her part in the fire-bombing, making her seem braver, more alive somehow than him, and he had wanted to respond.

‘
And what happens next? What exactly does this Mitchell man expect you to do?’

Tom
rolled over on his side, resting on an elbow, and looked at her. It was as if they were already old lovers. Always a sign of something good happening in a relationship. ‘I can tick the box on the first mission he set me. I get to go to Portugal with James. We fly out tomorrow. Once out there, I’ll be contacted by one of Mitchell’s people and briefed about what exactly they want me to do. It seems that’s when I really do become a spy. But in broad terms I already know what they want. I’m to find out who the biological weapons are for, why, and when they’re due for shipment. Hopefully by getting James to take me into his confidence on this. Or if he won’t, by getting access to the files and paperwork.’

‘
I still don’t like it. If Dad really is guilty of all these terrible things, why don’t these people just arrest him? And destroy all the dangerous viruses and the rest?’

‘
I asked exactly the same thing. And the answer is that unless they find out who commissioned the stuff, then whatever outrage is planned will still go ahead. With weapons acquired elsewhere. They can take James out any time.’

‘
Take him out?’ She sat up, pulling the sheet over her breasts.

‘
Sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. That was my clumsy phrase, not Mitchell’s.’

‘
Maybe. But it’s true, isn’t it? These people wouldn’t think twice about killing Dad.’

He
did not reply, afraid any reassuring denials would sound insincere. Mitchell had used the phrase ‘special forces’ to him when raising the option of a raid in Portugal. And if by that he had meant SAS types, then he also feared for James’s life if he got between them and their mission. ‘And you? What will you do? Go back to London, back to the agency?’

The
agency. How remote and foolish it all seemed from this distance, and knowing now what she did. ‘What’s he up to here in Belize?’

Pleased
that the tack had been changed, he replied, ‘This is his great hope for rocketing Temple Bio into the big league. And he’s using it to ramp the share price. He told me he needed some big money, fast. Fifteen million. For what, I don’t yet know. But the irony is, having talked to Penny, it’s clear he may really be on to something important out here in his own, proper research. If your father does nothing else right in his life, funding Penny at least could prevent a lot of suffering.’

‘
He’s saving lives with things like this, and killing people in Portugal,’ she sighed, perplexed. ‘How can any of it make sense?’

‘
Oh, there’s no mystery in that. It makes perfect sense on one level. The level of money. Saving lives and producing weapons of destruction are two of the biggest money-spinners in the world. Just look at pharmaceutical and defence stocks. Even primitives had medicine men as well as pretty damn lethal weapons. These things are right up there with procreation and finding food in just about any civilisation’s priorities. Your father isn’t really involved in making people well, or in making war. Just in making money. Big, big money. I think it’s become a fixation at the very heart of his illness. Think about it. He’s come from a long line of hugely successful people, only to find himself a disgraced bankrupt. And the last male heir in the baronetcy. Imagine it. The weakest and maybe final twig of your towering, deep-rooted family tree. Incapable of producing an heir. The laughing stock of the county. An embarrassment to his old school tie and political friends. And a complete non-person to his dowager mother. Damn it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have turned into something pretty strange carrying all
that
baggage.’

She
lay back again, thinking about all of this. It did make sense, she had to admit. Her father’s Lazarus-style comeback from ruin could only have been made with iron determination and fanatical, brass-necked application. And with a kind of fatalism. Perhaps the only options open to him at that time had been suicide, or some kind of screw-the-world success at any price. ‘What will happen to him?’ she asked hesitantly, for despite everything, she still carried deep, if ambiguous, feelings for her father.

Tom
rolled over and put his arm around her as if to protect her from what he was about to say. ‘I think that unless he confesses, and co-operates, then he’s finished for good this time. With no way back. He’s involved with some of the most violent and dangerous people around. And that goes for the good guys as well as the bad. Unless I help Mitchell stop him, he could get himself killed.’

‘
We,’ she said, quietly.

‘
Excuse me?’

‘
I said, unless
we
help him...’

‘
Oh no!’ Tom leaned over her. ‘This is something I have to do. Not you.’

She
kissed him and smiled enigmatically. ‘We’ll see.’

Chapter Thirteen

Banto had after all decided to carry out the traditional victory ceremony over his defeat of Bolitho, despite the man’s suicide. The Mayan ancestors and spirits of the ceiba would communicate with him. Had Bolitho taking his own life really cheated Banto? The spirits would tell him whether or not the dead man amounted to Payback. Because if there was still no Payback from this death, there was much work to do.

Taking
his time, and painstakingly following the ritual order, he first dug a pit and built a large fire inside. Then, when it was blazing, he put on hardwood logs. After an hour they were glowing like coals, just how he needed them. Next he prepared himself, covering his body with the thick oil of a swamp togaso tree, a fern in his hair, and with an elaborate face decoration using white clay he found on the bank of a stream.

Now
he was ready to cook the body. For his
mumu
feast.

Cannibalism
, prohibited long ago in the 1950s, was as alien to the modern, thriving PNG as burning witches and Tyburn hangings were to now to Britain. But the handful of remaining isolated tribes like Banto’s could know nothing of this and retained their ancient customs.

Dragging
Bolitho away from the roots of the ceiba and into the clearing, he used the serrated combat knife to hack off what little there was left of the head, the messy loose neck flesh and sinewy entrails. Then he cut off the clothing leaving the man spreadeagled on the ground. This was the first time he had actually cooked a human body himself, although he had watched others do it many times. There was nothing unusual about the butchery involved. Preparing meat was preparing meat, be it a pig, deer or chicken. Getting down to work, he set about jointing the body, starting with the arms and then legs. The hands were severed and discarded, but not the feet. These were a delicacy, just like pig’s feet. The rest he also discarded, before ramming the selected limbs into large bamboo cooking tubes to steam over the glowing coals for an hour.

An
important symbolic part of the body was missing and might, Banto feared, ruin the ceremony and displease the spirits. Not having the head saved him from the additional chore of wrapping it in thick palms to cook in its juices. Eating brain tissue during family funeral rites and at cannibalistic victory ceremonies such as this meant, until recently, that as many as one in a hundred of groups like the Fore people in PNG were affected by the terrible killer illness,
kuru
. Known to the natives as the laughing disease, it attacks the central nervous system making victims scream, bray and crawl like mad animals before the final blessed release of death. Women were especially affected.

Banto
improvised the victory ceremony which should have featured at least six other warriors. Crying out a repetitive ‘wa, wa, wa, wa’ mantra, he lost himself in a short-stepped dance, his mind soon floating above himself in what Western adults would have recognised as a self-induced out-of-body experience, and what their young children would have known as commonplace
Through
the
Looking
Glass
play. Life to Banto was a kind of ritual dance. Rhythm and repetition, repetition and ritual gave him the order and balance that he needed. Without it, Banto would drown in a bewildering sea of choices. Freedom of the will was an alien concept, one for future civilisations. Stone-Age Banto neither knew nor desired it. He was a forest creature of rhythm, who expected and wanted no more in his short years on Earth.

The
meat from Bolitho’s thigh tasted like pork, only a little sweeter. The Melanesian pidgin name for human flesh is indeed ‘long pig’. Banto sat and ate several mouthfuls before throwing the upper leg away. Spitting the flesh out, he knew that it was all wrong. Despite his careful, ritual preparation, the spirits were not pleased and there was no sense of the rhythm. The
mumu
was a failure. This was, he knew now for sure, because the man had taken his own life. Something
he
should have done. There had been no Payback. The man was in
dimanples
instead, with the others around the ancient tree, and Banto knew now for sure that to restore the rhythm he must retrace his journey and take Payback from the
kepala
. His first instincts had been right all along. There was nothing else for it.

*

Barton marshalled his thoughts before making the call to Colombia. Caldente’s English was only ever as good as he wanted it to be, and sometimes Barton found it difficult to make himself understood. Especially explaining some of the complicated financial structures and capital transfers they now had in place. But Caldente was the
de
facto
chairman of the group, having been the one who called together the first Aruban meeting. And Barton knew he would ask how the fund was performing. He always did, sometimes ringing twice a week for reassurance and an update on the value of his own share.

‘
It’s James Barton.’ He attempted no small talk or charm with these people. All the interpersonal skills which had served him so well throughout his life simply had no effect on them. ‘I need to agree with you how we want to play the summit next week.’ He spoke openly, their sophisticated telephone encryption never having been penetrated. So far at least.

‘
You still got the Africans?’ Caldente asked. The Nigerians were important to him in obtaining large quantities of good quality heroin.

‘
And the Russians and Sicilians.’

‘
Sure. OK. What do we need to discuss?’

‘
Well, we should review how my Stabiliser agreement is working out. And, of course, I’ll give a report on the financials. But most important is what we agreed in Acapulco when you told me to find a way to fight off the US anti-drugs taskforce. This is the main subject. And I have some pretty big news for you.’ The excitement showed now in his voice. ‘I’m sinking over £15 million of my own money setting this thing up, and I’ll want big bucks from the Alliance to see it through.’

‘
And you think you can stop a US President with this thing?’ There was incredulity in Caldente’s tone.

‘
I’m sure of it.’

Caldente
barked a short laugh. ‘Coming from anyone else, I’d say that was crazy talk. But so far, you’ve delivered good for us.’

‘
And I will again. But at a price.’

‘
You do this for us, and you can name any price.’ He meant it. Already a new Justice Minister had been appointed in Bogotà, one nobody—not even he—had been able to buy or threaten. Against all the odds, the new US trade and diplomatic threats were biting hard. There had been major DEA-inspired border seizures of cocaine and cash, and the twenty-six-nation Financial Action Taskforce, armed with the new Syfact fraud-protection software, was closing down scores of long-established money-laundering channels, including such favourites as car dealerships, travel agencies, chemist shop chains and pharmaceutical companies. Worse still, the US Treasury had now reduced from $10,000 to $750 the amount that remittance shops had to report on when, for instance, immigrants in the US wire money back home. This had choked off a billion dollars a year that Caldente’s Cartel had laundered back that way undetected. It was all starting to hurt. Bad.

Barton
smiled to himself, mightily relieved that Caldente remained as keen as ever on somehow fighting back. ‘I think when I tell you about it, you will be impressed,’ he said.

‘
Yeah. Sure. We’re all learning to trust you. And through your Stabiliser agreement, each other. You’re doing a good job.’

Barton
felt as proud as he had ever had at this rare praise. These were not easy men to impress. ‘Thank you.’

‘
OK. See you soon. Make sure security is real tight.’

‘
We’ll have you all protected by a small army of mercenaries.’

‘
Good. Like I said, you’re doing good, Sir Barton.’

‘
Sir James,’ he responded automatically.

‘
Whatever,’ Caldente snapped. Nobody corrected the head of the Lallandar Cartel.

*

A driver met them at Lisbon Airport and took them straight to Oeiras, half an hour away.

Tom
knew the area fairly well, having visited Lisbon many times on WMC and Temple Bio business, and as a student having stayed just down the bay in Estoril one whole summer—teaching tennis at a big hotel through the day, then blowing his wages each night at the casino. As they drove through, following the coast road, bars and familiar corners of the area as ever evoked happy, carefree memories for him. That period in his life did now seem a true age of innocence, compared with the dangerous, duplicitous work in which he was now involved. Oeiras itself, however, had changed little since then. An outbreak of long offices, along with the modern-looking lab, had sprung up opposite the beachfront, but everything else was still as pretty and picturesque in this somehow very English corner of north Portugal.

Barton
was more cheerful than Tom had seen him for years. His call to Caldente had tee-ed up his big pitch to the Alliance perfectly. Also, Elkins had been as good as his blackmailed word, and electronically filed the glowing ‘buy’ report on Temple Bio-Laboratories’s ‘wonder vaccines’. The short-memoried markets had immediately discounted all the previous bad news, and poured into the stock on both sides of the Atlantic, enabling Barton easily to place £15 million of his shares without so much as a raised eyebrow from anyone. Although the native was still missing, Barton now cared much less. The blood they had already taken and successfully used in Phase One trial ‘Jenner’ vaccines, along with Elkins’s report, had bought him all the time he had needed. He did not care if Bolitho and the native never came back. In fact, he would now prefer it.

‘
You never explained what you needed the money from the placement for,’ Tom prompted, as they cruised round the Rio Tejo, the Atlantic Ocean winter grey, flecked with white horses, ghostly tankers seemingly suspended in the horizonless torpor.

Barton
threw a quick look at him. ‘Expenses. CGT. Things like that.’

Mitchell,
in his briefing, had made it clear that Tom would have to be intrusive and more than usually persistent if he was going to be of help to them. ‘Anything I should know about? Call me old fashioned, but I am a director of Temple Bio-Laboratories, remember? With all the duties and responsibilities that entails under the Companies Act. I don’t want to get dumped on, James.’

‘
I don’t think there’s a risk-taking bone in your body,’ Barton replied, without malice.

Considering
the very dangerous course on which Tom was about to embark, the comment was ironic. But he simply replied, ‘Hey! I’m
normal
here, and proud of it. It’s you who’s risk-crazy. The kamikaze kid. Remember? That was how we first met. You giving the entrepreneur guest lecture at INSEAD.’

Barton
smiled, and took a swig from his hip flask. ‘I need the money for some special supplies. And to pay some people off out here. For extra-curricular work they’ve done—way outside their job description. Call it a performance bonus, for Andrei Rybinski.’

‘
A bonus for him, and none for Blacher? His boss? That won’t go down well, surely.’

Laughing,
Barton replied, ‘Blacher’s usefulness is at an end. All I needed him for was to bring Andrei up to speed on some production processes. Ploddy stuff, but it saved us reinventing the wheel. But it’s Andrei who’s the genius. Who’s delivered the impossible.’

‘
So he’s done it?’ Tom probed, nervous now. This was crunch time. ‘He’s produced a genetically intelligent fertiliser?’

A
slight smile still flickered over Barton’s lips. ‘Yes. Sure. A terrific new fertiliser.’

Tom
sat quietly for a few miles before gathering his courage to press on, knowing once he did, there would be no turning back. Taking a deep breath, he screwed his eyes up and took the leap. ‘Balls!’ he said at last.

‘
Excuse me?’ Barton still looked amused.

This
was it. He now had to play it for all it was worth. Barton had to believe the worm really had turned, and that Tom wanted in. ‘I said balls! I’m sick of it. Let’s start with Rybinski, shall we? You know, and I know, that Russia’s leading biological weapons expert has not just spent five months making a better horse shit. The only horse shit around here is what you’ve been expecting me to believe! I’ve had it, James. I’m either in or out on all of this. As a director, I’m taking the same risks for none of the real action. OK, my share options might now be worth a few hundred thousand dollars. But that’s not enough. Not
nearly
enough.’

The
smile had now gone as Barton leaned forward to close the glass divider to the limo driver. ‘And what else do you think you know?’

‘
What am I? Blind? Let’s look next at that $15 billion fund I’m having managed for you. You know what some of my new traders call the bank? The laundry. The goddamnn laundry. Look at the non-dollar currencies they’re dealing in. The Colombian peso. The Mexican peso. The Burmese kyat. The Nigerian naira. Russian ruble...Give me a break! At first, OK, I figured you were being kind—not telling me things to keep me clean. To protect me even. But we’re way past that now. I’m in over my head with your cocaine and biological weapons. You once boasted to me—right after your bankruptcy hearing—that you’d bounce right back and show the bastards. That you’d make yourself the richest man in Europe. Well, I now know that was no idle boast. I think you’re about to pull it off. And I’ll be damned, after all I’ve done, if all I get are those poxy share options.’