Full Black - Brad Thor [4]
• • •
The man who called himself “Sheikh from Qatar” closed his laptop with his liver-spotted hands and looked out the window of his cavernous apartment. He had quite literally a thirty-million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline. It was stunning. Even at this predawn hour.
He had always made it a policy to be up before the markets. Despite his advancing age, he found he needed less sleep, not more.
As he privately swilled astronomically expensive vitamin cocktails and fed on exotic hormone and stem cell injections, he publicly told people he’d had abundant reserves of energy ever since he was a boy and credited genetics and his impeccable constitution as the source of his vigor.
Such was the Janus-faced character of James Standing. Even his name was a lie.
Born Lev Bronstein to Romanian Jewish parents, he was sent from Europe to live with relatives in Argentina at the outset of World War II. His parents remained behind, tending their business and hoping things would get better. They never made it out of the death camps.
At thirteen, he ran away from his Argentinean relatives, renounced his Judaism, and changed his name to José Belmonte—an amalgamation of the names of two world-famous Spanish bullfighters at the time—José Gomez Ortega and Juan Belmonte Garcia.
The newly minted Belmonte found his way to Buenos Aires, where he took a job as a bellboy in a high-end hotel. Thanks to his drive and proficiency for languages, he started filling in on the switchboard at night, eventually moving into the position full-time. It was at this point that he began to build his fortune.
Belmonte, née Bronstein, listened in on all of the hotel’s telephone conversations, especially those of its wealthy guests. At fifteen, he entered the stock market. By eighteen, he was perfecting his English, and at twenty, he had changed his name yet again and moved to America.
Standing had been the name of a handsome American guest with a gorgeous, buxom, blond American wife who visited the hotel in Buenos Aires every winter. To Belmonte, they looked like movie stars and represented everything he felt the world owed him. Using the first name of one of his favorite American writers, James Fenimore Cooper, he adopted the Standing name as his surname and James Standing was born.
He emigrated to America, where he parlayed his substantial savings and penchant for trading on insider information into one of the greatest financial empires the world had ever seen.
Now, from his gilded perch overlooking the capital of world finance, he read all of the papers every morning before most of the city was even awake.
Regardless of his morning ritual, he would have been up early today anyway. In fact, he hadn’t been able to sleep very well. He was waiting for an important phone call.
Someone, to put it in vulgar street terminology, had fucked with the wrong guy. That “wrong guy” being James Standing. And the someone who had fucked with the wrong guy was about to be taught a very painful and very permanent lesson.
In fact, it would be the ultimate lesson and would stand as a subtle reminder to the rest of his enemies that there were certain people who were not to be crossed. Not that Standing would take credit for what was going to happen. That would be incredibly foolish. Better to simply let people assume. The mystery of whether he’d been involved or not would only add to the aura of his considerable power.
Though he’d gotten to where he was by breaking all of the rules, he still needed to appear to be playing by them—at least for a little while longer.
Soon, though, like an old hotel on the Las Vegas strip, America was going to be brought down in a controlled demolition. And when that happened, the rules would no longer apply to James Standing.
CHAPTER 3
COLDWATER CANYON
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The red Porsche 911 GT3 pulled to the top of the cobblestone driveway and stopped. “Are you going to be okay?”
The man in the passenger seat said nothing. In the middle