The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [148]
“Why me?”
“Because God is giving you an opportunity to prove yourself.”
Taj puts out his cigarette in an ashtray, mashing it methodically. His eyes go to the open box.
“What about the passports and tickets?”
“You’ll have them.”
“And the money?”
“Tomorrow.”
The two men size each other up, their eyes like sharpened sticks. Taj is talking before he thinks. “What if the vests go off accidentally?”
The Courier drops a vest at Taj’s feet and stamps down on it with his heel. Once… twice… three times. Then he picks it up and throws it to Taj, who catches it cautiously.
“If you are caught you must detonate the vests. I don’t care if you’re wearing them or not—it’s better to die than rot inside a British prison for the rest of your lives. It will be fast. You will not feel a thing.”
25
LONDON
Daniela and Luca have been up all night, fueled by machine coffee and the scent of something big. Both of them feel like college kids pulling an all-nighter, their heads tipped tensely forward, checking facts, comparing figures, picking apart the details of hundreds of transactions.
Often the numbers pose more questions than they answer. Luca has to console and cajole Daniela, pushing her to keep going. She circles the desk, scribbling numbers and tapping a calculator. Luca stares at her in awe. “Whoever said accountants were boring?”
“Are you saying I’m boring?”
“No…”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re brilliant, beautiful, intelligent, resourceful and amazing.”
“And boring?”
“You are the sexiest actuary to ever run a ruler over the numbers and I would happily look at your spreadsheet every day.”
“Was that so difficult?” she says.
They’re working at Keith Gooding’s desk while Ruiz dozes between two chairs. Holly and Joe are sleeping on sofas in the editor’s office. The night sky is giving way to a yellow glow, and shadows lengthen across rooftops. Ruiz groans and arches his back, swinging his feet to the floor. He rubs his eyes, adjusts his crotch and looks out at the dawn.
Daniela lets out a soft yelp of triumph. Another number has fallen into place. Ruiz glances at the Moleskine notebook in her hands and wonders how something so small and ordinary and seemingly innocuous could have caused such mayhem—the deaths, the violence, the secrecy.
Keith Gooding has arrived with decent coffee, pastries and juice. Shortly after nine, Daniela and Luca emerge from their huddle. They eat a little and freshen up, before pulling chairs into a rough circle.
Daniela begins. “You’re probably wondering about the notebook,” she says, holding up a double page. “These are codes.”
“Like account numbers?” asks Ruiz.
“Similar, but not quite the same,” she says. “See this one here: No. 2075. That code belongs to Banco Internacional de Nassau Ltd in the Bahamas. No. 20966 is an account opened by the Banque Assandra in the Cayman Islands.”
“So the codes are given to foreign banks?”
“Banks, companies, corporations, private individuals… They’re non-published.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re secret, off the books. In essence they are ghost accounts with no paperwork, just a number. Clients can transfer funds or buy stock or swap derivatives, but nobody knows who they are and Mersey Fidelity keeps no central record of the trades. Only the number is ever mentioned in the transaction.”
Daniela turns her laptop to show Gooding. “Some of the biggest corporations in the UK have taken advantage of the scheme. Look at these names.”
The journalist whistles through his teeth. “How many accounts?”
“Thousands.”
“What did Mersey Fidelity get out of it?”
“Handling fees. It used a debit and credit system. Often the actual funds never left Syria or Jordan or Lebanon—they were just credited to the client’s account as a paper transaction.”
Daniela taps on the mouse. “With me so far?”
Everybody nods. She points and clicks. A new landscape of information unfolds before them.
“It’s a brilliant system for doing dubious deals. It launders money. Avoids tax. It hides income or the ownership of assets…” Daniela points to a page of the