Gold Read online

  Gold

  Brian Freemantle

  writing as Jonathan Evans

  For Chris and Carole, with love

  Author’s Note

  Although events described in this book are based upon fact, it is a work of fiction. All the characters are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Winchester, 1981

  ‘Here’s the rule for bargains: Do other men, for they would do you. That’s the true business precept.’

  Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Epilogue

  A Biography of Brian Freemantle

  Prologue

  Psychiatrists who have studied the phenomenon conclude that although the truly rich differ mentally in substantial ways from other people, nearly all have the linking bond of greed. Poor people can be greedy too, of course. But they don’t have the means to indulge themselves, any more than they can pay a psychiatrist to hear secrets they would probably prefer to remain hidden anyway. R.L. Bains, whose personal fortune was estimated at two billion dollars, had never consulted a psychiatrist because he associated such people with madness and sure as hell knew he wasn’t mad. Had an examination occurred, however, he would have concealed his overwhelming ambition to accumulate even more wealth, because Bains was a very private man. This trait was unusual for Texas, but then Bains enjoyed the unusual.

  His father had been a cantankerous man who had established the family fortune from oil and disdained his son’s ability to maintain ihc business. But from his teens, Bains had determined to better the old man: one of his greatest regrets was that his father had died before he had been able to prove his expertise in the world commodity markets which, by the time he was thirty, had more than doubled the amount his father had bequeathed in his will.

  The idea of cornering the world’s silver supplies was flamboyant, even for a man who favoured the unusual.

  Despite his father’s doubts, Bains never forgot that oil was the basis for his other business dealings. He ran the company personally, travelled extensively and had naturally formed links with the oil producers of the Middle East.

  A particular friendship had developed with Prince Tewfik Hassan, predominantly because they had known and liked each other at Harvard. Of equal importance, however, was Hassan’s membership of the Saudi ruling family and the confident expectation that he would eventually become its head. Bains considered kings the best friends to have. He had always imagined that the advantage of his association with Hassan would come from oil. Then, when he calculated the sums that would be necessary to cover the world silver markets, in hedges and maintenance margins, he realised that he didn’t have sufficient liquid capital and foresaw another benefit.

  The Texan and the Arab were similar in many ways, both men whose domination by strong-willed families in their youth had created a determination to prove themselves. Hassan’s response to the other man’s approach was immediate. Within a month, the prince had pledged his personal fortune of £100,000,000 to the enterprise.

  Bains planned everything with the utmost care. Through nominees and intermediary companies, he placed automatic purchase orders with brokers operating in New York, London, Zurich and Tokyo, initially cautious that the spread should be wide enough to hide from any jobber or trader the fact that there was a concerted purchase being made. In four months, they were showing a profit of £250,000,000. An OPEC price rise had its usual whiplash effect, fuelling Western inflation and creating an uncertainty with paper money; and a bullish market forced up metal prices even further, so that in the succeeding two months, the profit increased by a further £150,000,000.

  Paradoxically, the disaster came from Bains’ meticulous attention to detail, and it might have gone unnoticed but for a market analyst in London’s Leadenhall Street whose hobby was crosswords and whose mind was therefore often occupied with conundrums.

  Throughout any day’s trading on any of the world’s stock markets, prices rise and fall like a kite in an uncertain wind; the expertise in speculation is guessing the highs and the lows and making a quick profit. Bains didn’t want a quick profit. He wanted manipulative ownership. So his automatic purchase orders were made within thirty minutes of the markets opening; experience had proved to Bains that over a period of time, this established a price average covering any margin commitment for which he might be liable. The mistake was his failure to protect his anonymity by allowing some of his purchases to be sold, which was what would have happened during normal trading. The analyst identified the trend and then followed it, curiously, first on the London market and then, with increasing interest, on the rest of the main metal exchanges. A man who completes crosswords doesn’t immediately write down the most obvious answer to a clue and so the analyst waited for over a month, until he was quite sure, before reporting the information to the jobbers who employed him for precisely this purpose.

  Discreet inquiries among brokers enabled the analyst to isolate Bains’ nominee companies and then, as the pressure increased, a broker’s clerk whispered the name and within twenty-four hours the Texas billionaire was linked.

  A single brick breaking loose from a dam is usually the initial cause of a flood. The association of R.L. Bains and his Croesus-type wealth with massive silver purchases had the same cumulative effect.

  There was the rush to buy, matched by an eagerness to sell for a quick profit when the prices rocketed, and the surging value persuaded people to buy again, increasing the upward spiral.

  Bains had never lost – ever – and he allowed arrogance to override his business acumen. He could have deflated the overblown value within days had he taken a short-term loss and sold heavily. But he was already locked into purchases against the future value of silver, stretching forward over a six-month period. To have brought about a market crash, however temporarily, would have meant his being contracted to pay high for low value.

  Greed was now added to the arrogance. The surging prices had already transformed his original £400,000,000 profit into £820,000,000. And Bains couldn’t bring himself to suffer a loss, however short. So he took the first positive, unthinking gamble of his career and decided to stay bullish. That meant continuing his purchases at the rising market price, hoping that the frenzy would explode itself, just like dynamite is the last resort to extinguish an uncontrollable well fire. The only explosion was in the continuing upward price.

 
By now Bains had exhausted not only his own liquidity but the £100,000,000 provided by Prince Hassan and was deeply into the arranged loans with the banks. Brokers became nervous and began calling their maintenance margins. Bains had already surrendered the second mortgages on his real estate and assigned his companies. And for the first time in his life, he was refused an extension of credit. The only thing Bains had left was silver. To cover his debts, he was at last forced to act as he should have done months before and sell, to raise liquidity.

  Coincidence defeated him. The Bank of Venezuela possessed forty million ounces of silver, which at its peak of £30 an ounce represented £120,000,000. They decided to capitalise to raise foreign currency at the very moment when Bains began to sell, and silver brokers with whom he had extended contracts decided to unload as well, to cut their losses. The sudden selling of such volume burst the bubble. In two weeks of frantic, world-wide dealing, the silver price plummeted from its peak of £30 an ounce to £9. Bains was trapped again, this time with the nightmare of all stock market speculators. He had bought astronomically high and was selling disastrously low.

  The plunge levelled out, of course. And, slowly, the price rose again. When the market began to lift, Bains was able to arrange credit to carry him forward and by the end of a year his losses were reduced to £100,000,000. Which meant he remained a very rich man.

  Prince Hassan’s losses were the same, because he and Bains had established themselves as equal partners. But the Saudi prince’s £100,000,000 represented his personal fortune and he suffered loss of face. In the Middle East, as in Asia, the loss of money through speculation is a disgrace for an ordinary man; for a man destined one day to be king, it was unthinkable. To recover face, Prince Hassan had to recover his fortune. And he didn’t have a year, like R.L. Bains.

  Chapter One

  During the flight from Moscow, the Ilyushin 11-76T had encountered unexpected head winds and so it was thirty minutes behind schedule when it landed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. It was directed at once by airport control to the freight section, where diplomats from the Soviet embassy were already waiting.

  Dutch intelligence had been advised earlier of the intended arrival from the filed flight plan, and so identification of the aircraft was the second message they received that day. A computer check upon that identification disclosed the NATO interest. A normal information request had been registered with all allied intelligence services from the moment of the Ilyushin’s first appearance at the Paris Air Show in 1971. A priority designation and the codename Candid had come later, when it was learned that as well as being in commercial service with Aeroflot, the aircraft had become the standard transport vehicle for the Soviet armed forces, with more than a hundred attached to front-line squadrons.

  From the Paris exhibition, the external configurations and equipment were well established, both from visual examination and from extensive photographing. The NATO interest was concentrated entirely upon cockpit modifications and particularly on the range and type of radar fitments.

  An intelligence team reached the airport within an hour of touchdown and almost immediately resigned themselves to failure. The aircraft and its cargo were protected by absolute diplomatic clearance. In fact, the degree to which the embassy personnel were invoking their diplomatic status was intriguing to those who watched. The only Dutch being permitted anywhere near the aircraft were the crew of the fuel bowser. Otherwise, everything was being handled by Russians, even the aircraft cleaning and cargo loading.

  Aware that they were duplicating information already available but unable to think of anything more constructive, the intelligence men photographed the plane extensively, using long-range lenses. They photographed the cargo pallets as well, accepting as they did so that the effort was probably just as pointless; the wooden crates were quite anonymous and could have contained anything. From the effort involved in lifting them, whatever it was appeared heavy.

  The loading took two hours. When it was completed, the Russians who had done the labouring work left in the two lorries and an escort car, leaving only a small group of senior diplomats. They stood by their cars, watching the Ilyushin taxi towards the departure runway. By 5 pm there was a build-up of traffic. The Ilyushin was allocated position ten in the take-off queue, which was stationary to permit the landing of a backlog of passenger aircraft. Through binoculars, the intelligence team watched the growing impatience of the embassy staff. At 5-30 pm there appeared to be a huddled conference. They entered their cars, waited a further ten minutes and then, in a regimented line, looped the perimeter road to join the main highway back to the embassy in Andries Bickerweg Street.

  It was 6-15 pm before the Ilyushin was directed for take-off and by that time the four Soloviev D-30 turbofan engines, individually mounted in underwing pods, had been running for over an hour. Matching the earlier impatience of his embassy colleagues, the pilot over-revved them, causing the engines to overheat. The aircraft lifted with a take-off speed of just over 114 knots and was 100 feet in the air when two of the fan blades in the bypass section of the outer port engine sheared through metal fatigue. The blocked engine shuddered violently, vibrating the entire aircraft and then the pod snapped right away from the wing. For what appeared a long time but was, in fact, barely seconds, the huge transporter hung in the air. Then it dipped to starboard and ploughed sideways into a marsh field a mile from the airport.

  The intelligence teams got to the crash scene at the same time as the ambulance and fire services. The navigator, who was housed in the glazed nose section directly below the flight deck, was killed instantly. The pilot lost an arm and was deeply unconscious and it was not until the post-mortem examination that the co-pilot’s fatal internal intestinal rupture was discovered.

  Despite the extensive damage to the cockpit, the intelligence men were able to expose four rolls of film, recording all the fitments and establishing a radar installation far more sophisticated than that imagined by NATO electronics experts. They had already been warned by radio of the hastily approaching embassy personnel when they turned to the cargo. They opened eight cases at random, using crowbars clamped to the side of the hold, and knowing the damage could be explained by the crash.

  ‘Christ!’ exclaimed the section head, going from box to box and staring down at the dull reflection of the gold that lay there. From the standardised ingot weights assessed against the number of crates carried, it took them three days to calculate the total value at £150,000,000. And to identify, from the assay marks which remained, the predominant source as the Witwatersrand mines of South African Grain, Ore and Mineral Incorporated.

  Another brick breaking loose from another dam.

  Chapter Two

  The knock was hesitant, but not as timid as he had expected. As if in confirmation of his thoughts, she rapped again, louder this time. Marius Metzinger did not respond at once, wanting every advantage, no matter how miniscule. He allowed a third summons before he moved, not just opening the door but pulling it wide apart and confronting her suddenly. The only reaction from Ann Talbot was a slight widening of the eyes; she didn’t start back, as he thought she might.

  ‘I was worried I might have mistaken the time, when you didn’t reply,’ she said. Her voice was properly respectful, but only just. Metzinger decided she was very sure of herself. The awareness pleased him, even though he had already been fairly confident of the sort of woman she was from the dossier that had taken enquiry agents almost a year to assemble. He was glad the opportunity to utilise the information had occurred.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t mistake the time.’ He stood back for her to enter the suite, the best at Claridge’s. Metzinger was a large, barrel-bellied man aware of his size and of his ability to overpower people. But as she passed, Ann Talbot didn’t seem overawed either by him or by their venue.

  ‘Sit there,’ he said, indicating a chair positioned near the desk which had been specially installed for Metzinger’s stay in London. He wa
s a man who enjoyed his wealth and privilege and it was obvious. As well as the desk, there was a stock market tape machine near the window and the cords of additional telephones ribboned messily across the carpet.

  Ann Talbot did as she was instructed, pulling a large briefcase close to her, as if in expectation of some work. She was a ripe bodied, full-featured woman. Her suit was severe but cleverly cut to show the heaviness of her breasts, and Metzinger decided the way she had of nipping her bottom lip between whitely even teeth was not nervousness but a discreetly cultivated mannerism, to make her appear provocative. Perhaps it was going to be easier than even he imagined. As he watched, she took heavily rimmed spectacles from her briefcase and put them on, reinforcing the impression that she was expecting the meeting to be on a business level. At the same time she patted into place the thick black hair strained back into a bun at the nape of her neck.

  Metzinger gestured towards the bar. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Were you surprised at my asking you to come here, instead of our meeting at the office?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said after a pause, catching her bottom lip between her teeth.

  ‘What did you tell Richard Jenkins?’ The curtness of the question concealed Metzinger’s apprehension at what he was setting out to achieve. It wouldn’t have mattered, had Jenkins simply been the managing director of their United Kingdom division. But he was one of the founder directors of South African Grain, Ore and Mineral Incorporated, with a seat on the SAGOMI parent board in Pretoria. And he’d been one of the most vigorous opponents, the last time Metzinger had attempted to upset the English control of the combine.

  ‘Just that you’d asked me to call by,’ said Ann.

  ‘Was he curious?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  According to the enquiry agents, Jenkins’ affair with his personal assistant had ended a year earlier, before her present involvement with James Collington, but Metzinger supposed there could still be some lingering jealousy. Fleetingly he was amused at the thought of Jenkins imagining that he might become sexually involved with her.