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  Jordan stirred, in self-recognition. And had another thought, even more self-indulgent, as he heard Beckwith say, ‘No chance that Pullinger might know Appleton? Have had some social contact?’

  ‘What the hell …? demanded Jordan.

  ‘Prior knowledge or awareness would be grounds for disbarment,’ explained his lawyer.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Alyce. ‘In Boston – the entire state of Massachusetts – he probably knows every judge there is to know: every important person there is to know. But not down here.’

  ‘That’s something to bear in mind,’ insisted Beckwith. ‘What about you? Any chance your family’s come into contact with Pullinger? Same exclusion would apply.’

  ‘Not that I’m aware,’ said Alyce. ‘Today’s the first time I’ve heard the name. I could ask my mother: I’m living with her at the moment.’

  ‘What about Appleton’s claim, in his statement, that he provided financial support for your mother?’ asked Reid.

  ‘Total nonsense,’ rejected Alyce. ‘The Bellamy Foundation dwarfs the Appleton wealth ten times over. I think it was around that time, just after we got back from Hawaii, that I told him of my trust inheritance.’

  ‘He didn’t know you were an heiress before you got married?’ asked Beckwith, seemingly surprised.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Alyce. ‘It was something that never came up.’

  ‘And when it did he asked you to lend him $500,000 to help start his commodity business?’ pressed Reid.

  ‘It wasn’t like that, a flat demand for a half million,’ qualified Alyce. ‘He said it would help if he had some cash infusions, from time to time. Which, of course, I gave him; was happy to give him. And then he asked for more, which grew into another half a million.’

  ‘Which you were still happy to give him?’

  ‘Lend him,’ insisted Alyce. ‘Things weren’t going well by then; beginning to break down, although I don’t think I properly recognized what was happening at the time.’

  Jordan wasn’t having any difficulty recognizing anything. His concentration – and retention – was absolute but it didn’t preclude his thinking in parallel. The feeling of dismissive antipathy towards Alyce had gone, replaced by the undiminished earlier embarrassment. Alyce Appleton was someone he’d briefly known, become briefly but pleasurably involved with but never imagined encountering again. Now he was reunited by unsought circumstances. What about right now, at this precise moment? Jordan couldn’t decide. It all sounded as he supposed it should sound, the necessary first meeting of lawyers, the initial strategy discussion that Beckwith had described it as being, but Jordan couldn’t actually discern any strategy evolving. Objectively Jordan acknowledged his attitude was driven by his overwhelming impatience – matched by his overwhelming need – to be rid of it all. But he couldn’t recognize any forward planning being formulated: it was all backward looking, not forwards. A closing remark of Alyce’s – ‘I came genuinely to think of him being seriously paranoid’ – brought Jordan conveniently back into the conversation.

  ‘Why should he have had you followed, as he obviously did, all the way to France? For the information he gathered about us there he must have engaged an army of private detectives!’

  ‘That was my final confirmation, about his being paranoid,’ stressed the woman, colouring again as she spoke. ‘I suppose he must have engaged them when I announced I was going ahead with the divorce …’ She hesitated. ‘I was not involved with anyone here. I’m still not, so there was nothing for him to find here, in America.’ She gave an uncertain movement. ‘France happened –’ she looked at Jordan – ‘I wish it hadn’t: wish you hadn’t got caught.’

  Before Jordan could speak Reid said, ‘That’s a point to pursue …’

  ‘And I will, as you should,’ picked up Beckwith. ‘He’ll have to call the people he put on to you. We can take them back before France.’ He looked to the other lawyer. ‘You can establish on oath what Alyce has just said, that she wasn’t cheating before France. And from that I can establish that there was no prior contact between Alyce and Harvey, until France.’

  ‘But France still happened,’ said Alyce.

  ‘But not until after you’d sent me, in a letter with a date on it, in an envelope with a French postal date on it – both of which I’ll submit as evidence – instructions to file for your divorce. As far as you were concerned, your marriage was over. It wasn’t when your husband had his two admitted mistresses?’

  ‘Isn’t that covered – excused – by all the caveats you explained earlier in the criminal conversation statute?’ cut in Jordan.

  ‘Depends how I argue it,’ insisted Reid.

  Maybe there was a benefit to the meeting after all, thought Jordan. He said, ‘What about after France? Do you think Appleton would have had the surveillance maintained?’

  ‘It might be something to pursue when we get to court,’ said Reid.

  ‘I don’t see the point or purpose of continuing the expense,’ said Beckwith. ‘He had his evidence by then, didn’t he?’

  It wasn’t the reassurance he’d wanted but realistically there was no way either lawyer could say any more, accepted Jordan. ‘If he has he’ll know Alyce and I have met again, here today.’

  ‘In the presence of your lawyers, both of whom have legally attested the meeting in the without prejudice documentation,’ Beckwith pointed out. ‘It can’t be used in any court hearing to any benefit to Appleton, which is why it was drawn up.’

  ‘In the presence of your lawyers,’ echoed Reid, to emphasize his following point. ‘Just in case there is continuing surveillance, I don’t think it would be a good idea for you and Alyce to get together in anything other than in our presence.’

  ‘With which I fully concur, ‘ said Beckwith.

  Alyce snorted a derisive laugh. ‘One of the few things that we can be assured of at this stage is that the likelihood of that being on either of our minds just doesn’t exist.’

  ‘I agree. To everything,’ said Jordan.

  ‘I’m still waiting, though,’ said Alyce, openly challenging Jordan.

  ‘I really am sorry for the way I behaved earlier,’ said Jordan.

  ‘I wish I believed you,’ said Alyce.

  It was just after nine that night when Reid’s home telephone jarred in his den but he was still there, waiting. He said, ‘I was beginning to get worried wondering what had happened to you.’

  ‘There were delays at your end and then we got stacked at La Guardia,’ said Beckwith. ‘It was a goddamned awful trip back.’

  ‘How’d you think it went?’

  ‘Better than I thought it would, after the rocky start. I certainly don’t think they knew each other, before France.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ agreed Reid.

  ‘I hope we don’t get Pullinger.’

  ‘I’ll keep on the case until we find out for sure.’

  ‘I think they’ll do well in court.’

  ‘I was worried about Jordan, as you know. I thought he did OK.’

  ‘I thought Alyce did, too. Can’t have been easy for her, as Jordan said, talking about her as if she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Cute little gal. I envy him France.’

  ‘We need Appleton’s medical report,’ insisted Beckwith. ‘If he’s infected we can both blow Appleton out the water.’

  ‘I’m worried about that,’ admitted Alyce’s lawyer. ‘It’s too obvious a weakness in his case. I wrote to Bartle after you left, demanding the production of a specific report, as well as the medical history. And to Leanne Jefferies. I don’t imagine she’s going to be so fond of Appleton now that she’s going to be sued for criminal conversation.’

  ‘You think Appleton could have an actual mental condition, as Alyce intimated? It could help as much as the proof of chlamydia. And should show on his medical history.’

  ‘If I don’t get what I want from Bartle I’m definitely going to file for a pre-court hearing,’ assured Reid. ‘Jordan real
ly make that good a living from gambling?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ said Beckwith.

  ‘I thought your guy made a good point about surveillance,’ said Reid. ‘I wish my people had produced as much on Appleton as his people did on Jordan and Alyce in France.’

  ‘There’s still time. We don’t have a court date yet.’

  ‘I’m glad we’re working together.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Let’s keep in touch.’

  ‘Let’s do that.’

  Fourteen

  Harvey Jordan decided there was no reason for him to have considered as wasted time the frustrating day he’d spent in the Carlyle suite waiting for the results of the American venerealogist’s examination. He would have been distracted then, not devoting his absolute concentration upon what he wanted to do and the preparations necessary to do it. And the trip to Raleigh had been a useful interval to think things through as well as the opportunity to put things right between himself and Daniel Beckwith.

  Today was the moment to start putting into practice the several decisions he’d reached and become pro-active: to start to work, in fact, with just the slightest variation from normal. Not wanting to risk being followed to all the places of public record and reference that he might need to visit – despite having so much useful information already available from the legal exchanges between the lawyers – Jordan’s first priority was to resolve the surveillance uncertainty. How to do that had come to him during the Raleigh meeting.

  The most compelling reason for staying in grand hotels was the comprehensiveness of their services, which he utilized by having someone from the Carlyle’s guest assistance go out to buy the laptop he needed, which had the double benefit of him not being seen to make the purchase if he were still being watched and further distancing him from it by having its purchase price registered against the hotel and not charged by name against him, personally. It took Jordan the entire morning to configure the machine and put it on-line, not through an American provider but through the British Telecom Yahoo broadband server. He set up his payments through England, too, from the Paul Maculloch account at the Royston and Jones private bank.

  From his previous lawful career Harvey Jordan had brought an unrivalled computer expertise to his new illegal career, in which phishing was essential. The first requirement for successful hacking was never to initiate a direct intrusion into another system, but to work through an intervening, unwitting ‘cut out’ server. The reason for such caution was twofold: computer protection had become extremely sophisticated since its inception, with many preventative systems utilizing tracing facilities to identify the source of a detected illegal entry attempt. It was this unknowing ‘cut out’ buffer computer system that showed up if Jordan’s cyber burglary got ensnared in a firewall, not Jordan’s laptop. The second advantage was that Jordan only got charged for the cost of accessing his cut out. Everything he did through it was billed against the unsuspecting host. Having penetrated the host system, like an intrusive cuckoo, Jordan then installed what in the self-explanatory vernacular of the trade is known as a Trojan Horse.

  Over his years as an identity borrower Jordan had successfully stabled his Trojan Horses in a number of illegal sites throughout the world unknown to the genuine owner and while he religiously destroyed the individual computers he only ever used for one identity stealing operation, he’d left his secret entry doors open to all the host sites, creating a bank upon which he could draw without having to hack in to a new system. That day he chose to return to a long term cuckoo’s nest in the mainframe of a beer-distributing company in Darwin, Australia, that he hadn’t used for five years. He still worked as carefully as he always did, with every new job, alert for the first indication that his previous presence might have been discovered during a virus or illegal entry sweep during his absence, but there was no tell-tale hindrance or unexpected ‘entry denied’ flash on his screen and the 12,000 mile connection was made in seconds.

  Continuing on was easier than normal, because he already had not just the publicly available website address of Appleton and Drake, a few blocks away from where he sat in Manhattan, but Alfred Appleton’s personal registration entry code supplied in the exchanged legal documents by Appleton himself. Jordan was, effectively and electronically, looking over Appleton’s shoulder in three minutes, and by another five had tied up a new, untraceable Trojan Horse within Appleton’s computer through which he could monitor every incoming and outgoing email the man had stored in the past and was likely to save in the future.

  Which was only the beginning of what turned out to be a very successful and productive day. Like the gambler he was supposed to be – but wasn’t – Jordan had hoped Appleton would have conducted his correspondence with David Bartle at Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein through his office facilities and so it turned out to be. It took Jordan a further thirty minutes to get into the law firm’s main computer system from which he moved on to embed a separate monitor in the lawyer’s personal machine. He scrolled patiently through the inbox and sent box of Bartle’s email service to discover the name of the ultra-efficient private enquiry agency, called unoriginally, Watchdog, whose offices were downtown, on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. Jordan had been surprised by how easy it had been penetrating the computer systems of both Appleton and Bartle, despite the advantages he’d had from the legal documents, but expected more difficulty entering that of Watchdog. He was surprised once more than it only took him another thirty minutes to get through the company’s firewall and a further fifteen to get his Trojan Horse and his own password in place in the personal computer station of Patrick O’Neill, the director with whom Bartle had conducted all his email correspondence.

  Jordan was cramped, physically aching, from the concentration with which he’d worked, without a break, into the middle of the afternoon. He still only allowed himself the briefest pause, just long enough to walk through the suite to the bathroom to wash his face and make himself a tall vodka and tonic from the well equipped, ice-maker and glass-backed permanent bar in the suite’s living room, excited at the possibility of being able to answer the most persistently nagging question since the entire episode began.

  It took him much longer than the previous hacking, because he had constantly to switch back and forth between in and out emails between Bartle and O’Neill to maintain a comprehensive continuity between the exchanges and even then there were gaps which Jordan assumed to be caused by the two men on occasions preferring the telephone to their computers.

  As Jordan’s understanding grew he learned that O’Neill had acted as an on-the-spot supervisor in France, with a staff that at its height grew to ten – with the addition of two photographers – once they’d established the affair between him and Alyce. Two of the Watchdog staff had actually flown on the same plane as Alyce from New York, and dated before that flight to Europe was a lengthy memorandum from O’Neill explaining that despite an intense, two months’ surveillance in Manhattan and East Hampton, they had failed to uncover any evidence whatsoever of Alyce being involved with another man. There were several references to him in France as being ‘someone of obvious wealth’ and as ‘someone who is very familiar with this area of France’.

  And finally Jordan found what he was specifically looking for. He guessed it was an email response from Bartle to a telephone call, which would have had to have taken place on the day Alyce flew back to New York from Nice, maybe even from the airport itself. The lawyer had written that O’Neill was to maintain the surveillance on Jordan while he remained in France but that it shouldn’t be continued back to England. In that email Bartle had written: ‘There is incontrovertible evidence of adultery sufficient for proceedings to be initiated and the expense in obtaining it has already been substantial.’

  Satisfied that he was no longer under Watchdog surveillance Jordan quit the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon opening four separate accounts at the four other already chosen Wall Street banks in the na
me of Alfred Jerome Appleton. As with the First National he specified that he would be predominantly using electronic banking and provided the West 72nd street apartment as the mailing address to which bank and credit cards and cheque books should be delivered. He used cash – ranging from between $2,000 to $3,000 – to establish the accounts, anxious now that they were set up to get back to the Carlyle for the first of the many intended phishing expeditions.

  He got back into Appleton’s personal computer by five thirty and through it, using Appleton’s unopposed, never rejected password, had the key electronically to pass through every door to wander wherever he chose within the firm of Appleton and Drake. A tour, Jordan both professionally and logically accepted, was too much to attempt in one visit: too much, possibly, to complete over a number of visits. But there was no hurry. The initial priority was to establish the value of the company, which again at this first visit was impossible to calculate. What wasn’t impossible, though, was to confirm that it ran into millions of contracts bought short or long, all set out like prizes in a raffle to which he held all the winning tickets. Apart from Appleton and his partner, Peter Drake, there were five additional traders and between them, after the briefest journey through the combined buy and sell portfolios, Jordan conservatively estimated there were more than 6,000 already logged trades, going through the entire gamut of the company’s range, from metals, its major activity, through its currency, cereal and Chicago meat subsidiaries.