Chapter Eleven
I
He woke with a bad taste in his mouth. It had been a restless night and the sheets were twisted around him like a shroud. He was cold, but didn’t get up immediately. He lay staring at the rectangle of blue sky he could see through the window. She was gone. All that remained was the smell of stale sex and lingering traces of her perfume.
He got up and dressed himself slowly, with an empty feeling inside. He made coffee in the kitchen and sat drinking it in an armchair in the living room where the sun sloped in at an angle and warmed the air.
Closing his eyes he pulled on the first cigar of the day. Perhaps she was already at the airport, or more likely she would be rising, or packing to leave. He allowed the thought to flicker through his mind only briefly before cutting it off. It was over, a thing of the past, already a memory that he would lock away with the others in his mind.
The phone rang, a long single ring, then an interminable wait before it rang again. He rose reluctantly and crossed the room without enthusiasm. ‘Bannerman.’ His voice caught on the phlegm that had gathered in his throat overnight and he coughed.
‘A heavy night, Neil?’ A pause. ‘It’s Hector Lewis here.’
‘What have you got?’ Bannerman sat down on the edge of the settee and wiped away the sleep from his eyes.
‘I thought I’d call you early in case I missed you. I tried yesterday evening, both at your office and at this number, but you were off gallivanting no doubt.’
Bannerman repeated irritably, ‘What have you got?’
‘Now hold on just a minute, my old friend, not so fast.’ His smarminess oozed across the telephone lines all the way from Switzerland, and it suddenly occurred to Bannerman that Lewis would not have been trying this hard to reach him if he hadn’t come up with something good. ‘It’s going to cost you.’
‘You said that already.’
‘Yes, but that was two days ago, and just for search fees. Now it’s going to cost you to keep the information exclusive.’
‘What the hell do you mean, Lewis?’ Bannerman’s voice was calm and steady.
‘I mean I’ve just unwrapped a time bomb that’s going to blow up in a lot of faces in London and Brussels. It’s heavy meat, Neil, and in lineage alone I could make thousands.’
‘I could be on a plane for Switzerland within the hour and I could break your neck by lunchtime.’
‘Ha, ha, yes, that’s good, Neil, but by lunchtime I could have sold the story over half of Europe, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?’
Bannerman felt his grip tighten around the phone. He should never have trusted this to Lewis. But he had had no choice. Now he was being screwed. ‘So?’
‘So I have a certain reputation for confidentiality to maintain and since you came to me in good faith, I’m offering you first option — in good faith.’
‘You bastard!’
‘It’s how I make my money.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten thousand pounds.’
Bannerman was stunned. ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind! Do you think the Post’s going to pay ten thousand notes for a company search?’
‘They will for this one.’
Bannerman’s mind was racing. ‘I would need to know what I’m buying.’
‘But of course. I have no objection to giving you the broad outline over the phone, but you will need the documentary evidence to back it up before you can do a story. And before you get that, I will require the money.’
‘Let’s hear it then.’
‘You agree to my terms?’
‘Not until I know what you’ve got.’
Lewis sighed. ‘So be it. The company, Machines Internationale, is owned jointly by René Jansen, Michel Lapointe, and... ah, the late Mr. Robert Gryffe.’ Bannerman felt the skin tighten across his scalp. ‘Not directly, of course,’ Lewis went on. ‘That would have been too easy. No, Machines Internationale is ostensibly owned by another company which, in turn, is an offshoot of another company, and so on. All shell companies of course, a cobweb of deceit, if I may lapse into cliché, to disguise the identity of the man to which the number one company is ultimately responsible.’
At last, it was the link between Gryffe and Jansen and Lapointe, but not not worth ten thousand. ‘What’s its business?’
Lewis waited and then replied with a calculated melodrama, ‘Guns, my friend, guns. Machines Internationale buys arms, mainly from the US, and sells to the Third World, some of the Arab states, and one or two of the South American republics. Not in itself a crime, of course. But when a British Government Minister at the Foreign Office is involved, then it starts to get interesting, doesn’t it?’ Lewis chuckled to himself, and when there was no response from Bannerman, he added, ‘So I got my boys to dig a little deeper in the company records and, it would appear, Machines Internationale has also been selling its wares to a number of pirate companies which operate out of several small African states — companies which, it seems are supplying arms direct to South Africa, in open defiance of the United Nations embargo. And perhaps even more interesting, to Rhodesia during almost all the time that sanctions were being imposed against the illegal Smith regime.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘My sentiments exactly, Neil. So much so, in fact, that I even did a quick trace on the origins of a couple of the pirate companies. Both the ones I checked are owned by a Lichtenstein registered company, Corniche S.A. The company, unfortunately, is one of those naughty little nominee companies which can act for unnamed clients whose anonymity is protected by law. Of course, you’ll know about nominee companies. This one is owned by a very respectable Swiss lawyer and businessman. So it’s unlikely we’ll ever know who’s actually behind it or the companies it controls. Worth it though, eh? Ten thousand? Cheap at the price. A British Government Minister who is shot dead in Brussels is found to have been indirectly involved in selling arms to the Rhodesians and the South Africans. Neat.’
Bannerman felt the muscles tighten around his throat, and the fingers of his free hand trembled slightly as he reached for the notepad by the phone. He glanced at it quickly and saw the name of the company he had underlined in the notes he had taken after Platt’s phone call. Corniche S.A.
‘Hello, hello? You still there?’
Bannerman was trying desperately to piece it together. Corniche S.A. was formerly a Belgian registered company belonging to Lapointe which had uprooted and re-registered in Lichtenstein, a new company listed under a Swiss lawyer. But wasn’t it just possible that Lapointe who had used the original company to buy and sell other companies for Jansen, was still pulling the strings, still providing the cash? That this Swiss lawyer was just his front man? It occurred to Bannerman that he didn’t even need to prove that. A plain statement of the facts would make the connection by implication. Gryffe, Jansen and Lapointe had not only been selling arms to pirate companies who were in turn selling to the white-ruled African states, they also owned the pirate companies. It wasn’t indirect selling, dammit. They were doing it direct. The implications for the British Government were enormous. And for Jansen and Lapointe. International pressure would be bound to force the Belgian Government to take action against the Jansen empire.
‘Bannerman, you haven’t died on me, have you?’
No wonder Lewis was seeking his pound of flesh. ‘I’ll call you back,’ Bannerman said.