First Horseman, The Read online

  4

  This was her world and Jim knew it.

  Jane passed him a gun with a quiet smile, as if she was handing him a sacred item of some religious rite. It was a gift of life or death, a Glock 35.

  He took it.

  ‘You know what to do next?’ she said gently.

  ‘Not really … Jane.’ He forced out her name.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said, a little louder than she had spoken before.

  He put his ear protectors in place and aimed. She’d asked him to let off fifteen rounds in five bursts of three. He aimed and fired the rounds. He reset his posture to stand passively, then repeated the exercise. She was grinning in a kind of happy, knowing, angry way he recognised. The familiar light was glowing in her eyes, with an exciting, dangerous sparkle.

  He fired another three shots, barely focusing on the aim, then three more, and a final three almost as an afterthought.

  He sniffed at the fumes, the hot, primitive smell of fire, a perfume that set surging the adrenalin to which he had become addicted.

  Circumstances had forced Jim to embrace a maelstrom of chaos and violence. Yet he was desperate to get back to escape it and get away from the danger and ruin that seemed to follow him everywhere.

  The target rushed towards him, an attacking white ghost. He peered at it as it flew towards him but could see no bullet holes.

  ‘Outstanding,’ said Jane, as he pulled off the ear protectors. ‘Outstanding,’ she said again studying the centre of the target which was neatly shot away. She ripped the target from its clips and handed it to him. ‘You’re hired.’

  ‘You can’t afford me.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, and reached forward.

  If only he didn’t love her, he thought, he might be able to live a reasonably normal life. But she amazed, dazzled and fascinated him. She was worth dying for, if there was ever such a woman.

  5

  A great pink claw reached in for the mouse. She backed as far into the corner of the cage as she could, her eyes widening in terror. The claw grabbed her and swept her out of the door and up into the air.

  ‘This is a trembler mouse.’ Professor Cardini smiled. ‘We’ve reared it so its myelin dissolves and its nerve current drains away before reaching its destination. The neuropathy causes tremens. This is an interesting model for experimentation.’

  The female mouse sniffed urgently at his hand, and Professor Cardini felt the hot surge of urine into his palm. It annoyed him a little. He struck the mouse’s head against the workbench, ending its brief life with a sharp crack. He noticed one of the students flinch. She was a thin, dark-haired specimen, pale and, he judged, weak. He laid the mouse flat on the board and pulled its forelegs apart. He smiled faintly, seeing, as he pinned the paws down, the tiny marks of a mouse crucified, blood seeping from the punctures.

  He sliced open its belly from throat to tail. Even now, though he had done this thousands of times, he could have gasped with pleasure at the perfection before him. The miniature work of art lay wet and quivering, exposed and vulnerable to him.

  He looked up at the students. ‘See?’ he said, in his slow, deep voice. ‘The heart still beats.’

  The girl’s eyes were closed. She had picked the wrong course if the death of a mere mouse was too much for her.

  ‘This is the machine that serves as our toolbox of discovery,’ he said. ‘It is a small analogue of the machine that drives our own existence.’

  The students looked on, hungry for mastery.

  Kate turned and eased her way back through the small crowd. She had made a mistake: even at this early stage she couldn’t stomach her subject. At the door she looked back. The professor caught her eye. She held it for an instant, then turned and left.

  6

  The sound of a helicopter passing above him filled Jim with gloom. He recognised the sound even though it was strangely attenuated and much quieter than he had expected. He had had enough of two things in his life: volcanoes and helicopters. Every time he got into serious trouble they were somewhere in the mix. The first volcano had been at Las Palmas in the Canaries: he had flown there in a chopper and ended up inside the accursed thing.

  Then there had been Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a volcano so active that it had recently erupted and cut Goma, a major city, in half. A helicopter had been his only means of getting out.

  Finally there was Fuji, a beautiful snow-capped mountain, the backdrop to a nasty scrap in Tokyo. Thankfully, no helicopters had been involved.

  Yet helicopters, unlike volcanoes, were hard to avoid. As far as Jim was concerned, a lunatic had invented the helicopter and lunatics flew in them.

  As Jim got up from his desk, Max Davas, the grand master of hedge-fund managers, shadow banker to the US Treasury, would be landing in the paddocks behind the house. There was no way the old man would contemplate arriving in a car, to come crunching up the long drive like everybody else. Davas had to arrive in the grandest possible style.

  Jim went out to meet him. The helicopter was huge, marked with matt grey cloud patterns that made it look like part of the sky above. It was weirdly angular with more than a hint of menace. Jim hadn’t seen a chopper like it before. It reminded him of objects the military considered classified. Where rich men had Gulfstreams, Davas owned the biggest Airbus they made. For some people a 250-foot yacht was enough; for Davas, nothing short of a frigate would do. He was astonishingly rich, with billions more than Jim, and he spent money like only countries do.

  Jim waited by the paddock gates and watched Davas emerge. His mentor wasn’t moving with the agility Jim remembered: he had suffered a bout of pneumonia and still looked as though he’d had a close shave with the Reaper. Weeks in bed had withered him like an uprooted plant.

  Davas was wearing a black blazer, dark blue jeans and black cowboy boots. He was carrying a large case. Somehow the smart informality was at odds with his uneven pace. The last time Jim had seen him, his friend had bounded across the field like a young man, full of energy and bounce. Now there was a shaky, careful determination in his walk, which was more of a stagger than a stride. Davas acknowledged him with a weak wave, as if raising his hand too high might cause him to lose his balance and fall.

  Jim opened the gate.

  ‘How are you, my boy?’ said Davas, clearly relieved to get on to firm ground.

  ‘Great, Max.’ Jim smiled and shook his hand. He wanted to give him a manly hug but held back. He didn’t want to embarrass him.

  ‘Sorry for the short notice, Jim, but you know how it is.’

  ‘I know what you want, if that’s what you mean. Let me take that.’

  Davas handed him the case, seeming glad to be shot of the load. To Jim, it felt almost empty.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ said Davas. ‘Is your house swept for bugs?’

  ‘Only insects,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve got no secrets.’

  Davas was disapproving: ‘That could be seen as sloppy. You should keep your guard up.’

  They walked through a large red-brick arched portico into a long, galleried hall.

  ‘You’ve done a beautiful restoration job,’ said Davas, his boots echoing on the wooden floor.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how much it all cost,’ said Jim. He stopped in his tracks. ‘No, I guess you’d know pretty much exactly how much this kind of thing costs.’

  ‘Chicken feed,’ said Davas.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Jim, ‘but a hell of a lot of it.’ He walked on.

  ‘One day, Jim, you’ll understand the scale of things. The important and the trivial will be clear to you. There have always been kings and princes and they have always lived in castles and palaces. They always will. They may not be called emperors or maharajas. They may not be seen as living gods or Dear Leaders, but they will always have everything. It’s Pareto’s Law. It’s the eighty-twenty.’

  ‘I can’t get used to it,’ said Jim, as they walked towards the door at the far side of the hall.


  ‘Well, Jim, it’s down to statistics and physics, anything but ethics.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Eighty-twenty means one per cent of the people get half of the whole pie, the one in ten thousand group gets a quarter and the lucky group that are one in a million get about an eighth of everything. The guy at the top of the pile ends up with three to four per cent of all the assets in the world.’ He patted Jim on the back. ‘That’s three to four per cent of all the money, the land, the combined wealth of the globe, and that’s as a result of the eighty-twenty rule. Think about it.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Jim. ‘It’s not worth my time. I’ve got way too much already, I don’t want to think about more.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Davas.

  They crossed a corridor of ancient red tiles and went into Jim’s study.

  Jim plonked himself in a mottled brown leather armchair by the empty fireplace. Davas took his case. He opened it, pulled out a file and handed it to Jim.

  Jim flipped through its contents and sighed. It was what he’d expected, a collection of currency and bond charts with a large blank area representing the future for him to fill in with his prediction. He dropped the papers on the floor by his feet.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Davas wondered.

  ‘I told you last time I wouldn’t read charts for you any more. I meant it.’ He looked at Davas, whose right hand was in the case, holding something. Any second he was going to break into a rant. He was going to say that Jim had a God-given talent to read the future of financial markets and that gift was to help the world, more particularly Max Davas, by manipulating the bond markets so that the US could continue to control the global economy by the dominance of the dollar. The US was bust, but in fiddling the bond market and the connected currencies, Davas kept the US all powerful and, by implication, safe.

  Davas had used Jim’s predictions to crush the euro to the edge of collapse so that the US could fund its overwhelming debt; the dollar had staggered on as the global currency. Davas would say Jim was turning his back on God by not using his gift, that he was inviting the barbarians to pillage the West if he didn’t help Davas and the US Treasury. Only he could see the possible future, and with Jim’s vision, Davas could mould a favourable outcome, crafted for the good of all.

  Jim had resolved that he was not going to participate in Davas’s schemes. A fat American in Ohio was counterbalanced by a starving kid in India. One man’s barbarian was another man’s hero. Why couldn’t the United States simply live within its means?

  Davas pulled a metal frame from the bag and unfolded it. It was a chair of sorts, a fold-out stool with an X-frame and a seat made of a thick piece of fawn leather. ‘What do you think?’ He stood up and gazed down at it.

  ‘What is it?’ said Jim, knowing it was a seat.

  ‘A Roman camp chair.’

  ‘Wow.’ Jim got up and crouched beside it. The leather was evidently new but the iron of the frame was ancient. Jim had a warehouse full of Roman pieces he had bought indiscriminately around Europe. Over months of studying the results of his feverish collecting, he had learnt what was real and what had been turned out in some resourceful faker’s studio. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Germany,’ said Davas. ‘I thought I might pay you for your help in precious Roman artefacts.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Jim, peering at it closely, ‘but no dice.’

  ‘It belonged to Marcus Aurelius,’ said Davas.

  ‘What?’ said Jim. ‘The Emperor?’ He smirked. ‘Yeah, right, of course it did.’

  Davas was holding something towards him. It was a large gold ring with a carved stone in it. ‘Oh,’ said Jim, taking it, ‘that’s nice too.’

  ‘It was found buried with the chair,’ said Davas.

  ‘That’s got to be Augustus,’ said Jim, marvelling at the superb carving as he turned it in the light. ‘But you’re having me on about Marcus Aurelius, right?’ He studied the sculpted carnelian. The artistry was stunning.

  ‘Not imperial enough for you?’ Now Davas held out a golden mask. ‘Have a look at this. Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Kind of,’ said Jim.

  ‘It was found over the ring, on the frame of the chair.’

  ‘It’s a gold battle mask.’

  ‘Well, you know who wore one in Roman times.’

  The mask was exquisitely fashioned and the face hammered out on it was the official portrait of Marcus Aurelius, the last emperor of a truly great Rome. It was surely the battle mask of the Philosopher King.

  ‘You should donate it to a museum,’ said Jim.

  ‘You can, if you wish,’ replied Davas, his eyes glinting.

  Jim sat down and put the mask over his face. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘It was found in a field in Germany about three weeks ago. When I saw it I knew I might have something to change your mind about helping me.’

  ‘Do you think they buried it where he died?’

  ‘Very possibly.’

  Jim slid the ring onto his little finger. ‘The Romans were short-arses.’ He was always surprised by how tiny their things were.

  ‘They were harsh times,’ said Davas. ‘It’s only in this modern era that we can grow to our full potential.’

  ‘When they buried these, they were burying Rome,’ said Jim. ‘After Marcus that was it for civilisation.’

  ‘Plague,’ said Davas. ‘Marcus Aurelius died of it. Perhaps half the population of the known world died of it.’

  ‘I hope you washed this,’ said Jim, almost joking.

  ‘Smallpox doesn’t survive for very long,’ said Davas.

  ‘Smallpox has been eradicated, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Davas. ‘I would say it decimated the Roman Empire, but “decimate” means only one in ten died. Instead whole regions of Europe were emptied of people. Grass grew on their roads. The barbarians simply filled the vacuum. With smallpox the empire crumbled into dust.’

  Jim held up the mask and looked into the face of Marcus. The emperor had worn it at his last battle against the northern tribes and then the plague that had killed his partner in government had struck him. When the Philosopher King had been cut down by smallpox, his world had been set on a course of irreversible decay.

  ‘Why don’t you take a look at those charts?’ said Davas, as Jim marvelled at the battle mask.

  Jim laid the golden trophy on the low walnut table in front of him and picked up the papers.

  Davas was holding out a pen to him.

  ‘These are three-year charts?’

  ‘I’m not expecting to get my hands on another trove like this,’ said Davas. ‘I need all you can give me.’

  Jim knew he’d be back soon enough. ‘That’s a fake,’ he said, waving his pen at the mask, well aware that it wasn’t.

  Davas didn’t react.

  ‘What’s wrong with your computers?’ said Jim. ‘Have they gone blind?’

  ‘In a way.’ Davas looked unhappily at him. ‘That’s why I need you.’

  Jim turned to the first chart. It was the dollar yen. He squinted at it. ‘I don’t look at this stuff any more,’ he muttered. ‘I trade a few stocks for a bit of fun, but I keep away from the big stuff.’ He shook his head, as if his neck was stiff. ‘Most of the time, anyway.’ He stared hard at the chart. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘This is kind of indeterminate.’

  Davas was looking past his shoulder as if he didn’t want to put Jim off but, equally, was desperate to watch him study the charts. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I can draw on this – it’s like a bit of a fork in the road.’ Jim circled a blank about two months into the future. Davas had left a large quantity of space, which represented the future for Jim to fill in with his pen. This was the skill that had made Jim unbelievably rich: his talent at inking a line that predicted the future of money markets.

  ‘Look at the others,’ said Davas.

  Jim leafed through them. ‘
I’m losing my touch,’ he said. ‘This is just bullshit to me.’ He went to the gold chart. ‘OK, this is what I see.’ Starting where the gold chart ended, the price at yesterday’s close, he drew a line that zigzagged up over the next three years. But then he drew another that zigzagged down and levelled out. ‘That’s pretty crazy, but that’s what I see. In a few months’ time things could go either way.’

  Davas riffled in his case and pulled out a roll of transparencies. He flicked through them until he came to the one he wanted. ‘Gold,’ he said, grabbing Jim’s chart. He put an overlay over Jim’s drawing. Davas’s projection stopped where Jim’s line forked: Jim had predicted a potential split in the fortunes of gold.

  ‘We kind of agree, then,’ said Jim.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But gold at nine hundred dollars an ounce, that’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘It would be very inconvenient,’ said Davas, ‘to put it mildly.’

  ‘Sorry, Max, but that’s all I’ve got.’ He looked at the ring on his little finger. ‘Do I get to keep these?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Davas, ‘but I might have to use your God-given talent again to be certain you’ve earned them.’

  Jim wasn’t sure whether he was getting a good deal or not. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but only once, and not, like, a ten-year chart next time or every instrument on the whole bloody market either.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Davas. He folded up Jim’s projection. ‘Can you draw on the others for me?’

  Jim paged through the charts. ‘It’s the same story. It’s like there’s a cliff and either the chart goes off it or it doesn’t. It’s like a fifty-fifty moment in history is coming up. Either something bad happens or it doesn’t.’

  Davas grunted in agreement. ‘Well, that’s what I’m getting from my computers too, and it’s not good.’

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ said Jim.

  ‘I don’t know so much,’ said Davas.

  ‘It’ll work itself out. It always does.’