Читать книгу A Woman Involved - John Davis Gordon - Страница 21

Over at old Pearls airport there was still scattered gunfire as the Marines mopped up the Revolutionary Army and the Cubans. The Rangers were still clearing the new airfield of the earth-moving equipment and spikes under sniper fire; they hot-wired the bulldozers and steamrollers and they used them as tanks to charge Cuban positions, and there were running battles and counter-attacks, and all the time the thudding of the mortars and the stench of cordite. The Revolutionary Army retreated back through the town, commandeering houses for defence positions and setting up barricades; they swarmed around the True Blue medical campus, and the American students lay low in their rooms, the bullets smashing and whining and ricocheting everywhere. And now helicopter gun-ships came clattering through the sky to take on the People’s Revolutionary Army surrounding Government House, but first they had to take on the anti-aircraft guns at Fort Frederick and Fort Ruppert, and the thudding and thundering and clattering and chattering filled the sky and shook the windows.

Upstairs, Anna Hapsburg was in an exhausted sleep at last.

Once upon a time, when he was a schoolboy, Jack Morgan had been deeply religious, and a Catholic. But university and the rough-and-tumble of the Navy had changed that. He found he could no longer believe in a God who would damn him to eternal flames, if only because no twentieth-century judge would sentence anybody to such a punishment for anything; nor could he believe in a God who logged up millions of prayers a minute like a mighty computer and tried to rearrange the world on request, if only because such a God cannot be persuaded to change His mind because, being omniscient, He already knew whether He was going to change His mind or not. And so Jack Morgan, scientist, had reluctantly become an atheist. But then he had the good fortune to meet Anna Valentine and read a book called Summa in Theologica, written in the fourteenth century. And, to his relief, the good Saint Thomas had proved to him, through pure, invincible Aristotelian logic, that a God existed – even if he could not, by logic, prove what kind of God He was. And Morgan had been able to believe again. It was a long way from the Holy Roman Church that he used to believe so completely, but Jack Morgan had the comfort of being able to pray again, at least in homage.

But it was different for Anna Hapsburg. She believed completely.

He looked at her. She lay on her stomach, one leg bent, her long hair matted across her face.

Her beloved Roman Catholic Church? Was that what this secret, this Nazi file was all about? ‘Something that could destroy the whole Roman …’ she had said. And she had been aghast that it had slipped out.

An important Western institution, Brink-Ford had said.

Well, if the authority of the Catholic Church were suddenly destroyed, many governments would be in trouble. Latin America – the power of the Church there was enormous, it was the opium of the masses. If the Russians had the ability to undermine the Catholic Church, to destroy its authority, it would enormously help their policy of world-wide revolution, of ‘liberating the world from the capitalist yoke’.

Morgan dragged his hands down his face. But all this was guess-work.

He was too tired to think straight. Oh, to sleep. To just take her in his arms and sleep, sleep, sleep. But he could not. It had all been go go go, so much action, so much tension, that the enormity of it hadn’t fully sunk in until now. The Russians had sent a man to get her and she had killed him … And if she hadn’t she would probably be dead herself now – the information extracted from her, her body dumped midst the ruins out there. And if the British couldn’t get the information out of her politely? He was bloody sure they’d get it somehow. And then what? Do they just turn her loose afterwards, to tell every newspaper what the terrible British had done to her, to shout her story from the rooftops? Including perhaps the very information they so desperately wanted to get their hands on. Or did even the pukka British make sure people didn’t talk?

God, it was like a bad dream. Gone was the euphoria of finding her, of knowing she was safe for the moment.

Something Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, a Nazi war criminal, knew.

Something the Catholic Church had done during the Second World War?

Collaborated with the Nazis? But it was common knowledge that the Catholic Church had not raised its voice to stop the Nazi extermination of the Jews, that the Pope of that time made a concordat, a live-and-let-live deal with Hitler to ensure that the Holy Roman Church was allowed to survive. But would that, so long after the event, shake the Church to its foundations, destabilize the Western world?

Something that God’s Banker had died over? …

He gave an exhausted sigh and looked down at the contents of her handgrip, spread on the floor.

The notebook. Passports. The will. Some share certificates. Some newspaper and magazine articles. A wad of money. The keys.

The passports. Three. At least one was false. It was an American passport, it bore Max’s photograph, but it was in the name of Maxwell Constantine. The next was Grenadan, the other West German, both in Max’s real name. It was not very unusual that he should have had two nationalities. But why the false American passport? It had a good number of immigration stamps in it, but mostly Max had used the German passport. Morgan had made a list of every entry and exit stamp in eyery passport, and had arranged them in date order. Max had travelled a good deal. South America, United States, Europe. Morgan could not remember the date when God’s Banker had been found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge but Max had been to England several times every year.

The will. It left everything to ‘my darling wife, Anna Louise Hapsburg, on condition that she does not remarry nor cohabit with any man …’

What did all that mean? Morgan knew nothing about wills, but were those conditions legally enforceable? When would she get the inheritance? – only after she had not remarried nor cohabitated? How long would she have to wait to prove her virtue? And if, having inherited, she then remarried or commenced to live in sin, would she then be disinherited?

But it showed an insecure, jealous man – who would try to intimidate his wife. Was such a man to be believed if he claimed to have something that could destroy the Roman Catholic Church? Or was he so unstable that he invented his story? The bastard had once concocted a terrifying case against him …

Morgan stared across the room.

No. She believed it. And so did the British who had sent him here. And the Americans. And the Russians.

Attached to the will was a schedule of principal assets. The man was extremely wealthy. Real estate, shares, bonds. There was a list of safety-deposit boxes, and the banks in which they were. Banks in Miami, Venezuela, Liechtenstein, and London.

Morgan squeezed his eyes.

But the microfilm or file probably was not in any of those banks. It was probably in one of the other banks listed on the page that she had torn from the notebook. And even if he found out which banks those were, how do you get into a man’s safety-deposit box?

He sighed, and picked up the keys again.

Some of them had numbers stamped on them, some of them were blank. Some of the box numbers mentioned in the will corresponded with numbers on keys. So, at least some of the keys were eliminated. But that didn’t help much.

And then the cash. Twenty thousand dollars.

That was a lot of money to Jack Morgan, but not to Max Hapsburg. Why shouldn’t he keep twenty thousand bucks in his safe, in case he had to jump on an aeroplane suddenly?

Yes, but twenty thousand? All in used fifty-dollar bills? It made a bulky wad. Why not travellers cheques? In case he had to run and be anonymous? Not leave a trail of travellers cheques and credit card deals for the authorities to follow?

That left the newspaper and magazine cuttings.

They all concerned the Third World debt. Max was mentioned in several pieces. In short, most Third World countries, including Grenada, were in serious trouble because they had borrowed so heavily at high interest rates. They could not repay their loans, partly because of mismanagement, waste and corruption, and partly because the commodities which they produced had recently dropped drastically in value. The dollar was too high, the interest rates too high; the loans were now crushingly burdensome and the terms should be renegotiated. Some debtor countries were threatening to declare themselves bankrupt, to form a cartel, defy the banks and refuse to pay; but saner countries, and leading figures like Max Hapsburg, had dissuaded them from this suicidal course for the time being. There were lists of big banks and the frightening amounts they had loaned and could not recover. The overall picture was frightening; if the crisis was not resolved, if the debtor countries did not repay the loans, many big Western banks would go bankrupt. So millions of depositors would lose their money, the bankrupt banks would have to call in the other loans they had made so many industries would go bankrupt too, so millions of workers would become unemployed and unable to repay their debts – in short, there would be an international depression which would make the Wall Street crash of 1929 look like a Sunday-school picnic. And the inherent political dangers were spelled out.

If the debtor countries did not improve their economies, if the masses were kept poor, as in most of South America, if a strong, sensible middle class did not emerge, these countries were vulnerable to communist-inspired revolution. Russia stood to gain everything from this economic crisis. If the Western banks collapsed because of the Third World debt, it could bring about the collapse of the capitalist system the Russians were working for. And, in the final result, it was the capitalist system which was to blame. Greed. The banks were to blame, for greedily lending vast sums of money at high interest rates to these corrupt banana republics during the good times of high commodity prices …

Morgan stared across the gloom. Outside were the sounds of war. ‘I’d rather die like God’s Banker … ’

So banking, high finance, had something to do with this Nazi secret that could destroy the Roman Catholic Church, to quote Anna, this important institution that could destabilize the West, to quote Brink-Ford. And so Vatican banking might be involved. And God’s Banker hanging from Blackfriars Bridge might look like suicide, but obviously Anna knew he had been murdered …

Murdered by whom? By Max Hapsburg?

By the Vatican? He could hardly believe that.

And murdered for what? What had God’s Banker gone to London for? For the secret which Max Hapsburg possessed? The same secret that was now locked in Anna’s head?

He sighed in frustration. This was all conjecture. Maybe God’s Banker had nothing to do with it, maybe she had used it as a figure of speech.

But no, he did not believe that either. Not in the context. The murder of God’s Banker had everything to do with this.

And, looking at the facts so far, he had no doubt that she was in grave danger of being murdered too. And not necessarily by the Russians alone.