Читать книгу The Manhattan Puzzle - Laurence O’Bryan - Страница 13

Henry Mowlam turned to the screen on his left. The hum of the office in Whitehall had hardly changed in the past few years. The only noticeable difference was that the screens they were watching at the monitoring stations were thinner and the light was yellower, more natural, it was claimed, though Henry didn’t believe it.

The secure PDF on his screen was the oldest military archive file he had ever accessed. At the top there was a summary by a Royal Engineers Major. Below was a handwritten report in a thin spidery scrawl enlivened by occasional twirls and flourishes. The name at the top was Captain Charles George Gordon.

Henry scrolled down the document.

It was a personal account of the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Xianfeng Emperor of China in Beijing during the Second Opium War in October 1860.

‘On the night of the 20th we were carrying out Lord Elgin’s orders and came upon a remote palace building, which had not been destroyed up to that point due to its location on an island and its small size. I ordered only the porcelain to be removed and the building to be left intact, but one of the Sergeants took it upon himself to break through a trap door and loot an underground room. He arrived back while we were loading up the boats. He was carrying a green jade statue, about the size of an owl. I confiscated it in the name of Barkers & Son, Bankers, whose kin had been tortured and murdered by the Chinese, and whose shipment of opium had been lost on the Pearl River six months before.’

Henry closed the PDF. Barkers & Son were one of the early manifestations of the BXH banking conglomerate. Henry switched to his right-hand screen and studied the report on Lord Bidoner that had recently been emailed to him.

So this was where Bidoner was going to invest the ill-gotten loot he’d escaped with after the Jerusalem incident. It couldn’t be proven that it was an attempt to provoke a war and then profit from the surge in certain shares of companies, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Henry still seethed at the thought of how much money Bidoner had made. He read the report again. It stated that Lord Bidoner had already built up a shareholding in BXH that should have been notified to the authorities, but hadn’t. And now he was doing more buying through nominee accounts.

What was he up to?

BXH was definitely in trouble, on the blocks for an immediate takeover. If that didn’t happen, the bank could very well be taken over by the US Government. And if that happened Bidoner would lose his investment.

Was there something going on that he didn’t see?

He read the email from Lord Bidoner to the CEO of BXH, which they had intercepted. It requested an inventory of the bank’s artworks. It also stated that Lord Bidoner had an artistic interest in a jade statue that the bank was rumoured to have in its possession since the time of the Second Opium War.

He turned to look at the report from Captain Charles George Gordon. Was Bidoner looking for the statue mentioned in this report? It certainly looked like it.

But why?