Dirty Money

By P.I. Foate

Dirty Money is the first novel in a new trilogy by a promising new Swedish author, P.I. Foate. Readers will be captivated and enthralled by this gripping and intense drama about events and people whose paths were changed by the horrifying events of September 11, 2001.

In 2007, Peter Wall appears to lead an ordinary, although not entirely law-abiding, middle-class life in Manchester, England. Suddenly, his luck comes to an end and he fears that his money-laundering scheme is about to be discovered by the authorities. He makes a run for it, taking with him the money of some of his sinister clients.

Peter cleverly evades both sets of pursuers by leaving a false trail across Europe. As his pursuers close in on him on the Greek island of Mykonos, it seems as if the end is near, not only for Peter but also for his clients, who, unknown to them, are also being investigated by the authorities.

All is, however, not as it seems. Peter has a secret, which only two of his closest friends know. Dick Monson and Christos Xenitidis have been working together for years in a secret anti-terrorism unit of MI5. Is Peter ready to join them or is it too late for him to redeem himself?

Follow what happens next in this suspenseful saga about the efforts of these dedicated men in their journey towards justice, in this novel and the remaining two novels in the trilogy, The Forgotten Children and Its Never too Late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jun 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462885978

P.I. Foate

P.I. Foate is a promising new Swedish author, who has worked around the world as an entrepreneur and writer, including in Sweden, Hong Kong, Miami, Greece, Australia, and now England. He worked as a consultant for the Swedish military intelligence and the Swedish army for many years. “Dirty Money” is his fi rst English novel, and is the fi rst of a trilogy. The remaining two novels in the trilogy, “The Forgotten Children” and “It’s Never too Late” will be out soon.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Mr and Mrs Monson were running late. They were on their way to Logan International Airport, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, to take American Airlines flight 11 to Los Angeles. Their friend’s chauffeur was driving them in from Hull, south-east of Boston, in Charlie Green’s colossal white Hummer limousine.

Mr Monson hated to be late, even by ten minutes.

Mr and Mr Monson were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary.

Mr Monson had worked for thirty years all around the world as a diplomat for the British Embassy, but had recently retired. They lived in the UK, outside London on a big estate in Ascot, Berkshire. Now that they had the time, they had decided to take a leisurely round-the-world trip visiting all their old friends and family.

Boston was the second stop on their journey, for three days, to visit Mr Monson’s good friend, Charlie Green, and his wife, Liz. They had met at boarding school in St. Edmund’s outside London, and then they had studied law at Cambridge together and become best friends. Charlie had also met his wife at Cambridge, the daughter of a wealthy family from Boston.

The first stop on their journey had been Niagara Falls, Buffalo, New York state. They had landed at Niagara International Airport the first weekend in September. Hotel Sheraton on the Falls’ private limousine had picked them up, like so many other honeymooners, and they had stayed in a spectacular Deluxe Falls View King Suite on the hotel’s nineteenth floor.

On arrival, they found chilled champagne and a bouquet of pink roses in their room. Mr Monson was still in good shape but he didn’t carry his wife across the threshold this time. They did make love, however, in front of the room’s large window, just to be able to see the waterfall at the same time. Mr and Mrs Monson were still madly in love even after forty years of marriage.

They arrived at Terminal B at 7.10 a.m. Charlie’s driver helped them carry their baggage to the check-in line for domestic flights. The queue was not long so it took only twelve minutes to check-in and collect their first-class boarding cards.

Mr Monson then sent a text message to their son, Dick, ‘On our way to Los Angeles now, boarding in thirty minutes.’

Michael Clain was eating pancakes with maple syrup and bacon in the Hilton Logan Airport’s restaurant, Berkshires. He couldn’t sleep because of his jet lag, so he had risen early. Yesterday he had given a lecture at the main office of the IBM education centre in Boston, Massachusetts.

Before that he attended a three-day conference about the future of the Internet in Haifa, Israel. Michael Clain was IBM’s number one Internet consultant. He was now on his way home to San Jose, near San Francisco, via Long Beach, outside Los Angeles, where he was meeting his sister. Michael was really enjoying his breakfast.

In Haifa it was already lunchtime. Even if he had only been in Europe and Israel for one week, it had changed his usual sleeping and eating patterns. He was not due at the gate for his American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles for another hour.

In a three-bedroom apartment in Southie, South Boston, the Ming Hang family was saying goodbye to Mr Ming’s brother. They all stood in the doorway waiting for the taxi that they had called.

Mr Ming’s brother ran a Chinese restaurant on Dorchester Street in Southie. He had run the restaurant for almost ten years now. Mr Ming and his brother were joint owners. They had inherited their first restaurant from their father in Los Angeles, China Town, at the end of the 1980s.

Their father was well-known among the Los Angeles Asian community.

Mr Ming and his brother had decided to expand their business, so had bought this restaurant, The Blue Dragon, in the spring of 1992.

They were doing very well with both the Los Angeles and Southie restaurant. Every year in either Los Angeles or Boston, they held an annual family board meeting. This year it was in Boston, and now Mr and Mrs Ming were on their way home. The taxi arrived and Mr and Mrs Ming said goodbye, got into the cab, and disappeared into the early morning mist coming in from the sea. It would take less than one hour from Mr Ming’s apartment to the Logan International Airport so they were in good time for their flight 11 to Los Angeles.

Three men drove in and parked their Chrysler Voyager rental car in the parking area for budget rental cars at Logan International Airport. They were dark-skinned and talking jovially in Arabic. One of them was telling some kind of story which made them all laugh.

They walked into the budget office and dropped off the car key. One of them called Al-Sheker paid the balance owing with his credit card. They walked to Terminal B, a fifteen-minute walk, enjoying the fresh autumn mist from the Atlantic.

In a king-sized bed at the Liberty Hotel, Beacon Hill, in Central Boston, a young flight attendant from American Airlines was having sex with a lecturer from Boston College. Her name was Madison Anderson and she came from Denver, Colorado. She was twenty-three years old and had always been a nymphomaniac. She couldn’t help herself.

This was her first year working for American Airlines and she had one day off in Boston before she was due to work on flight 11 to Los Angeles later that morning from Logan airport.

Madison had met this lecturer at Frank’s Steak House in North Cambridge. She had been there with one of her airline colleagues, who lived in the neighbourhood. They had eaten at the bar because the restaurant was fully booked.

Madison met the lecturer at the bar when he had offered to buy both of them a drink. Madison was not the kind of girl to say, ‘no.’ The lecturer was married, had three kids, and was going through a mid-life crisis.

He was fucking her now as if possessed, and Madison was panting and howling as if in pain. She was not actually in any pain but loving every minute. Just as she was about to reach orgasm, however, she glanced over at the clock-radio and froze, yelling at the lecturer to stop.

She had warned him the night before that she had to leave to catch her flight by 7.30 a.m. at the latest. The clock-radio was showing that the time was almost 7 a.m. Telling the lecturer that he could check out later, she had one of the fastest showers ever and was dressed in five minutes.

She ran out of the hotel room, down to reception, and ordered a taxi.

The taxi arrived in five minutes but even so when she arrived at Logan International Airport she was too late. She did not even bother running, she knew she would never make it to flight 11. Madison reported in as running late and was re-allocated to another flight later the same day.

She sat down in the American Airlines lounge to have some breakfast.

Passengers started to board flight 11 at Terminal B, gate four.

Finally, they were all aboard—among them, Mr and Mrs Monson from Ascot, Berkshire, UK, Mr and Mr Ming from Los Angeles, and the Arabs who arrived in a rental car. The last man on board was Michael Clain from San Jose.

There were eighty-one passengers and eleven crew members aboard.

Two of the Arabs were sitting beside Mr and Mr Monson in first class, the other three in business class behind Michel Clain and beside Mr and Mrs Ming.

American Airlines flight 11 would never reach Los Angeles; it would end up as a burning inferno as it crashed into the north tower of the twin tower World Trade Centre in New York at 8.46 a.m. that morning.

CHAPTER ONE

Manchester, England, 2007

A car is driving down the bus lane on Portland Street in central Manchester. Its driver, Peter Wall, is impatient; he loathes waiting in car-lane traffic jams.

It’s a fine day, despite the light rain. The last three weeks had been awful with constant thunderstorms and far too much rainfall.

Peter is fed up with the weather; it is, after all, supposed to be summer. Right now he is also feeling hounded; that’s the reason he doesn’t want to stand still.

One of his firm’s biggest clients was being difficult about payments that were due to Peter months ago. Peter had sued them, but he knew deep inside that it would take at least six to eight months before he’d recover any money out of them through legal channels, and even longer if they appealed the court decision. He knows that it is always the big companies who survive; it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong or that his lawyer is confident that they will win the case.

The trouble for Peter is that now his subcontractors are chasing him for their payments and he hadn’t been able to pay any of them for more than five weeks.

His mobile rings and he answers on the hands-free, ‘Hi, Peter here.’

Slatan Baric, one of Peter’s subcontractors, is calling from his office. Sitting with his feet up on his desk, smoking a cigarette, Slatan talks to Peter with an Irish accent. He is dressed in a black suit, black shirt, and black lace-up shoes. He is someone who commands instant respect.

‘Hi there, Peter, I need to tell you that we just can’t wait any longer. We must get paid, man, and you know we’ve been very patient until now.’

Peter tries to sound cool while drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, ‘I know, I know, I’ll definitely pay you next week.’

Peter has to stop for a red light on Oxford Street.

Slatan answers in a tense voice, ‘Okay, man, but you’d better pay up next week. We can’t wait any longer.’

Peter is still drumming his fingers on the driving wheel as the light turns green. He is mulling over Slatan’s words, when someone honks a horn at him. As he drives forward, he quickly says, ‘Great, thanks, man, sure, see you next week then.’

Peter hangs up.

Peter Wall is blond with blue eyes, medium height, and quite a fit man. Having turned forty last spring, he has been having a midlife crisis for more than a year already, and now he is feeling extra stressed because of this shit he has to deal with.

Peter Wall has always been an entrepreneur, although he has a degree in economics from Oxford University. He is a nice guy, a respected citizen in the community, a board member of the local cricket club—and he has a good sense of humour, always joking about something. He is also a family man with his wife, Anna, and two children.

He tries to be the average English man; he doesn’t want to stand out.

His car, for example, is a Renault Kangoo minivan. He had always driven that style of car to keep a low profile on the construction sites.

Peter is dressed as usual in a smart suit. Even if it’s a Batistini from H&M which cost only £85, it looks very smart, especially teamed with a blue shirt and tie. Looking at him, you wouldn’t realise his big secret—which only his two oldest friends know. Peter Wall’s destination is Hale village, just outside of Manchester. He needs to see his friend and business partner—Bill Henderson. Peter still has Slatan’s voice in his head as he drives out of the city, and the feeling of being hounded has grown even stronger. He scrolls through phone numbers on the hands free buttons on the steering wheel and calls Bill, just to have someone to talk with.

‘Bill, hi, it’s Peter. I’ll be at your place in ten minutes.’

Bill is sitting at his desk when his mobile rings. Peter always calls on that phone, as he never wants to talk to Bill’s secretaries; they never stop talking. Bill Henderson is trained as an accountant at Oxford University; he was there the same years as Peter Wall. He is the same height as Peter Wall, slimly-built and has brown hair and brown eyes. He is also in his forties. Bill lives and works in Hale.

Hale is a very old village, first mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1086. The Doomsday Book, written by order of William the Conqueror, dictated that the Normans could collect tax from all the new English land they had conquered. Bill liked to joke that one of his family members had written the Doomsday Book such long ago. Bill’s office walls are full of pictures of sports men—football players, cricket players, rugby players. It looks more like a sports bar somewhere in New York rather than an office in Hale. Bill has always been a collector—he collected everything, including women and money. He had been divorced three times, and has four kids with four different women. Bill is dressed as you’d expect an accountant to be—a classic, well-cut grey suit with white shirt and tie. He looks the part to perfection. He looks like an honest man who would not kill a fly.

‘Okay, I’m here waiting for you,’ Bill says.

‘I’ll be there soon.’

Peter hangs up. Edgy, he overtakes a car as he drives down Princess Road and then heads south, driving a little too fast. He thinks to himself, Time is catching up.

He drives into Hale village and pulls into the parking lot just in front of the main entrance of Bill’s office on the east side of the village.

He walks into a small reception area. Peter smiles at Mona, the receptionist, as he enters the lobby. She is casually dressed in a blue blouse and a blue skirt, but has a little too much make-up for Peter’s taste.

‘Hi, Mona, Bill is expecting me.’

‘Yes, you know your way, Peter. Bill’s in his office.’

Peter walks past Mona and follows the long corridor. On his way to Bill’s room, he says hello to everyone he passes on the way.

Bill has six secretaries work for his company, looking after the accounts of his three hundred clients, including the many sham companies that he and Peter had set up. Many years ago, Bill and Peter had developed a system for companies to reduce their tax liability by paying for services provided by these sham companies, claiming back the value added tax they paid for such services and subsequently receiving a cash payment of 80 per cent of the value of the services invoiced from the sham company.

He arrives at Bill’s door, which is open. He looks in: Bill is on the phone but beckons to Peter to come in.

‘Yes, yes, I will do that, Yes, thank you . . . bye, and see you soon.’

He hangs up the phone, stands up and shakes Peter’s hand over his desk.

‘Damn. You sounded upset on the phone. What’s up, Peter?’

Peter, looking anxious and hesitant, replies, ‘I’m okay, Bill. It’s just this company—they won’t pay me, you know. Shit, I hate them. They owe me £2 million, for God’s sake. Of course, I’m upset. It means I can’t pay my subcontractors. I’m just worn out by everything today.’

‘I understand, Pete, and that audit which our client, Ursut, got doesn’t make it any better either. Look, you want coffee, Pete, with milk, sugar, as usual?’

He looks at Peter and waves towards the coffee machine.

‘Yes, sure would, thanks, my usual,’ Peter replies.

Bill steps out of his office and Peter follows him to the kitchen and the coffee machine. Bill presses the machine’s buttons and coffee pours down into a cup; the pleasant smell of fresh-brewed Italian coffee fills the kitchen.

‘There you go, Pete, just as you like it.’

Bill gives Peter his cup, then fills up another for himself.

They return to Bill’s office and sit down.

Bill slurps his coffee and asks Peter,

‘So, are there any new invoices to issue today, Pete?’

‘Yes . . . two. I need one to HTM construction in London and one for Slatan.’

‘What kind of invoice for HTM?’

Bill sits, hands poised over his computer, ready to type.

‘They want a marketing report for Scotland, concerning their product. You can put this: Marketing report for current HTM products for Scotland.’

Bill writes, listening to Peter, ‘Market study—hours worked—250 at £90 pounds/hr, totals £22,500. Hours worked in office—50 at £90 pounds/hr, totals £4,500 plus VAT.’

Once typed up, Bill prints out the invoice on the letterhead of a company called Manchester Marketing Ltd. He hands it over to Peter.

‘Looks good, Bill. They’ll pay in ten days. I know because they need the cash.’

He gives the invoice back to Bill.

‘And Slatan . . . what does he need? Some subcontractors he’s had working for him again?’ Bill asks sarcastically.

‘Yes, as usual, he needs £35,000 out in cash by next week.’

Bill types another invoice and prints it. Then he takes a cash box from his desk draw, opens it, and takes out four envelopes, throwing them on to the desk in front of Peter.

‘Here’s your delivery for today, Pete, one envelope for Ursut and this one for Steve, you know him? He has this company called Clean Room Ltd.’

‘Yes, I know him; he’s on Queen Street, right?’

‘Yeah, that’s him, and this one’s for you, Pete. Last week’s profit—8 grand, not that bad at all, Pete. And this one’s for me—nice money for a few hours’ work.’

‘How many years have we been doing this now, Bill?’

Peter smiles for the first time today. Bill looks at his computer screen and after typing, says, ‘Well, I believe it is twelve years next month. How time flies, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh, yeah, it feels like we’ve only just started.’

Peter stands up and puts the envelopes inside his jacket pocket. He shakes Bill’s hand and says, ‘See you next week, Bill. And please, if you hear anything about Ursut and his audit from HM Revenue & Customs, please call me.’

Peter walks back along the long corridor, now saying goodbye to everyone he sees. He walks out of the building and into the parking lot.

He doesn’t notice the car with two men inside, parked nearby, observing Bill’s office. They are Jonathan and John, undercover police officers in civilian clothing, dressed in blue jeans and short-sleeved shirts.

One of them is writing down the names of everyone who visits Bill’s office. They work for the FCU: the Financial Crime Unit.

As Peter exits the building, their eyes follow him as he walks to his car.

‘Here we go again,’ says Jonathan in a sing-song voice.

‘Jonathan, how many times has he been here in the last month?’

Jonathan checks his book, marking where he is up to with his finger.

‘Well, I make it twelve times this month and fifteen times last month. He has to be one of the heads of this business.’

‘Yes, for sure he is,’ replies John.

They watch as Peter’s car pulls out of the parking. At the same moment, two other clients arrive, park, and enter Bill’s office. Jonathan makes a new note in his book.

Peter drives back into Manchester, to 34 Market Street; it is right beside Piccadilly Garden where he has his office.

At one time he had worked from home, but he hadn’t done that for a very long time. He wasn’t attracted to his wife anymore, so he had no desire to be at home all day. Everything had changed so much over the years it wasn’t like this, when they had met when he was studying at Oxford.

He had loved her more than anything else on earth and had been oblivious to the fact that she had married him mostly for the money he had always splashed around so generously.

She was strikingly beautiful, in fact, the most beautiful girl Peter had ever seen. She had also given him the best sex he had ever had in his life.

He’d had many girls before that, but none like Anna.

Having parked his car in the garage of the house next door, Peter walks over to his office building and takes the elevator up to his office.

He opens his door, walks in, sits down at his desk, and begins opening his mail for the day.

He opens one letter, reading it slowly, and says to himself, Shit, shit not now! throwing the letter on to his desk.

The letter is from HM Revenue & Customs. They intend to carry out an audit at his office in one week. His phone rings. He answers abruptly, sounding almost angry, ‘Yes, Peter here.’

‘Hey, Pete, Steve here. What’s up? You sound upset, man. Is everything okay?