to go on. She’d been a reporter for ten years. She had all the skills necessary. If the material was true—and her every instinct told her it was—there would be a great many people upset to see it revealed. More than upset. R could be in danger. Or worse.
A chill rattled her spine.
London stood, throwing her laptop into her bag. Forget the drink. Forget the food. She dropped fifty dollars on the table and stormed from the lounge. She wasn’t afraid. She was inspired. It was her story now.
Ladder.
Chapter 7
London
Simon slammed his foot on the brake pedal as he passed the entrance to his shop. Parked out front was a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom: no two alike, three hundred fifty thousand pounds apiece if you could get one. Vanity plates. He knew who the car belonged to. Everyone in London did. They called him the “Sultan of Stratford,” and he’d recently purchased one of the city’s football clubs, returning it to English ownership after a decade of Middle Eastern control. Simon knew him for a different, less celebratory reason.
He drove around the block, turning into the alley that led to a fenced-in security lot at the rear of the shop. A sign above the work entrance read, EUROPEAN AUTOMOTIVE REPAIR AND RESTORATION. Inside, he crossed the shop floor as if on a mission, not slowing to inspect any of the dozen Ferraris currently being restored.
“He’s in your office,” said Harry Mason, standing in the reception, looking awestruck. Harry was pushing seventy, Irish, too feisty for his own good, and ran the shop’s day-to-day operations. He loved football the way a wino loves his red. The Sultan of Stratford was the closest thing to English royalty he’d ever see. “He said he knew you, that you two went way back. Why didn’t you say so?”
“Don’t ever let anyone into my office again unless I say so.” Simon spoke the words with more venom than he would have liked.
“But it’s the Sultan—”
“Ever!”
Harry promised and withdrew, though not before muttering what he thought of his employer.
Simon drew a breath to gather himself, seized by an instinct to stand taller, puff out his chest, hating himself for it. He opened the door with authority. “Make yourself at home, Dickie,” he said, striding into his office. “Or is it Sir Dickie? Or Sir Richard? I suppose congratulations are in order.”
“Piss off, Riske. Just a bloody ribbon with a slug of lead on one end.”
“I hope you didn’t say that to the queen.”
“Course not,” said Sir Richard Blackmon. “Asked her if she knew the one about the three priests who walked into a pub—Anglican, Lutheran, and Protestant.”
Neither man made a motion to shake the other’s hand.
Richard “Dickie” Blackmon was a towering presence all the way around: size, personality, and influence. He stood six feet two inches tall, two hundred fifty pounds easy, muscle gone to fat long ago. He wore a navy-blue pin-striped suit, white shirt, and pink silk necktie with a Windsor knot as big as Simon’s fist. He was not a handsome man. Watery blue eyes, a bloodhound’s jowls, a nose that stuck out like a thumb and was decorated by a road map of broken blood vessels. He wore his thinning reddish hair swept off his forehead and long in the back. Several prominent rings made his enormous hands appear even bigger, great sparkling mitts that swung through the air to underscore his words. When Dickie Blackmon entered a room, people took notice. He liked it that way.
“Why the long face?” asked Dickie when Simon failed to smile. “You could give aspirin a headache.”
“Probably the sight of your Roller out front. We service real automobiles here. Not half-million-pound monuments to your ego.”
“I didn’t know a man could bear a grudge for ten years. I’m impressed.”
“Not easy,” said Simon. “I’ll grant you that. But against a real bastard, it can be done.”
“Present and accounted for,” said Dickie Blackmon, expansively. Then with an earnest aside: “The Simon Riske I knew would never have uttered an expletive.”
That Simon Riske had been a private banker employed by one of the City’s most prestigious institutions. Back then, Dickie Blackmon had been among his biggest clients. In a sense, Simon knew him better than most, certainly better than Blackmon would like others to. Dickie Blackmon had earned his money in commodities—silver, gold, unobtainium—and, later, real estate and property development. His code of conduct lay somewhere between the gilded side of crime and the tarnished side of business.