Under Eden by Mark Furness

Author:Mark Furness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vigilante justice thrillers, financial thrillers, suspense thrillers, reporter thrillers, journalism thrillers, international crime thrillers, mystery and crime, conspiracy thrillers
Publisher: Mark Furness
Published: 2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

XLI

THE FIRST words that came into my mind were ‘funeral parlour’. The only thing that suggested Cliff McDonald and I were entering The New Silk Roads investment conference was a sign on a floor-stand.

The Park Suite Left meeting room at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in Mayfair was draped from ceiling to floor with silver-coloured curtains. Huge bouquets of red and white flowers, mixes of roses and lilies, sat on pedestal tables arranged around the walls. I could smell no perfume from the flowers, but there was plenty of perfume in the room. The competing scents of a hundred, highly-polished men and a dozen women merged with the odours of fresh coffee and French pastry.

The people sipping, nibbling, nattering and swapping business cards talked for a trillion dollars.

Of course none of the real owners of the money were attending BKB Nouveau’s conference. Those men and women were in their workshops and factories, offices, classrooms and hospitals, entrusting their retirement savings to the professionals. From my eavesdropping, the card-swappers’ core interest was discussing the quality of their rooms at the Dorchester and where to drink tonight after the official dinner.

“Where did they check them in?” I said to Cliff, nodding at the throng of talking heads. His eyes were scouting the room for the registration desk.

“What?”

“Their eye-patches and cutlasses.”

At my utterance, a young woman chatting to a portly fellow beside us glanced sharply our way. Her brilliant red hair was pulled into a pony tail that looked painfully tight; it had lifted her eyebrows so high it was a wonder that her eyeballs hadn’t popped from their sockets.

“Cliff!” she said gleefully, proudly displaying her glow-in-the-dark teeth. She grasped him by the forearm. “We are so glad you could come.”

A badge over her left breast said: Sally Hawkins. Communications Director. BKB’s elephant-eared PR woman talked brightly to Cliff about chaperoning him at their big horse race in Paris in two weeks. Cliff looked sheepish. I raised my eyebrows at him as if it was news.

Cliff said: “Sally, this is my colleague, Gar Hart. I hoped you could fit him in today.”

“I’ll see. This way please”.

We followed her towards the registration desk. Cliff’s name tag was already printed. She had to handwrite my name on a label. Her face suggested I was as welcome as a bout of herpes. I had no doubt she’d Google, or probe Linked In, for my pedigree at her first private opportunity.

“Now, gentlemen,” she said, “just a reminder that you are here today as observers. I can give you copies of the presentations on a memory stick, or email them to you later, if you prefer. But I’m afraid there will be no questions from the media.”

Cliff lapped the invisible sugar cube from her palm and nodded assent.

“Are you kidding?” I said.

She reached for her whip. “I’m afraid they are our rules, Mr Hart. You don’t have to stay if you don’t like them.”

“Let’s see how we go.”

She moved to the side of the room and talked animatedly to a tall, young man in a dark suit wearing an earpiece.

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