Chapter Three
THREE
On London’s Bayswater Road, a six-story commercial building overlooks the bucolic anomaly in the center of the city that is Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
Comprising a large suite on the top floor of the white building are the offices of Cheltenham Security Services, a private firm that contracts executive protection officers, facility guard personnel, and strategic intelligence services for British and other western European corporations working abroad.
CSS was conceived, founded, and run on a daily basis by a sixty-eight-year-old Englishman named Sir Donald Fitzroy.
Fitzroy had spent the early part of Wednesday hard at work, but now he forced himself to push that task out of his mind.
He took a moment to clear his thoughts, drummed his corpulent fingers on his ornate partners desk.
He did not have time for the man waiting politely outside with his secretary—there was a pressing matter that required his complete focus—but he could hardly turn his visitor away.
Fitzroy’s crisis of the moment would just have to wait.
The young man had called an hour before and told Sir Donald’s secretary he needed to speak with Mr. Fitzroy about a most urgent matter.
Such calls were a regular occurrence at the office of CSS.
What was irregular about this call, and the reason Fitzroy could hardly ask the emphatic young man to return another day, was the fact his visitor was in the employ of LaurentGroup, a mammoth French conglomerate that ran shipping, trucking, engineering, and port facilities for the oil, gas, and mineral industries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.
They were Fitzroy’s largest customer, and for this reason alone he would not send the man off with apologies, no matter what other matters pressed.
Fitzroy’s firm ran site security at LaurentGroup’s corporate offices in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK, but as large as was Fitzroy’s contract with Laurent as compared to CSS’s other corporate accounts, Sir Donald knew it was no more than a drop in the bucket as far as the mammoth corporation’s total annual security budget.
It was well known in protection circles that LaurentGroup ran their own security departments in a decentralized fashion, hiring locals to do most of the heavy lifting in the eighty-odd nations where the corporation owned property.
This might mean something as innocuous as vetting secretaries at an office in Kuala Lumpur, but it also included the nefarious, like having a recalcitrant dockworker’s legs broken in Bombay, or a problematic union rally broken up in Gdansk.
And surely, from time to time, executives at Laurent’s Paris home office required a problem to go away in a more permanent fashion, and Fitzroy knew they had men on call for that, as well.
There was a dirty underbelly to most multinational corporations that worked in regions of the world with more thugs than cops, with more hungry people who wanted to work than educated people who wanted to organize and bring about reform.
Yes, most MNCs used methods that would never make the topic list of the chairmen’s briefing or a budget line in the annual financial report, but LaurentGroup was known as an especially heavy-handed company when it came to third-world assets and resources.
And this did not hurt the stock price at all.
Donald Fitzroy forced his worry about the other affair from his head, thumbed the intercom button, and asked his secretary to escort the visitor in.
Fitzroy first noticed the handsome young man’s suit.
This was a local custom in London. Identify the tailor, and know the man.
It was a Huntsman, a Savile Row shop that Sir Donald recognized, and it told Fitzroy much about his guest. Sir Donald was a Norton you will have to connect the dots for me. What are you doing in my office?”
“My company is prepared to offer you a threefold increase in contracts if you will only assist us in the neutralization of the Gray Man. Without going into unnecessary detail, the president of Nigeria is asking us to help him bring justice down on his brother’s killer.”
“Why LaurentGroup?”
“That would involve unnecessary detail.”
“You will find it to be quite necessary if this discussion is to continue.”