He was still musing when Endean asked, “May I put a question, Sir James?”
“What is it?” asked Manson.
“Just this: What did he go down there for? Why do you need a military report on how Kimba could be toppled and killed?”
Sir James Manson stared out of the window for some time. Finally he said, “Get Martin Thorpe up here.” While Thorpe was being summoned, Manson walked to the window and gazed down, as he usually did when he wanted to think hard.
He knew he had personally taken Endean and Thorpe as young men and promoted them to salaries and positions beyond their years. It was not simply because of their intelligence, although they had plenty of it. It was because he recognized an unscrupulousness in each of them that matched his own, a preparedness to ignore so-called moral principles in pursuit of the goal success. He had made them his team, his hatchet men, paid by the company but serving him personally in all things. The problem was: Could he trust them with this one, the big one? As Thorpe entered the office, he decided he had to. He thought he knew how to guarantee their loyalty.
He bade them sit down and, remaining standing with his back to the window, he told them, “I want you two to think this one over very carefully, then give me your reply. How far would you be prepared to go to be assured of a personal fortune in a Swiss bank of five million pounds each?”
The hum of the traffic ten floors down was like a buzzing bee, accentuating the silence in the room.
Endean stared back at his chief and nodded slowly. “A very, very long way,” he said softly.
Thorpe made no reply. He knew this was what he had come to the City for, joined Manson for, absorbed his encyclopedic knowledge of company business for. The big one, the once-in-a-decade grand slam. He nodded assent.
“How?” whispered Endean. For answer Manson walked to his wall safe and extracted two reports. The third, Shannon’s, lay on his desk as he seated himself behind it.
Manson talked steadily for an hour. He started at the beginning and soon read the final six paragraphs of Dr. Chalmers’ report on the samples from the Crystal Mountain.
Thorpe whistled softly and muttered, “Jesus.”
Endean required a ten-minute lecture on platinum to catch the point; then he too breathed a long sigh.
Manson went on to relate the exiling of Mulrooney to northern Kenya, the suborning of Chalmers, the second visit of Bryant to Clarence, the acceptance of the dummy report by Kimba’s Minister. He stressed the Russian influence on Kimba and the recent exiling of Colonel Bobi, who, given the right circumstances, could return as a plausible alternative in the seat of power.
For Thorpe’s benefit he read much of Endean’s general report on Zangaro and finished with the conclusion of Shannon’s report.
“If it is to work at all, it must be a question of mounting two parallel, highly secret operations,” Manson said finally. “In one, Shannon, stage-managed throughout by Simon, mounts a project to take and destroy that palace and all its contents, and for Bobi, accompanied by Simon, to take over the powers of state the following morning and become the new president. In the other, Martin would have to buy a shell company without revealing who had gained control or why.”
Endean furrowed his brow. “I can see the first operation, but why the second?” he asked.
“Tell him, Martin,” said Manson.
Thorpe was grinning, for his astute mind had caught Manson’s drift. “A shell company, Simon, is a company, usually very old and without assets worth talking about, which has virtually ceased trading and whose shares are very cheap—say, a shilling each.”
“So why buy one?” asked Endean, still puzzled.
“Say Sir James has control of a company, bought secretly through unnamed nominees, hiding behind a Swiss bank, all nice and legal, and the company has a million shares valued at one shilling each. Unknown to the other shareholders or the board of directors or the Stock Exchange, Sir James, via the Swiss bank, owns six hundred thousand of these million shares. Then Colonel—beg his pardon—President Bobi sells that company an exclusive ten-year mining franchise for an area of land in the hinterland of Zangaro. A new mining survey team from a highly reputable company specializing in mining goes out and discovers the Crystal Mountain. What happens to the shares of Company X when the news hits the stock market?”
Endean got the message. “They go up,” he said with a grin.
“Right up,” said Thorpe. “With a bit of help they go from a shilling to well over a hundred pounds a share. Now do your arithmetic. Six hundred thousand shares at a shilling each cost thirty thousand pounds to buy. Sell six hundred thousand shares at a hundred pounds each—and that’s the minimum you’d get—and what do you bring home? A cool sixty million pounds, in a Swiss bank. Right, Sir James?”
“That’s right.” Manson nodded grimly. “Of course, if you sold half the shares in small packets to a wide variety of people, the control of the company owning the concession would stay in the same hands as before. But a bigger company might put in a bid for the whole block of six hundred thousand shares in one flat deal.”
Thorpe nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, control of such a company bought at sixty million pounds would be a good market deal. But whose bid would you accept?”
“My own,” said Manson.
Thorpe’s mouth opened. “Your own?”
“ManCon’s bid would be the only acceptable one. That way the concession would remain firmly British, and ManCon would have gained a fine asset.”
“But,” queried Endean, “surely you would be paying yourself sixty million quid?”
“No,” said Thorpe quietly. “ManCon’s shareholders would be paying Sir James sixty million quid, without knowing it.”