The Solomon Curse

Remi smiled. “Sounds like a good plan.”

“Particularly the avoiding being murdered part,” Sam agreed.

“No more driving around in the boonies,” Remi warned.

“My appetite for adventure is completely sated at the moment. One brush with death per day is more than enough.”

“The problem is tomorrow’s another day.”

“Right, but technically we had two brushes today: going off the cliff and being shot at. So that takes care of tomorrow, too.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Remi said, her tone skeptical.

Sam smiled. “I’m a changed man.”

“Sure you are, Fargo. Sure you are.”

CHAPTER 16

Sydney, Australia

Jeffrey Grimes leaned back in the executive chair and eyed the others in the conference room, the air filled with the aroma of half-drunk coffee, tension, and frayed nerves. The end of another quarter was upon them and the publicly traded conglomerate they operated was going to report a loss—the third straight quarter the company had hemorrhaged money due to its international subsidiaries.

Grimes was a fixture on the Australian business and social scene, legendary for his high-risk strategies that had, until now, turned out to be wi

Going public had seemed a brilliant idea two years earlier when the Australian economy was booming and money was flowing like water. The initial offering had raised almost a billion dollars. But Grimes’s personal stock was locked up and his net worth had collapsed in the wake of bad bets in the mining and petroleum sectors when the company’s valuation dropped by half overnight.

The decline triggered covenants in the company’s debt agreements and now the wolf was at the door, the former golden child of the Australian investment community struggling for survival.

Grimes ran his fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, worn longish and combed straight back, and sighed. “Can’t we push some of the bad assets off into a subsidiary, at least for this quarter? You know, the usual game of musical chairs?”

His chief financial officer, Curtis Parker, shook his head. “The regulators will be all over us. If we transfer anything off the balance sheet, there will be fifty snoops demanding to know where it went and that will open a whole new can of worms. No, whether we like it or not we have to take our lumps and hope we can turn it around next quarter.”

Grimes frowned. “What about accelerating or slowing depreciation on some of the underperforming investments? Or why don’t we simply claim an inflated value for the assets with a straight face, get an accounting firm to sign off on it, and ignore that in a sale we’d get ten cents on the dollar?”

Parker gave him a humorless smile. “Because we aren’t a Wall Street bank. We don’t get to play those kinds of games. We’re expected to behave honestly.”

Grimes tossed his pen on the table. “Fine. How much of a hit are we going to take on the stock? Give me your worst-case scenario.”

“Fifteen percent. Which will recover within a week—I’ve lined up some buyers to come in and stabilize the price at that level and they’ll hype it once they’ve stopped the fall, turning a handy profit in the meantime—they’ve already established short positions to finance the purchases.” Parker glanced at a spreadsheet. “But we’re going to have a hell of a time with our credit lines. It’s looking increasingly like we won’t be able to service our debt within another two quarters and nobody’s going to want to be last in line to get paid.”

A beautiful brunette in her early thirties poked her head into the conference room and caught Grimes’s eye.

“Yes, Deb?” he asked.

“I have a call on your private line. Said it’s urgent . . . that you’re expecting the call?”

Grimes brightened. “Ah, yes.” He looked around the room at his i

“Line two,” she said as he entered his office, and he nodded as he closed the door behind him and walked to his desk. He sat in his burgundy calfskin executive chair and raised the handset to his ear.

“Hello,” he said.

The caller’s voice was flat, genderless, robotic, run through some sort of software filtering that disguised it, as it had been each time he’d spoken with his mystery accomplice.

“The first step in escalating our conflict has been taken. By the end of the day there will be articles in the Australian and Solomon papers about the aid workers’ disappearance, as well as the militia’s demands.”

“Finally, some good news. How do you intend to resolve the situation once the tension’s built sufficiently?”

“Unfortunately, the workers won’t make it. Which will trigger cries of outrage, demands for retribution, and travel advisories. Most important, it will create a difficult situation for the sitting administration, whose approach so far to unrest has been to do nothing.”

“Will that be sufficient?”

“Only time will tell.”

“I presume you have an alternate course of action if this doesn’t do the trick.”

“Of course. But you don’t want to know what it entails.”

“Very well. Do what you must.”

“Just don’t forget the next transfer. I’ll be watching for it.”

“Consider it done.”

The caller hung up, leaving Grimes staring at the phone. This was unlike any arrangement he’d ever had and that made him uncomfortable but also exhilarated. He’d been approached the year before by the caller, who’d had a unique proposition: participate in the formation of several untraceable corporations in far-flung jurisdictions and have them salt the Solomon Islands’ parliament with donations to pliable officials so that in the event of any societal upheaval the companies would be in first position to receive any new leases or prospecting rights for oil, gas, and minerals.

At first he’d been skeptical, but when the caller had promised to shut the gold mine down, it had gotten his attention. Right on schedule, things had begun to go wrong for the operation, culminating in seasonal flooding that brought catastrophic results mainly because emergency equipment designed to protect the mine failed at critical junctures.

Almost immediately after that the foreign operators had been ejected by the government, as promised, throwing the entire country’s mining prospects into jeopardy.

At that point Grimes became a believer and shunted millions from his personal accounts through a complex series of blind transfers in places like Latvia and the Seychelles. The cash wound up in the corporations that his new friend had set up, always in jurisdictions where ownership was impossible to verify. The visible entities appeared to be Solomon Island companies and would be viewed as domestic by any cursory regulatory scrutiny.

The game plan was simple: foment discontent and support a new rebel group whose aim was to eject the current players. Once that was done, allies of the caller would create a new administration that supported local involvement in key lucrative industries and would declare all prior agreements void before handing out new agreements to preferred players—Grimes’s silent-partnered corporations ranking among the most desirable.