The Take(7)

Simon climbed behind the wheel and drove out of the parking lot. In moments, he was speeding beside the River Thames.

Three million for a watch.

Amazing what people would pay for things these days.





Chapter 3



Lloyd’s of London, the world’s preeminent insurance exchange, had its offices in a steel-and-glass skyscraper in the heart of the City, the one-square-mile district that was home to England’s most powerful financial institutions. Late on a Sunday night, lights burned brightly on all floors. Insuring risk was a twenty-four-hours-a-day occupation.

Simon parked in the subterranean garage and showed his ID at the reception desk on the main floor. “Mr. Moore,” he said, giving the name of his contact.

“Know the way, do you?” said the security guard.

Simon took an elevator to the eleventh floor. The door to the office was unlocked. He followed the scent of coffee and cigars to the end of the hall.

“Don’t you sleep?”

D’Artagnan Moore sat at his desk, banging figures into his computer. “Did you get it?”

“And here I thought you were staying awake to make sure I got home all right.”

“Well, did you?”

“You mean this?” Simon dropped the watch on the desk.

“Careful!” Moore scooped up the timepiece in his immense hands, appraising it before offering Simon a relieved look. “Of course I was worried about you. It’s just that I was worried about this beauty more.”

D’Artagnan Russell McKenzie Moore was a bear of a man, six and a half feet tall, three hundred pounds, with a mane of untamed hair and a black beard that had been neither groomed nor trimmed in years. As was his custom, Moore was dressed in a tweed hunting jacket over a cardigan vest. Simon had known him since the age of eight, when he’d lived with his father in the village of Royal Tunbridge Wells and the two boys had attended the same day school in Surrey. Simon’s father, Anthony Riske, had come to London to set up a branch of his commodities-trading business. Moore, the son of minor nobility, went on to Harrow, Cambridge, and a stellar career in the insurance industry. Simon’s path took him in a different direction.

“Still haven’t told me where you learned the trade,” said Moore, eyeing him from beneath a shaggy brow. “I don’t imagine they taught you that at the LSE.”

Simon smiled cryptically, then dropped into a chair across from the desk. “What are you going to tell your partners?”

“They know better than to ask. Discretion is the better part of profit.” Moore slipped the watch into a beige jewel pouch and locked it in his desk. “Went well, did it?”

“To a point.”

Moore’s leonine head came to attention. “How so?”

“There was a second as I was leaving when I thought he might have noticed the switch. Not consciously, maybe, but by instinct. Guys like that have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Are you saying I’m a thief?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Moore. “But he didn’t…notice, I mean.”

“No.”

“Then none’s the wiser. What’s he going to do? Report it missing? By God, I’ve got friends at Scotland Yard who wish he would.” Moore rose from his desk and poured two drinks from his sideboard. He handed a glass to Simon. “Health.”

“Health.” Simon swallowed the scotch in a single gulp.

“You Yanks,” said Moore. “Think everything needs to be consumed at once. This isn’t some cheap Tennessee sour mash. Sip it, lad.”

“Laphroaig. Single malt.”

“I’m impressed.”

“You’ve told me a dozen times. And I’ll take Jack any day.”

“Cretin.”

“And proud of it. How ’bout another?”

Moore brought the decanter to the desk and poured Simon another drink. “Talk. You’re as nervous as a bull in a slaughterhouse.”

“Just unsettled.”

“Shop not doing well?”

“Pays for itself.”

“And then some. We write insurance on automobiles, too, you know. The price of those Italian contraptions has gone through the roof of late.”

“I restore them. I don’t own them. There’s overhead. Salaries. Parts are a fortune. I need to order a new dynamometer to test my engines. Thing costs fifty thousand pounds.”

“Go back to private banking. I know a dozen shops would love to have you.”

Simon looked around the office. He’d spent years toiling inside a plush coffin no different from this. In all, they were good years. Challenging, enriching, stimulating. He’d taken the job with an express purpose. He’d been tasked to find something. When he’d succeeded, he left.

He’d begun his career at twenty-seven, old for someone without an MBA. If anyone had been curious about the gap in his résumé between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, they never said. They were too dazzled by his First from the London School of Economics and his medal for excellence in mathematics from the Sciences Po. And, anyway, by then they’d met him and that was enough.

Twelve-hour days had been common. Weekends, the norm. No one was more driven. But if Simon wore his ambition on his sleeve, he was the rare type whose motives were not in question. The bank’s interests came first. His own, afterward.