An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Read online

  An Almighty Conspiracy

  A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected

  Fred Schäfer

  Copyright © 2011 Paul Friedrich Schäfer (Fred Schäfer)

  Preview Edition. Published by:

  Condor Books, 11 Starrs Road

  Quinns Rocks WA 6030

  Australia

  www.condorbooks.com

  www.amazon.author.com/fs

  Email: [email protected]

  Fred Schäfer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved.

  About Fred Schäfer

  Fred was born in the south of Germany. He lived in Berlin and Düsseldorf and travelled extensively in America, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. Today he lives with his family in Western Australia.

  Fred published his first books – fiction, poetry and travel experiences – in Germany. His most recent non-fiction books, The Solution Within Yourself and Success, Money and You, have sold successfully during public speaking engagements and seminars and have helped thousands of people to reassess and improve their lives.

  His previous novel, The Invention of The Big Bang, is a reflective and at times provocative story of four extraordinary people: an elderly banker, his wife and two young bohemians.

  This book, An Almighty Conspiracy, is the story of a con artist, a former Miss USA contestant, a detective and a woman who is not influenced by people’s external appearances. These people are brought together by fate – and they do the unexpected.

  Fred is the author of more than 12 books. A brief outline of each of his books can be found at the end of this novel.

  www.condorbooks.com

  www.amazon.com/author/fs

  Table of Contents

  About Fred Schäfer

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  A little request

  Acknowledgement

  Books by Fred Schäfer

  PART 1

  1

  It was nine o’clock in the evening. Mike Thompson and a man Mike had met ten minutes earlier were sitting in a bar in Queens Village. Nothing indicated that the man was about to die. Mike asked him for the third time, “Why did you request this meeting? We’re not making progress, unless you tell me. What is it that you want to talk to me about?”

  “I need to get to know you first.”

  “You know I’m a policeman, a detective. You said you read about me in the paper. What more do you need to know? You also said you are in a hurry, you have to go to the airport.”

  “I need to know if I can trust you,” the man replied.

  “I told you, you won’t know if you can trust a man unless you trust him. That’s the way to find out.”

  “Then it could be too late.”

  Mike decided to wait and said nothing. The man looked around. There were not many people in the bar. It was still early and would take another hour before the place started to fill up.

  “I’m a publisher,” the man said, “a niche publisher. I produce religious and philosophical books that have been out of print, often for centuries. For me, when I have to decide about whether or not to publish a book, the major criteria is whether the text has something to say about forgotten truths or forgotten unsolved crimes. A week ago I received a copy of a text about…”

  He never finished his sentence. He was interrupted by a loud voice from a man, Tony Jackson, sitting a few yards opposite him at the other end of the U-shaped bar. Tony yelled, “Down! Now! Hit the floor!” At the same time he dropped to the floor, out of sight.

  The publisher did not move. He stopped mid-sentence and looked surprised. The detective beside him reacted automatically and dropped off his barstool to the floor. In the process he grabbed the publisher’s arm and tried to pull him down, but he was a big man, overweight, at least 140 kilograms, and all Mike could do was pull on his jacket and let it go when the man didn’t follow.

  A fraction of a second later the publisher was hit by a bullet in the head, Mike was hit by a bullet in the shoulder. The publisher was dead. Mike’s injury wasn’t too bad. The bullet went straight through without touching bone. He ended up in hospital for one night. Then, instead of taking a few days off as the doctor had ordered, he returned to work.

  The dead man had phoned Mike a few hours before he was murdered. He told Mike that he had come across a story that may help the police to solve a major crime which had taken place some time ago. He was vague and gave his name as John Hector. He said he was on his way to the airport and could meet Mike for a quick beer before his departure. He gave Mike the name of a bar in the vicinity of Mike’s office and then hung up.

  Mike would not necessarily accept such an invitation, but he was a man who often followed his gut feelings, probably more often than he followed rules and regulations. In this instance his gut feeling created a mild sense of inquisitiveness and Mike decided to walk to the bar. At worst, he thought, there may be nothing behind the man’s story and he would have a beer and this would be okay. Besides, it was late and he should have left the office hours ago.

  While Mike was in hospital one of his colleagues had identified the dead man as Edward Rose. He was a publisher, just as he had told Mike. The name he had told Mike on the phone was false. His one man company was located in Brooklyn and published on average two books a year. A search of the premises revealed nothing of interest. From his hospital bed Mike had told the search team to look for a text, probably a copy of a manuscript, it could be one page or lots of pages. The search team leader replied, “This is a book publishing company, there are probably hundreds of copies of manuscripts. Can you be more specific?” Mike couldn’t. The team found nothing, not even one manuscript, which at first seemed strange. Later they discovered that all manuscripts of published books were kept in a safe in the publisher’s apartment in Greenwich Village.

  Out of the hospital and back at work, Mike looked at the CCTV footage from the bar’s security cameras. The recordings from the various cameras installed inside and outside the bar were excellent. They showed Mike everything he was interested in: the faces of two killers, the pistols and the two shots that were fired. They showed Mike’s reaction and his attempt to pull the fat man with him to the floor. They showed the fat man’s permanent departure and the face of the man who had yelled the warning. Mike thought, This man saved my life. Who is he? Why didn’t he stay and report what he had seen to the police? Why did he disappear? The security cameras showed him leaving the bar immediately after the shooting. He walked out, casually. He seemed in no hurry, as if nothing had happened. One of the security cameras also showed that he took his almost empty beer glass with him. Outside the bar he poured the rest of the beer onto the footpath and placed the empty glass in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Tony Jackson was fifty two and Mike Thompson fifty three. They were each about five feet nine tall (180 cm), fit, healthy, athletic and with dense grey hair that made them appear distinguished and trustworthy. They could have been academics: Professor Thompson and Professor Jackson; nobody would have doubted it. They could have been businessmen, retired tennis players, doctors, even actors. As we will see, they would have been very good actors. However, at the time when the publisher was murdered, they didn’t know each other.

  Neither the faces of the two gunmen nor the face of the man who had saved Mike’s life were known to the police. They could not be found in police files or databases. This was somewhat strange, Mike thought, at least the gu
nmen should be known. They acted like professionals; most professionals, by the time they had achieved this kind of status, had a record and were known to the police. The police may not know more than their names and faces, but in this case the police had to conclude that they were dealing with dangerous criminals of whom, so far, they knew nothing.

  Mike arranged for the security recordings to be analysed by forensic experts. The experts concluded that the faces of the two men who had fired the shots were not their real faces. These men were wearing partial face modifications. Their chins and noses were enlarged and they were wearing wigs. These were the most common disguises used by movie studios when they wanted to alter an actor’s face without preventing the actor’s face from making movements and from appearing natural when the actor laughed or displayed other emotions.

  The face of the man who yelled the warning seemed real. “He is a handsome looking guy,” said Mike’s partner Christina. “Just like me,” Mike replied jokingly. “Actually,” commented Christina, who insisted on being called Christina and not Tina or Chris, “you are not wrong. You two have the same figure and pretty much the same hairstyle.” She stepped back a couple of yards and asked Mike to walk to the office entrance and back. Mike did her the favour and she finished her assessment by saying: “He seems more relaxed than you. You look a bit stiff and tense in comparison to him.” Mike didn’t know what to say. It didn’t seem important enough to reply. But then a thought occurred to him and he said, “I guess the man is rich, lives in a penthouse overlooking the Hudson River, has one or two sexy girlfriends and doesn’t have to chase murderers to make a living. If I swapped my miserable life with his life, I too could look relaxed and not worry about a damn thing.” He didn’t know then that his assessment was not far off the mark.

  2

  One of Tony Jackson’s girlfriends was a former Miss USA contestant. This goes back quite a few years to when she was nineteen. Rumour has it that she won the contest but then, before the result was made public, she convinced the judges that they should make her the runner up. She didn’t feel like continuing, trying to become Miss Universe and that kind of stuff, she explained. They didn’t like it but she insisted and no matter how much they pressured her and how much money they offered she wouldn’t change her mind. Now, at the age of forty three she could still get away as a woman in her late twenties. The cut of her blonde hair, neither short nor long, made her look Swedish, her figure was sexy, but not in an exaggerated way. Her name was Nancy Baliva, she was slim, about an inch shorter than Tony, looked sporty and whenever she smiled, Tony thought that none of his previous girlfriends had such a warm, intelligent and natural smile.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

  “What makes you think something is wrong?”

  “I feel it.”

  This conversation took place during breakfast the day after the murder.

  Tony told his girlfriends that he was reasonably well off because of an inheritance twenty years ago. Most women were satisfied with this explanation and the topic didn’t come up again. Nancy did not belong to most women. When he told her about his inheritance she was interested in details. This was a bit over six months ago, shortly after they had met in a first class airport lounge.

  “What can one say,” she replied after he had told her about the source of his wealth, “it is great if one inherits a lot of money, but I do hope it was not at the expense of a loved one.”

  “No,” he said, “a distant relative”.

  “Most people,” she continued, “inherit money from their parents. Are your parents still alive and well?”

  Tony didn’t want to talk about his parents and he definitely didn’t want to talk about his non-existent distant aunt, an excentric old woman who throughout most of her non-existent life had countless non-existent disagreements with just about everybody, except with him. “Therefore,” Tony had explained after ten minutes of questioning, “I assume she decided to leave all her possessions to me.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Lucky me, indeed.”

  Now Nancy wants to know what’s wrong with him. How could she know that something was wrong in the first place? I am an experienced and successful fraudster, Tony thought. I am also a good poker player. I have learned to hide my emotions. I have practised it for decades. In fact, I am a master at hiding my emotions. I was there when someone was killed yesterday, shot in the head, I am sure I didn’t show any emotions about that, how can she know that something is wrong? Nothing is wrong. I am just a bit concerned about the recordings made by the damned surveillance cameras in the bar. But Tony was smart enough not to contradict her.

  “You are a good observer,” he said. “I was thinking we should go away for a few weeks. Perhaps to Europe, Paris, Berlin, London, Saint Tropez, what do you think?”

  “Well … if this is all you are worried about, I would say, let’s go. But are you sure there is nothing else on your mind?”

  “No! Only you, holidays and having a good time together.”

  She is listening to her intuition and is not easily diverted, Tony thought. She would make a good trickster. She can almost read people’s thoughts. She would also make a good detective. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

  Just to make sure she stopped inquiring he added, “There are other things on my mind, things like whether it is time to get out of the share market, I am also thinking of selling an investment property, a friend offered me a partnership in his gym; that kind of stuff. Nothing serious. Kind of worries which 95% of the world’s population would love to have.”

  “Well then, let’s plan a holiday to Europe.”

  They finished breakfast and went back to bed where they made love. Later she went to a sports boutique on the Fifth Avenue which she owned jointly with another woman, a previous international tennis star. He went to his study where he checked how the share markets in Europe and Asia had performed during the night. For the next two hours he bought and sold shares and options, just the way he had done almost every workday morning for the past two decades. He was not only a good con artist, he had also learned to invest and double, on average every four years, the money he had swindled out of the bank accounts of the rich and superrich.

  3

  Mike decided against initiating searching for the man who had saved his life. He was pretty certain that the man would not be able to tell him anymore about the two men who had killed the publisher than what he knew from watching the security videos. The CCTV footage from the bar’s cameras provided a complete second by second record of what had happened. It showed the two men approaching the bar on the footpath. It showed them entering the bar. They immediately identified the obese publisher, had a look to the left, to the right, pulled their guns from holsters hidden by their jackets, they aimed and at the same moment the man opposite the publisher yelled, “Down! Now! Hit the floor!” Mike and the man who had yelled the warning dropped off their barstools; the publisher hardly moved and ended up with a bullet in the back of his head.

  Mike was certain there was nothing else the man who had saved his life could have told him, unless he knew the assassins. But there was nothing to make him think that this could be the case. Mike suspected that the man left the bar because he didn’t want to be interviewed by the police. There could be dozens of reasons for that. Maybe he just didn’t want to hang around, maybe he had decided that there was nothing he knew that could have helped the police, maybe he hated publicity, maybe he was a tax cheat or a drug dealer or a foreigner whose visa had expired and therefore had no interest in identifying himself. Whatever the case, Mike thought, you saved my life, thank you and may the force be with you; should we ever run into each other, allow me to buy you a beer.

  Looking into the dead publisher’s affairs revealed a number of interesting facts. He had been running his publishing business for twelve years. In these twelve years he had published twenty four books. Every book he had published made a loss. Every year of the man’s
twelve years in business showed a loss. It was obvious that the kind of books that his business published were meant for a niche market. He could not expect to sell tens of thousands of copies of a particular title; if he could sell five hundred or a thousand books of a title that would have to be regarded as a success. This was obvious to Mike and was confirmed by publishing people when he checked his opinion with them. “So why then,” and he asked this question every marketing and publishing expert he met, “did this man print thirty thousand books of each title? And what happened to these books? Where are they? As far as we could establish, he did not sell one book in twelve years. Not officially. We have evidence that he printed books – a total of 720,000 first class hard cover books – but we don’t have the faintest idea what happened to them.”

  Nobody knew. The police found two copies of each of the books in the publisher’s residence.

  The man, Edward Rose, had arrived in New York from London two years prior to the start of his business. He had an expired English passport and overstayed his visa by many years. Investigations in London were of no help. He was unknown. His passport turned out to be a high quality fake document. During the ten minutes Mike had met him, the detective thought he may have noticed a slight accent in the man’s words and sentences. But he wasn’t sure. It could simply have been the man’s unusual melodic voice that gave this impression.

  Two weeks after the publisher’s murder Mike went to Plainfield, NJ. He talked with Christina on his cell phone about another murder case they were working on. Christina had phoned him and told him about an anonymous fax that had arrived a few minutes earlier. “It contains a New Jersey address, just a few miles outside Plainfield,” she said. “What else?” “Nothing else, just an address, no explanation, no comment, nothing. It may or may not have something to do with the case.” There was no need for his partner to tell him what case she was referring to.