Free The Untouchable by Gerald Seymour Page A

above the ground. Inside the ribbed metal container, which would fragment into shrapnel, was a core of TNT. They could kill anyone within a twenty-five metre radius of the detonated charge. The positioning of each was marked on the captain's map, and the location of two PROMs and their trip-wires.
    As the war stretched out its greedy arms to them, the villages and the valley were now contaminated.

Chapter Three
    'What are you going to do? Go on, or step back?'
    'I'm thinking.'
    At a few minutes short of five o'clock in the morning, the sparrows, tits and chaffinches were starting to sing and, with the smear of grey softening the city's lights, Mister paced in the back garden. The Princess was now beside him. She had been to bed, had woken, found he wasn't beside her - panicked before clarity took over from the weariness - thrown on her dressing-gown, and come to find him. He did most of his thinking in the back garden, and made all of his calls on the mobile phones from behind the screen of conifers that would block out their cameras.
    'Can you do it without Cruncher?' she murmured.
    He was two years younger than Cruncher. At school he had made the money and Cruncher had been his banker; he had put the frighteners on the kids and they'd taken money from home, and Cruncher had minded it for him and told him where to put it; good old conservative Cruncher, then aged fifteen, had put his first hundred and his first thousand into Channel Island-based bonds, a numbered anonymous account. He'd lost touch with Cruncher when he'd gone to the young-offenders prison, and Cruncher had moved out of Attlee House. If Cruncher had been physically strong, and a hard man, he would eventually have taken over his parents' fruit and vegetable stall in Dalston market. If he'd had money, real money, he would have gone off to accountancy school.
    He hadn't been strong, hadn't had the resources, so he'd taken a flat south of the river and a clerk's job in the City. The way Cruncher told it, the supervising clerk was embezzling, and doing it cleverly because when the books bounced the blame seemed to fall at Cruncher's feet. A fraud conviction had put Cruncher into Pentonville, and an old friendship had been resumed. Mister, and he'd always acknowledged it, was fascinated - in Pentonville and afterwards - by Cruncher's encyclopedic knowledge of the routes for moving covert money. The day after he'd been released, two weeks before Cruncher came out, he'd gone down to a suburban Blackheath road, kicked in the supervising clerk's door, beaten the man half to death, good enough for him never to work again, and Cruncher had become his man.
    'I never backed off.'
    'Is it that important, to you?'
    'Seems to be.'
    'But you've never done anything big - and this is the biggest - without Cruncher.'
    Cruncher organized the network of bankers and dealers who would ignore the Disclosure regulations and flush the money into the legal financial system.
    Cruncher liked to say that the size of the globe had been reduced to that of a computer screen. Accounts were held in the Caymans, Cyprus, Panama, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela and Canada, and still there was the old Jersey nest-egg. Cruncher talked a language, foreign enough to Mister, of cost flow, franchising, front companies and offshore. Half the year Cruncher was in the air or swanning in the best hotels on Mister's business, moving money and identifying the property investments that the Eagle made legitimate.
    If there had been records available to public scrutiny, and there were not, Mister would have figured on any list of Great Britain's top twenty for wealth. It had been Cruncher's idea that he should move on, soar upwards, do his biggest deal. The thought of the deal, in the eight months in Brixton, had sustained Mister.
    'Have to learn then, won't I?'
    'Like the start again of the good days . . . ?'
    'The best days.'
    The good days, the best days, the days he loved, were the early ones when he had made his