Page 29 - double revenge 3.

Satisfied with his message he then used his notebook to encode it into a long list of numbers. When
he had finished he used the office phone to dial his contact. There was no voice on the other end;

just a long tone blip and Hagley typed in the list of digits using the dial pad. When he had finished
he settled back into the comfortable Captain’s Chair to await Arnold Warner’s presence and started
to doze.

‘What the hell is going on and who the hell are you?’

Hagley was brought abruptly from his light slumber.

Framed in the doorway with a now defunct set of keys in his hand, stood, Hagley presumed, Arnold
Warner.

‘I should lean the door against the wall if I were you.’ advised Hagley. ‘And then come and sit down,
we have to talk.’

Warner propped the door against the wall and turned back to the room.

‘What are you doing in my office and who are you?’

‘First things first. What I am doing in your office is discovering you are a compulsive gambler. At a

rough count, I would say you are over sixty grand in the hole. A Mafia bookie will probably be
sending round a debt collector accompanied by his specialist knee-capping colleague pretty soon.
Secondly I have discovered you have been skimming accounts to pay off previous debts to the tune
of around half a million bucks. If your boss at Langley ever found out you would soon make the
obituary column in the Boston Globe. The story would be about an investment advisor who
couldn’t face his clients with the big losses he had made on their money and decided to throw
himself under a tram.
You know the sort of thing.
Thirdly, you are trying to shake down someone who I can only presume to be a representative of
her Britannic Majesty’s Intelligence Service. An audacious challenge even for someone with the

amount of shit you seem to be swimming in.

Arnold, you are an accountant who is trying his damndest to be America’s number one most
wanted but you have no idea how to steal other people’s money. You have been set up by the CIA
as an investment office in the city which gave birth to the greatest fraud of all time, the Ponzi
scheme, not five miles from where we sit and all you can do is gamble your employers money away.
Have you not thought that whatever scams you got up to the CIA would protect you, they wouldn’t
want your true identity and what you do to get out. You could have earned all the money you need

from suckers trying to get rich quick. You wouldn’t have needed to steal from the CIA and you
would have been able to pay off your gambling debts tenfold. And now you have the perfect
blackmail scenario. Arnie my son, you are sat on a goldmine. You are an accountant trying to be a
crook whereas I am a professional crook.

As to who I am, Arnold, I am your new business partner.’