How Not To Make Money , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Raj Kundra

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205 pages

English

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When booze smugglers Jai and Mike reconsider their options after another close brush with the law, their friend Aziz, a corporate lawyer comes up with a plan for all of them to rake in even more money with less risk. Setting up an undetectable, foolproof scam, the boys who grew up together in the same London neighbourhood are now going to grow rich together, and quick. As with the best laid plans, they'd not counted on a few bumps along the way in the form of the intrepid fraud investigator who picks up on their trail, and Pam, the femme fatale whose sari blouses leave less to the imagination than bikinis, who has her eye set firmly on Jai. Knowing you have to risk it big to make it big, the boys put everything on the line in this high-speed thrill ride of a novel. But will they come out laughing or are they walking into a trap?

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Thriller

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	14 octobre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184004977
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright Raj Kundra 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004977
C ONTENTS
P ART O NE : The Boys
P ART T WO : The Great Game
P ART T HREE : The Jimmy Tipnis
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
P ART O NE
T HE B OYS
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
-AC/DC
1.1
There were ten minutes left until they d start the run back from Calais and Mike was watching the seconds tick away on the caf clock while JD kept his face buried in The Sun . When you were running two hundred thousand pounds worth of contraband into England, there was only so much you could do to keep from getting caught, and once you d done that there was fuck-all else to do. If they felt Customs coming down on them once they were moving, there d be options, but they wouldn t know what those options were until the last second, the last chance. So what was there to talk about?
Mike?
Yeah? Mike looked out of the window, through the collected grease of years, at a sky that darkened towards a singular grey.
It says here that a bunch of Arabs spent fifty thousand pounds in one evening at a place called the Doxy. JD s head emerged from the paper. Can you fucking believe that?
Mike shrugged. It s their money.
I wonder how much that is in camels?
Mike laughed through the side of his mouth and JD grinned back at him. He shook his head and looked down at The Sun .
Fifty thousand pounds, he said. His voice was soft. Mike winced. JD was setting himself up for one of his monologues. He looks like a violin-playing Jew, and not a Punjabi misfit from Heston, thought Mike. JD had mournful basset hound eyes, hair that went every which way and Satan s grin. It was an attractive, sharp face. But it wasn t distinctive. JD had learned that trick very early in their association.
They could both effortlessly disappear into crowds. It was a skill that they d possessed since their childhoods. Profit always ran in the mob, at their end of the street. JD was better at it because he was brown, and because he was smaller.
Mike had to work harder at it. He was taller, bigger, memorable because he was weather-beaten. He had a hard face, but one that people identified with. Mike looked like someone everyone knew. Mike drained the last of his coffee.
JD glanced at his watch. It was verging towards half past. He swung around and waved at the waiter for the bill.
The two men exited the caf , both pulling on leather gloves. They walked around the corner to a small white van. Mike reached into his pocket for the keys. Above them, the night was on the move, descending, restless, like black ink seeping through cotton. The streetlamps were already beginning to hum. The wonder of it, JD thought, was this little stretch of Calais, removed from the clock tower that served as the dead centre of the town by only a handful of streets, and was quiet enough for him to catch that hum. He turned around the other way-he could see the top of the enormous glass dome that formed the entrance of the Cit Europe mall. That , he knew well enough. He had spent a large part of the previous twenty-four hours moving in and out of it.
Mike was already in the driver s seat, waiting. They always picked ordinary-looking vans. But every single one of them had the living hell tuned out of it.
Let s roll, JD said, the grin still on his face. It s a nice enough night for it.
Mike turned the van around, waited at the intersection and turned right, heading back towards Cit Europe.

Mike drove quickly but unhurriedly, as if he spoke the van s language. The two of them had once outrun a tail on the M25, taking the off-ramp into a series of country roads that JD had never seen, and had never seen again. That was the fastest he d seen anyone drive, and Mike had done it with the tach red-lining, barely touching the brakes. There were three turns, JD remembered, where he was certain that they d finally run out of luck-the rear end of the van fishtailing like it was on snow. On each of those turns Mike had literally talked the van back onto the road, laying fifty or sixty feet of rubber every time. His shoulders never tensed. His grip on the steering wheel remained light and relaxed, with Mike still laid back in the absurd position he always put the driver s seat in, almost horizontal. They d lost the tail in about twenty minutes and had come to a halt at a pub-The Traveller s Rest-with their tyres still smoking. JD had opened the door and vomited, mostly out of relief. Mike had just grinned. It was only later in the pub that his hands began to tremble. JD had forced him to drink two whiskys and had driven them home with changed number plates. Shortly after that, they had altered their model of operation to the present one.
JD shifted in his seat and crossed his right leg over his left. As he untied and redid his shoelace, swearing under his breath because of the gloves, the van joined the motorway proper. They were clear. On the other side of the road, the traffic into Cit Europe was beginning to build up. They were now out of the town limits.
Do it, Mike said, not taking his eyes off the road.
JD reached for the rucksack lying at his feet, pulled out two packets of chewing gum and tossed them onto the dashboard. Mike grunted a single short laugh.
Never forget, huh?
It s a charm, bruv. You respect the luck. Only then does the luck respect you.
Did you come up with that? All on your own, JD? Mike asked.
There s more I can come up with, said JD. If you like.
Please spare me.
JD took three cell phones from the bag, his bashers on this trip, all of them identical. Each had a tag of paper taped to the side, neatly numbered, the sequence running 1-2-3. He picked up the phone labelled 1 , pulled off the label, and dialled.

Ritual came with the territory. It made them what they were-successful smugglers in a business that afforded very little success. This was the climax to their weekend. This had been the climax to most of their weekends over the past five years.
If Brian disconnected after a single ring, it meant they were going through with the run. And they were running the single largest amount of contraband they had ever attempted. The moment they entered the inspection bay before boarding the train across the Channel, everything went on hold. Decisions, if they had to be made, were made in seconds. Maintaining a winning percentage in this business required a combination of intelligence, intuition and pure balls.
The game had three stages. The first, and most basic, was sourcing the goods. Depending on the size of their shipment, this might indicate either a day-trip to Calais or a longer visit. For the current stock, JD and Mike had made the trip across on Saturday morning, yesterday. In turns, they ran Cit Europe ragged, while the other visited a number of smaller shops in and around the Town Hall. They were always careful, never buying too much from one location, always paying cash. This morning they had driven into a warehouse they rented in a poorer quarter of Calais. Brian Nash, the driver of the stock van, had driven across the Channel at a pre-arranged time, parked his van in the warehouse (he had his own key) and left to get breakfast. There, JD spent approximately an hour in absolute concentration, transferring the goods to Brian s van. It was all about the packing: the central core of cigarettes and booze was surrounded equally on all sides by boxes and boxes of packed drinking glasses. JD had a friend who serviced baggage X-ray machines at Heathrow airport, and he d picked up this little nugget after feeding the guy a few pints. Carbon confused the scanners. It had worked for them thus far. The glasses guaranteed nothing. Just that the Customs guys would think once before they unpacked everything.
When he was done, JD would replicate the set-up in their own van. Inevitably, he would use more boxes this time around because he was compensating for weight. He needed to make up the difference, the weight of the contraband, with more glasses. The vans needed to be identical, with one crucial difference in the belly of the beast.
While JD was working on Brian s van, Mike spent the hour washing down every square inch of their own, obliterating any possible fingerprints. This was central to their current method of operation; once JD was done with Brian s van, he would wear gloves for the rest of the trip. Since the opening of the Eurotunnel, Customs had clamped down very hard. The tax on booze and cigarettes on the Continent made bulk-buying very attractive, and the tunnel invited large-scale racketeering.
The guidelines allowed for personal use-around three thousand two hundred cigarettes, and proportional quantities of booze, one hundred and ten litres of beer-on a single trip. Anything above was contraband. Mike and JD typically moved between seventy-five thousand and a hundred grand worth of stock on any given weekend. A bust meant seizure of the van and immediate arrests. Or occasionally, they got tails once they landed in England, Customs trying to uncover the London base for a suspicious van. But since that narrow escape on the M25 about two years ago, they had perfected their method.
A hired driver drove the van with