Windfall

Windfall

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1981

Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1981

Cover layout design Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008211356

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008211363 Version: 2017-07-05

Title Page

Copyright

Windfall

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

To JAN HEMSING and an unknown number of Kenyan cats

It is difficult to know when this business began. Certainly it was not with Ben Hardin. But possibly it began when Jomo Kenyatta instructed the Kenyan delegation to the United Nations to lead a move to expel South Africa from the UN. That was on the 25th of October, 1974, and it was probably soon thereafter that the South Africans decided they had to do something about it.

Max Stafford himself dated his involvement to the first day back at the London office after an exhaustive, and exhausting, trip around Europe—Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Milan. Three years earlier he had decided that since his clients were multinational he, perforce, would also have to go multinational. It had been a hard slog setting up the European offices but now Stafford Security Consultants, as well as sporting the tag ‘Ltd’ after the company name, had added ‘SA’, ‘GmbH’, ‘SpA’ and a couple of other assortments of initials. Stafford was now looking with a speculative eye across the Atlantic in the hope of adding ‘Inc’.

He paused in the ante-room of his office. ‘Is Mr Ellis around?’

Joyce, his secretary, said, ‘I saw him five minutes ago. Did you have a good trip?’

‘Wearing, but good.’ He put a small package on her desk. ‘Your favourite man-bait from Paris; Canal something-or-other. I’ll be in Mr Ellis’s office until further notice.’

Joyce squeaked. ‘Thanks, Mr Stafford.’

Jack Ellis ran the United Kingdom operation. He was young, but coming along nicely, and ran a taut ship. Stafford had promoted him to the position when he had made the decision to move into Europe. It had been risky using so young a man in a top post where he would have to negotiate with some of the stuffier and elderly Chairmen of companies, but it had worked out and Stafford had never regretted it.

They talked for a while about the European trip and then Ellis looked at his watch. ‘Bernstein will be here any minute.’ He gestured to a side table on which lay several fat files. ‘Have you read the reports?’

Stafford grimaced. ‘Not in detail.’ Having determined to expand he had gone the whole hog and commissioned an independent company to do a world-wide investigation into possibilities. It was costing a lot but he thought it would be worthwhile in the long run. However, he liked to deal with people rather than paper and he wanted to match the man against the words he had written. He said, ‘We’ll go over it once lightly with Bernstein.’

Two hours later he was satisfied. Bernstein, an American, was acute and sensible; he had both feet firmly planted on the ground and was not a man to indulge in impossible blue sky speculation. Stafford thought he could trust his written reports.

Bernstein tossed a file aside. ‘So much for Australasia. Now we come to Africa.’ He picked up another file. ‘The problem in general with Africa is political instability.’

Stafford said, ‘Stick to the English-speaking countries. We’re not ready to go into francophone Africa.’ He paused. ‘Not yet.’

Bernstein nodded. ‘That means the ex-British colonies. South Africa, of course, is the big one.’ They discussed South Africa for some time and Bernstein made some interesting suggestions. Then he said, ‘Next is Zimbabwe. It’s just attained independence with a black government. Nobody knows which way it’s going to go right now and I wouldn’t recommend it for you. Tanzania is out; the country is virtually bankrupt and there’s no free enterprise. The same goes for Uganda. Now, Kenya is different.’