Paper Money
Ken Follett
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
SIX A.M.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
SEVEN A.M.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
EIGHT A.M.
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
NINE A.M.
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
TEN A.M.
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
ELEVEN A.M.
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
TWELVE NOON
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
ONE P.M.
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
TWO P.M.
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
THREE P.M.
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
FOUR P.M.
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
It would make a powerful government official risk his reputation--and career--in one unforgettable night. . . . It would set the stock market spinning in a bold move to take over a giant corporation. . . . And it was worth any gamble for a corporate raider who used illicit information as his tool--and deadly violence as his weapon. . . .
Paper Money
An explosive novel of high finance and underworld villainy from Ken Follett, the grand master of international action and suspense.
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF KEN FOLLETT
JACKDAWS
"[A] celebration of uncommon courage and unlikely heroes."
--People
"Great entertainment."
--The Baltimore Sun
CODE TO ZERO
"Gripping."
--The New York Times
"This spy thriller is Follett at his best."
--People
THE HAMMER OF EDEN
"Hammer will nail readers to their seats."
--People
"Follett ratchets up the Richter scale of suspense."
--USA Today
THE THIRD TWIN
"Follett really knows how to tell a story."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"His scenes whip along. And his ending is absolutely smashing."
--The Virginian-Pilot
A PLACE CALLED FREEDOM
"An altogether entertaining reading experience."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
A DANGEROUS FORTUNE
"A terrific page-turner. Careening thrills . . . telling historical detail . . . genuine surprises."
--Los Angeles Times
"Relentlessly suspenseful."
--The New York Times
NIGHT OVER WATER
"An excruciatingly taut drama on the aerial equivalent of the Orient Express . . . thoroughly satisfying . . . his best since Eye of the Needle."
--Publishers Weekly
THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH
"An extraordinary epic buttressed by suspense . . . a monumental masterpiece . . . a towering triumph from a major talent."
--Booklist
"A seesaw of tension . . . a novel that entertains, instructs, and satisfies on a grand scale."
--Publishers Weekly
LIE DOWN WITH LIONS
"Sheer suspense."
--The Washington Post
"Vintage Follett. . . . This is his most ambitious novel and it succeeds admirably. . . . Tense, vivid, exciting . . . satisfies on deep levels."
--USA Today
ON WINGS OF EAGLES
"Absolutely electric with suspense."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"A marvelous, rare, terrific read . . . A superb edge-of-the-seat true story that is as exciting as a novel."
--USA Today
THE MAN FROM ST. PETERSBURG
"Ken Follett has done it once more . . . goes down with the ease and impact of a well-prepared martini."
--The New York Times Book Review
THE KEY TO REBECCA
"A topflight adventure thriller . . . violence, intrigue, and exotic passions . . . a vivid page-turner."
--The Washington Post
"The most exciting novel in years."
--The Cincinnati Enquirer
TRIPLE
"One of the liveliest thrillers of the year. . . . Follett is a master of crafty plot and incredible detail . . . a sizzling narrative."
--Time
EYE OF THE NEEDLE
"Really thrilling."
--The New York Times Book Review
ALSO BY KEN FOLLETT
The Modigliani Scandal
Paper Money
Eye of the Needle
Triple
The Key to Rebecca
The Man from St. Petersburg
On Wings of Eagles
Lie Down with Lions
The Pillars of the Earth
Night over Water
A Dangerous Fortune
A Place Called Freedom
The Third Twin
The Hammer of Eden
Code to Zero
Jackdaws
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
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Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Published by arrangement with the author.
First Signet Printing, October 1987
Copyright (c) Zachary Stone, 1977
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK--MARCA REGISTRADA
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-10104385-1
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INTRODUCTION
This book was written in 1976, immediately before Eye of the Needle, and I think it is the best of my unsuccessful books. It was published under the pseudonym Zachary Stone, as was The Modigliani Scandal, because the books are similar: they lack a central character
, but feature several groups of characters whose stories are linked and share a common climax.
In Paper Money the links are less fortuitous, for the book is supposed to show how crime, high finance, and journalism are corruptly interconnected. The ending is rather somber by comparison with The Modigliani Scandal--in fact it is almost a tragedy. However, it is the differences and similarities between Paper Money and Eye of the Needle that are most instructive. (Readers who want the cake, not the recipe, should skip this and go straight to chapter 1.) The plot of Paper Money is the cleverest I have ever devised, and the small sales of the book convinced me that clever plots satisfy authors more than readers. The plot of Eye of the Needle is of course very simple--in fact it can be written down in three paragraphs, as indeed I did write it when I first thought of it. Eye of the Needle has only three or four main characters whereas Paper Money has a dozen or so. Yet with its complex plot and large cast, Paper Money is only half the length of Eye of the Needle. As a writer I have always had to struggle against a tendency to underwrite, and in Paper Money you see me struggling in vain. Consequently the many characters are painted in brisk, bold brushstrokes, and the book lacks the feeling of detailed personal involvement with the private lives of the characters that readers demand of a bestseller.
One of the strengths of the book is its form. The action takes place during a single day in the life of a London evening newspaper (I worked for such a newspaper in 1973 and 1974), and each chapter chronicles one hour of that day in three or four scenes describing both what happens at the news desk and what happens in the stories the paper is covering (or missing). Eye of the Needle has an even more rigid structure, although nobody to my knowledge has ever noticed it: there are six parts, each with six chapters (except for the last part, which has seven), the first chapter in each part dealing with the spy, the second with the spy catchers, and so on until the sixth, which always tells of the international military consequences of what has gone before. Readers do not notice such things--and why should they?--but still I suspect that regularity, and even symmetry, contribute to what they perceive as a well-told story.
The other feature Paper Money shares with Eye of the Needle is a wealth of good minor characters--tarts, thieves, half-witted children, working-class wives, and lonely old men. In subsequent books I have not done this, for it only diverts from the main characters and their story; yet I often wonder whether I am being too clever.
Today I am not as sure as I was in 1976 of the links between crime, high finance, and journalism; but I think this book is true to life in another way. It presents a detailed picture of the London that I knew in the seventies, with its policemen and crooks, bankers and call girls, reporters and politicians, its shops and slums, its roads and its river. I loved it, and I hope you will too.
SIX A.M.
1
It was the luckiest night of Tim Fitzpeterson's life.
He thought this the moment he opened his eyes and saw the girl, in bed beside him, still sleeping. He did not move, for fear of waking her; but he looked at her, almost furtively, in the cold light of the London dawn. She slept flat on her back, with the absolute relaxation of small children. Tim was reminded of his own Adrienne when she was little. He put the unwelcome thought out of his mind.
The girl beside him had red hair, fitting her small head like a cap, showing her tiny ears. All her features were small: nose, chin, cheekbones, dainty teeth. Once, in the night, he had covered her face with his broad, clumsy hands, pressing his fingers gently into the hollows of her eyes and her cheeks, opening her soft lips with his thumbs, as if his skin could feel her beauty like the heat from a fire.
Her left arm lay limply outside the coverlet, which was pushed down to reveal narrow, delicate shoulders and one shallow breast, its nipple soft in slumber.
They lay apart, not quite touching, although he could feel the warmth of her thigh close to his. He looked away from her, up at the ceiling, and for a moment he let the sheer joy of remembered fornication wash over him like a physical thrill; then he got up.
He stood beside the bed and looked back at her. She was undisturbed. The candid morning light made her no less lovely, despite tousled hair and the untidy remains of what had been elaborate makeup. Daybreak was less kind to Tim Fitzpeterson, he knew. That was why he tried not to wake her: he wanted to look in a mirror before she saw him.
He went naked, padding across the dull green living-room carpet to the bathroom. In the space of a few moments he saw the place as if for the first time, and found it hopelessly unexciting. The carpet was matched by an even duller green sofa, with fading flowered cushions. There were a plain wooden desk, of the kind to be found in a million offices; an elderly black-and-white television set; a filing cabinet; and a bookshelf of legal and economic textbooks plus several volumes of Hansard. He had once thought it so dashing to have a London pied-a-terre.
The bathroom had a full-length mirror--bought not by Tim, but by his wife, in the days before she had totally retired from town life. He looked in it while he waited for the bath to fill, wondering what there was about this middle-aged body that could drive a beautiful girl of--what, twenty-five?--into a frenzy of lust. He was healthy, but not fit, not in the sense with which that word is used to describe men who do exercises and visit gymnasia. He was short, and his naturally broad frame was thickened by a little superfluous fat, particularly on the chest, waist, and buttocks. His physique was okay, for a man of forty-one, but it was nothing to excite even the most physical of women.
The mirror became obscured by steam, and Tim got into the bath. He rested his head and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that he had had less than two hours of sleep, yet he felt quite fresh. His upbringing would have him believe that pain and discomfort, if not actual illness, were the consequences of late nights, dancing, adultery, and strong drink. All those sins together ought to bring down the wrath of God.
No: the wages of sin were sheer delight. He began to soap himself languidly. It had started at one of those appalling dinners: grapefruit cocktail, overdone steak and bombe no surprise for three hundred members of a useless organization. Tim's speech had been just another exposition of the Government's current strategy, emotionally weighted to appeal to the particular sympathies of the audience. Afterwards he had agreed to go somewhere else for a drink with one of his colleagues--a brilliant young economist--and two faintly interesting people from the audience.
The venue turned out to be a nightclub which would normally have been beyond Tim's means; but someone else had paid the entrance. Once inside, he began to enjoy himself, so much so that he bought a bottle of champagne with his credit card. More people had joined their group: a film company executive Tim had vaguely heard of; a playwright he hadn't; a left-wing economist who shook hands with a wry smile and avoided shoptalk; and the girls.
The champagne and the floor show inflamed him slightly. In the old days, he would at this point have taken Julia home and made love to her roughly--she liked that, just occasionally. But now she no longer came to town, and he no longer went to nightclubs, not normally.
The girls had not been introduced. Tim started to talk to the nearest, a flat-chested redhead in a long dress of some pale color. She looked like a model, and said she was an actress. He expected that he would find her boring, and that she would reciprocate. That was when he got the first intimation that tonight would be special: she seemed to find him fascinating.
Their close conversation gradually isolated them from the rest of the party, until someone suggested another club. Tim immediately said he would go home. The redhead caught his arm and asked him not to; and Tim, who was being gallant to a beautiful woman for the first time in twenty years, instantly agreed to go along.
He wondered, as he got out of the bath, what they had talked about for so long. The work of a Junior Minister in the Department of Energy was hardly cocktail-party conversation: when it was not technical, it was highly confidential. Perhaps they had discussed pol
itics. Had he told wry anecdotes about senior politicians, in the deadpan tone which was his only way of being humorous? He could not remember. All he could recall was the way she had sat, with every part of her body angled devotedly toward him: head, shoulders, knees, feet--a physical attitude that was at once intimate and teasing.
He wiped steam off the shaving mirror and rubbed his chin speculatively, sizing up the task. He had very dark hair, and his beard, if he were to grow it, would be thick. The rest of his face was, to say the least, ordinary. The chin was receding, the nose sharply pointed with twin white marks either side of the bridge where spectacles had rested for thirty-five years, the mouth not small but a little grim, the ears too large, the forehead intellectually high. No character could be read there. It was a face trained to conceal thoughts, instead of displaying emotion.
He switched on the shaver and grimaced to bring all of his left cheek into view. He was not even ugly. Some girls had a thing about ugly men, he had heard--he was in no position to verify such generalizations about women--but Tim Fitzpeterson did not even fit into that dubiously fortunate category.
But perhaps it was time to think again about the categories he fitted into. The second club they had visited had been the kind of place he would never knowingly have entered. He was no music lover, and if he had liked it his taste would not have included the blaring, insistent row which drowned conversation in The Black Hole. Nevertheless, he had danced to it--the jerky, exhibitionist dancing that seemed to be de rigueur there. He enjoyed it, and thought he acquitted himself well enough; there were no amused glances from the other patrons, as he feared there might be. Perhaps that was because many of them were his age.
The disc jockey, a bearded young man in a T-shirt improbably printed with the words HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL, capriciously played a slow ballad, sung by an American with a heavy cold. They were on the small dance floor at the time. The girl came close to him and wound her arms around him. Then he knew she meant it; and he had to decide whether he was equally serious. With her hot, lithe body clinging to him as closely as a wet towel, he made up his mind very quickly. He bent his head--she was slightly shorter than he--and murmured into her ear: "Come and have a drink at my flat."
