Desperate Measures: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF

Ash’s car. Ash had had a car, but he’d no idea what had become of it. This had been his mother’s car until her death three years earlier.
    For most of those three years he had felt no urge to drive. In the last six months, though, the notion had seemed less impossible than it once had, to the extent that he’d had a mechanic service the vehicle against the day when he might want to use it. Now he’d dismissed his chauffeur, the need to be mobile again was suddenly pressing. He turned the hall bureau inside out looking for the keys.
    The white dog sat in the kitchen doorway, watching him.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    S TEPHEN GRAVES, TOO, WAS FINDING it impossible to sit still. Yesterday’s developments had unsettled him more than he’d realized. He tried to catch up on some work, but though he had the Grantham office to himself, he was unable to concentrate well enough to achieve anything useful. In the end he did what most people do when the rug has been yanked from under their feet and they’re not sure who’s going to do the cleaning up. He went home.
    His wife looked puzzled, unaccustomed to seeing much of him even at weekends. Graves assured her—lied to her—that all was well, and offered to treat her to an afternoon’s golf. Then he had the house to himself.
    Looking back from where he was now, it was hard to remember how it had begun. He’d been in the business of manufacturing arms for half his life; in a way, for all of it, since Bertrams had been established by a childless uncle with the clear intention that Stephen should succeed him. Most of that time it had been a complex, demanding, exciting, profitable business, one that he was proud to be a part of. Then, the thing with the pirates …
    Even now it was hard not to smirk at the word. He knew, as did anyone with a television and half a brain cell, that Somali pirates had been responsible for devastating losses to international trade and to life; still, the word conjured images of Captains Hook and Pugwash.
    He’d known it was no joke even before he lost his first shipment. He’d been taking additional precautions since learning that the pirates were beginning to augment their maritime activities with attacks on air freight. Arms shipments held a particular attraction for them, so he and others in the industry had got their heads together to agree on a strategy, keeping details of destinations, routes, cargoes, and estimated times of arrival under wraps for as long as was practical. Maybe it helped, but it didn’t solve the problem. Clearly there was a leakage of information somewhere in the system. But then, so many people had to know. Pilots had to be instructed; flight plans had to be filed. Somehow, the pirates found out.
    That first time Bertrams was targeted, Graves couldn’t believe how angry he felt. It wasn’t just the financial loss, it was the sense of helplessness. Of knowing it could happen again the next week or the next month, and unless he could come up with an answer, he’d be just as helpless to prevent it then as he had been this time.
    In due course it did happen again. Planes were seized off runways and flown away to God knows where. Planes disappeared in midair, between one refueling stop and the next. Planes reached their destination, only to be taken over while the paperwork was being completed.
    They weren’t all Bertrams shipments, of course. They originated in various parts of Europe and were en route to various destinations in Africa. Most of the competitors Graves had talked to seemed to be losing a shipment once or twice a year—not enough to devastate the industry, not enough to send otherwise-sound companies to the wall, but easily enough that there was no other topic of conversation when arms manufacturers got together.
    That was when the government started taking it seriously. Not seriously enough to send gunboats—that sort of thing got ex-colonial powers a bad name in these democratic days—but enough to set up a