“We wait.”
“How long will it take?”
“Several hours, perhaps even a day. But don’t worry, we’re going to put the time to good use.”
“How?”
“You’re going to tell me all about your business. The properties you own, your partners, where you get your money.”
“Out of the question. That information is strictly private.”
“There’s no such thing as privacy,” said Gabriel. “Not in a kidnapping.”
Edward Knight, only child of a headmaster and an NHS nurse, graduate of a second-tier redbrick university, had been toiling on the bond desk of a minor London house of finance when he noticed an emerging glut of distressed commercial properties on the British real estate market, especially in the Docklands area of the East End. With money borrowed from his parents, the Knight Group, as he called his nascent company, made its first acquisition—a tumbledown warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. Six months later, with a loan supplied by his firm, he purchased a second derelict warehouse, this time in neighboring Canary Wharf.
He sold the properties to a developer just eighteen months later and used the proceeds to snap up a terrace of cottages in Whitechapel. Next he ventured across the Thames to Southwark and Battersea, where he added still more residential assets to his portfolio. Other acquisitions followed in quick succession—in Earl’s Court, Paddington, Notting Hill, and Chelsea, where he bought two commercial properties along the King’s Road. He bought his first London hotel in 2000 and his first shopping center a year later, in the Thames Estuary town of Gravesend. He now held controlling stakes in more than a dozen hotels, several of which were located on the European mainland, and was the largest owner of shopping centers in the British Isles.
“I’m told you also own most of Sussex,” said Gabriel.
“Told by whom?”
“My dinner companion at the Wickham House fundraiser.”
“The countess? Silly old cow.”
Because the Knight Group was entirely private, its founder was under no obligation to reveal the true scale of his current real estate empire, including his holdings in the former Kingdom of Sussex in southeast England. The document that Knight showed Gabriel revealed that they were extensive. Still, they were only the tip of the iceberg. All totaled, the Knight Group’s current portfolio was worth an estimated eight and a half billion pounds.
“How’s your debt?” asked Gabriel.
“A manageable five billion.”
“Where do you get your financing?”
“Most of it comes from HSBC.”
“And the rest?”
“Private investors.”
“I’ll need their names.”
Knight frowned irritably. “How is this remotely relevant to Alice’s abduction?”
“I’m wondering whether you have any enemies. Someone you wronged along the way. Someone you cheated.” Gabriel paused. “Someone with the wherewithal to hire a crew of professional criminals to kidnap your wife.”
“The real estate business is full of sharp elbows, Allon. It is not for the faint of heart.”
“Can you think of anyone who might wish you harm?”
“Too many to count.”
“I’ll need their names as well.”
Knight tossed out the names of a few potential enemies, none of whom Gabriel recognized, along with the names of his primaryinvestors. All were British and of reasonable repute, with the exception of the sexually disgraced former Duke of York.
“The ass,” groused Knight. “What on earth was he thinking, getting mixed up with a creature like that?”
Gabriel jotted down each of the names, then spent the remainder of the afternoon reviewing the property portfolio while Higgins saw to the burner phones and SIM cards, and Edward Knight paced and chain-smoked.
