Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less Read online

  Outstanding Praise For Jeffrey Archer and His Novels

  “A master at mixing power, politics, and profit into fiction.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Archer plots with skill, and keeps you turning the pages.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Cunning plots, silken style…Archer plays a cat-and-mouse game with the reader.”

  —The New York Times

  “A storyteller in the class of Alexandre Dumas…unsurpassed skill…making the reader wonder intensely what will happen next.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Archer is one of the most captivating storytellers writing today. His novels are dramatic, fast moving, totally entertaining—and almost impossible to put down.”

  —Pittsburgh Press

  The Prodigal Daughter

  “Chalk up another smash hit for Jeffrey Archer…an exceptional storyteller.”

  —John Barkham Reviews

  “Fast-moving and compelling.”

  —Library Journal

  Kane & Abel

  “A smashing good read!”

  —The Des Moines Register

  “I defy anyone not to enjoy this book, which is one of the best novels I have ever read.”

  —Otto Preminger

  “A sprawling blockbuster!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Grips the reader from the first page to the last. A smash hit.”

  —John Barkham Reviews

  As The Crow Flies

  “A certified page-turner.”

  —New York Daily News

  “An endearing story.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Archer plots with skill, and keeps you turning the pages.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Top flight…Mr. Archer tells a story to keep you turning those pages.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Great fun!”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  To Mary

  and the fat men

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Prologue

  “JÖRG, EXPECT $7 million from Credit Parisien in the No. 2 account by 6 P.M. tonight, Central European time, and place it with first-class banks and triple ‘A’ commercial names. Otherwise, invest it in the overnight Euro-dollar market. Understood?”

  “Yes, Harvey.”

  “Place $1 million in the Banco do Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, in the names of Silverman and Elliott and cancel the call loan at Barclays Bank, Lombard Street. Understood?”

  “Yes, Harvey.”

  “Buy gold on my commodity account until it reaches $10 million and then hold until you receive further instructions. Try and buy in the troughs and don’t rush—be patient. Understood?”

  “Yes, Harvey.”

  Harvey Metcalfe realized that the last instruction was unnecessary. Jörg Birrer was one of the most conservative bankers in Zürich and, more important to Harvey, had over the past twenty-five years proved to be one of the shrewdest.

  “Can you join me at Wimbledon on Tuesday, June 25th at 2 P.M., Centre Court, my usual debenture seat?”

  “Yes, Harvey.”

  The telephone clicked into place. Harvey never said good-bye. He had never understood the niceties of life and it was too late to start learning now. He picked up the phone, dialed the seven digits which would give him the Lincoln Trust in Boston, and asked for his secretary.

  “Miss Fish?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Remove the file on Prospecta Oil and destroy it. Destroy any correspondence connected with it and leave absolutely no trace. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The telephone clicked again. Harvey Metcalfe had given similar orders three times in the last twenty-five years and by now Miss Fish had learned not to question him.

  Harvey breathed deeply, almost a sigh, a quiet exhalation of triumph. He was now worth at least $25 million, and nothing could stop him. He opened a bottle of Krug champagne 1964, imported from Hedges & Butler of London. He sipped it slowly and lit a Romeo y Julieta Churchill, which an Italian immigrant smuggled in for him in boxes of two hundred and fifty once a month from Cuba. He settled back for a mild celebration. In Boston, Massachusetts, it was 12:20 P.M.—nearly time for lunch.

  In Harley Street, Bond Street, the King’s Road and Magdalen College, Oxford, it was 6:20 P.M. Four men, unknown to each other, checked the market price of Prospecta Oil in the final edition of the London Evening Standard. It was £3.70. All four of them were rich men, looking forward to consolidating their already successful careers.

  Tomorrow they would be penniless.

  Chapter One

  MAKING A MILLION legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all. Henryk Metelski was one of those rare men who had managed all three. Even if the million he had made legally came after the million he had made illegally, Metelski was still a yard ahead of the others: he had managed to keep it all.

  Henryk Metelski was born on the Lower East Side of New York on May 17th, 1909, in a small room that already slept four children. He grew up through the Depression, believing in God and one meal a day. His parents were from Warsaw and had emigrated from Poland at the turn of the century. Henryk’s father was a baker by trade and had soon found a job in New York, where immigrant Poles specialized in baking black rye bread and running small restaurants for their country men. Both parents would have liked Henryk to be an academic success, but he was never destined to become an outstanding pupil at his high school. His natural gifts lay elsewhere. A cunning, smart little boy, he was far more interested in the control of the underground school market in cigarettes and liquor than in stirring tales of the American Revolution and the Liberty Bell. Little Henryk never believed for one moment that the best things in life were free, and the pursuit of money and power came as naturally to him as the pursuit of a mouse to a cat.

  When Henryk was a pimply and flourishing fourteen-year-old, his father died of what we now know to be cancer. His mother outlived her husband by no more than a few months, leaving the five children to fend for themselves. Henryk, like the other four, should have gone into the district orphanage for destitute children, but in the mid-1920s it was not hard for a boy to disappear in New York—though it was harder to survive. Henryk became a master of survival, a schooling which was to prove very useful to him in later life.

  He knocked around the Lower East Side with his belt tightened and his eyes open, shining shoes here, washing dishes there, always looking for an entrance to the maze at the heart of which lay wealth and prestige. His first chance came when his roommate Jan Pelnik, a messenger boy on the New York Stock Exchange, put himself temporarily out of action with a sausage garnished with salmonella. Henryk, deputed to report his friend’s mishap to the Chief Messenger, upgraded food poisoning to tuberculosis, and talked himself into the ensuing vacancy. He then changed his room, donned a new uniform, lost a friend