A Woman Involved by John Gordon Davis Page B

knew nothing about wills, but were those conditions legally enforceable? When would she get the inheritance? – only after she had not remarried nor cohabitated? How long would she have to wait to prove her virtue? And if, having inherited, she then remarried or commenced to live in sin, would she then be dis inherited?
    But it showed an insecure, jealous man – who would try to intimidate his wife. Was such a man to be believed if he claimed to have something that could destroy the Roman Catholic Church? Or was he so unstable that he invented his story? The bastard had once concocted a terrifying case against him … 
    Morgan stared across the room.
    No. She believed it. And so did the British who had sent him here. And the Americans. And the Russians.
    Attached to the will was a schedule of principal assets. The man was extremely wealthy. Real estate, shares, bonds. Therewas a list of safety-deposit boxes, and the banks in which they were. Banks in Miami, Venezuela, Liechtenstein, and London.
    Morgan squeezed his eyes.
    But the microfilm or file probably was not in any of those banks. It was probably in one of the other banks listed on the page that she had torn from the notebook. And even if he found out which banks those were, how do you get into a man’s safety-deposit box?
    He sighed, and picked up the keys again.
    Some of them had numbers stamped on them, some of them were blank. Some of the box numbers mentioned in the will corresponded with numbers on keys. So, at least some of the keys were eliminated. But that didn’t help much.
    And then the cash. Twenty thousand dollars.
    That was a lot of money to Jack Morgan, but not to Max Hapsburg. Why shouldn’t he keep twenty thousand bucks in his safe, in case he had to jump on an aeroplane suddenly?
    Yes, but twenty thousand? All in used fifty-dollar bills? It made a bulky wad. Why not travellers cheques? In case he had to run and be anonymous? Not leave a trail of travellers cheques and credit card deals for the authorities to follow?
    That left the newspaper and magazine cuttings.
    They all concerned the Third World debt. Max was mentioned in several pieces. In short, most Third World countries, including Grenada, were in serious trouble because they had borrowed so heavily at high interest rates. They could not repay their loans, partly because of mismanagement, waste and corruption, and partly because the commodities which they produced had recently dropped drastically in value. The dollar was too high, the interest rates too high; the loans were now crushingly burdensome and the terms should be renegotiated. Some debtor countries were threatening to declare themselves bankrupt, to form a cartel, defy the banks and refuse to pay; but saner countries, and leading figures like Max Hapsburg, had dissuaded them from this suicidal course for the time being. There were lists of big banks and the frightening amounts they had loaned and could not recover. The overall picture was frightening; if the crisis was not resolved, if the debtor countries did not repay the loans, many big Western banks would gobankrupt. So millions of depositors would lose their money, the bankrupt banks would have to call in the other loans they had made so many industries would go bankrupt too, so millions of workers would become unemployed and unable to repay their debts – in short, there would be an international depression which would make the Wall Street crash of 1929 look like a Sunday-school picnic. And the inherent political dangers were spelled out.
    If the debtor countries did not improve their economies, if the masses were kept poor, as in most of South America, if a strong, sensible middle class did not emerge, these countries were vulnerable to communist-inspired revolution. Russia stood to gain everything from this economic crisis. If the Western banks collapsed because of the Third World debt, it could bring about the collapse of the capitalist system the Russians were working