The Hollow Man by Oliver Harris

requirements.”
    “And the bank account?”
    “If it was me I’d go for Cyprus, but that will be fifteen hundred. Otherwise, maybe St. Vincent, which is U.S. dollar accounts only but you can receive or transfer money in all major currencies. Minimum deposit would be around two grand; you pay the deposit to the bank, not to us. It’s totally anonymous but they do ask for references. It’s a tough climate out there. You don’t look like a terrorist to me, but . . .”
    “Any that don’t ask for a reference or minimum deposit?”
    “The Island of Niue.” He pronounced it Nee-oo-yee.
    “Niue?”
    “A chunk of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Three hours’ flight from New Zealand. Self-governing member of the British Commonwealth, mostly home to seagulls and the registered addresses of Japanese telephone-sex companies. And the Bank of the South Pacific, as it’s known. Essentially, you give us an address of your choice and we type up a bill and fax that to them. It will do. They’ll charge a one-off fee of two hundred dollars for admin.”
    “Perfect.”
    “Great. What else? We can do you a Certificate of Good Standing for ninety-five pounds, a virtual office in a city of your choosing which can hold mail and forward calls. That’s around seventy per month. For twenty-five pounds we can even give you a rubber stamp of the company.”
    “What does that do?”
    “It’s a stamp made out of rubber, with the company name on it.”
    “I’ll get one of those.”
    “OK.”
    “How does this call-forwarding service work?”
    “However you want. When someone dials your company it goes through to them. They answer the phone and say this is X company, so-and-so is in a meeting, and then they call you to pass on the message. Or not. They can wait for you to call, or pass messages once a week. They can sing the caller happy birthday, if you want. It’s your call, you see?” He grinned.
    “I see. I’ve got a lot of money in an Austrian account that I want to transfer. What works best for that?”
    “Niue will be fine. We can use one of the IBCs to set up an account on the island. That will come with a local office address, which is a statutory requirement, but we’ll throw in a virtual address package which means you can operate from anywhere in the world and not worry about unwanted bureaucracy.”
    “That would be great.”
    “Of course it would.”
    Belsey sipped his coffee. He felt, for the first time, what every career criminal must feel at least once and never forget: the possibility of getting away with it; the knowledge of policing’s limits, the limits of international cooperation, and the space of freedom beyond them. He gazed out of the window and thought of tropical seas. Wash me whiter than snow , the prayer went. Wash my sins away .
    “What’s the total?” Belsey asked.
    “For an address, two shelf companies and a bank account you’re looking at six grand, tops. Probably more like five thousand eight hundred.”
    “I don’t have the money on me right now.”
    “Sure. Come back when you do. It’s all ready to go.” The young man looked up from his screen and smiled.
    B elsey tore a parking ticket off the Porsche’s windscreen, tossed it and drove to a travel agent’s on Hampstead High Street. All the assistants were busy. He took a seat in the waiting area and thought of the last time he’d been out of the country: a weekend break to Palermo, a spur-of-the-moment thing with a blonde estate agent who had been a witness in a club shooting. They’d gone straight from the Old Bailey. That was last May, his only holiday in five years. But he remembered the feverish promise of those days, of places in which London seemed a long, dark dream; that was the kind of place he was going.
    He took a brochure and scribbled a list of non-extradition countries on the back. He knew the police forces that were hard to liaise with. There’d been several cases where they tried to liaise with