The Billionaire Banker by Georgia le Carre Read Free Book Online Page A

the pillow. ‘This better be good,’ she grumbles and hangs her head off the side of the bed with her eyes still shut.
    ‘Come on, Bill. I’ve only got thirty minutes.’
    ‘Pass me a fag,’ Billie mumbles, and makes a silent snarl with her lips. Lana takes a cigarette out of a box she finds by the bedside, lights it and puts it into the curve of Billie’s snarl. Billie inhales lustily.
    Lana stays silent until Billie has sat up, propped up some pillows behind her, and is leaning back against them.
    ‘OK,’ she says, ‘did you do it?’
    Lana nods.
    Billie’s eyes pop open. ‘Whoa…. You did….? And you got the money?’
    Lana nods and grins.
    Billie almost chokes on her cigarette. ‘I don’t believe it!
    The fat bastard agreed to cough up fifty grand?’
    ‘Actually, it wasn’t him.’
    Billie holds a palm up. ‘Back up, back up. What?’
    ‘OK, I did ask him, but he turned out to be a total perv; you won’t believe what his idea of a good time is.
    Fortunately, someone else cut in and offered double what I had asked him.’
    ‘Bloody hell!’ screams Billie.
    ‘Keep your voice down,’ Lana whispers. ‘Your mother’s in the kitchen.’
    ‘Double, as in a hundred thousand pounds?’
    Lana nods a lot.
    ‘So who is this guy then?’
    ‘Have you heard of the Barringtons?’
    ‘Who?’
    Lana walks to the laptop sitting on Billie’s messy desk and, flips it open. When the familiar Google emblem pops up on the screen she types in Blake Barrington. As the page starts to load she takes the laptop over and holds it out to Billie. Billie grinds out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and takes it wordlessly.
    She whistles low and long and looks up at Lana with shining eyes. ‘Oh! Mr. Bombastic, call me fantastic. I thought all the best-looking males were gay?’
    Lana blushes. ‘Pick the Wikipedia entry,’ she advises.
    Billie hits the Wikipedia link and proceeds to read aloud from the screen.
    ‘The Barrington banking dynasty, also referred to as the House of Barrington is one of the world’s oldest existing banking dynasties with a history spanning over four hundred years. The family is descended from Lord John James Barrington.
    ‘Unlike the courtiers of earlier centuries, who financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new international bank created by the Barringtons was impervious to local attacks.
    ‘Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts.
    Their strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands through carefully arranged marriages to first or second cousins. Similar to royal intermarriages, it allowed them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes. By the late nineteenth century, however, almost all of the Barringtons had started to marry outside the family into other great, old families.
    ‘The name Barrington is synonymous with extravagance and great wealth. The family is renowned for its vast art collections, palaces, wine properties, yacht racing, luxury hotels, grand houses, as well as for its philanthropy. By the end of the century, the family owned, or had built, at the lowest estimates of forty-one palaces, on a scale and luxury level perhaps unparalleled even by the richest royal families. In 1909, the soon to be British Prime Minister Lloyd George claimed that Lord Charles Leon Barrington was the most powerful man in Britain and America.
    ‘The Barringtons are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them. An author who planned to write a book entitled Lies About The Barringtons abandoned it, saying, “It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but proved impossible to find the truth.”
    Billie pauses and lets her eyes skim down the screen.
    ‘Well, the rest seems to be stuff about their international investment banking