The Last Passenger by Manel Loureiro Read Free Book Online

this story. Suddenly, reading everything in the folder seemed more important to her than anything else in the world.
    “I need details.”
    “Does the name Isaac Feldman ring a bell?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” The reporter inside her suddenly felt mortified for not recognizing his name. “Should it?”
    “Unless you spend a lot of time betting in online casinos, it shouldn’t.”
    Rhonda took an image from the folder and handed it over to Kate. It was a photograph of an elderly man around seventy. He had great shocks of white hair and looked surprisingly hefty for a man his age. His unshaven face along with his look of surprise made him appear quite unhappy to be having his picture taken.
    “So you want me to investigate online casinos?” Kate suddenly felt disheartened.
    “Nothing like that, dear. You’re too late. Feldman is an Israeli with a British passport, or English with an Israeli passport, depending on the person you ask, and the owner of at least five of the largest online betting houses. Obviously, he’s made tons of money. But it would seem he hasn’t paid his taxes for the past three years, and now he’s under investigation by the Treasury Department.” Rhonda smiled. “You see, it’s not exactly an investigation you can take part in.”
    “So what’s the angle?”
    “Feldman is clearing out his accounts in the United Kingdom, or at least that’s the word on the street. But he’s invested huge amounts of cash in the last five months in a bizarre project that’s about to become public. They say he’s obsessed with it and he doesn’t care if he loses everything as long as it goes ahead.”
    “What is it? Funding a church? Building another Vegas in Dover? Hunting UFOs?”
    “It’s much more mysterious than any of that. Robert thought it would be the story of the year. Have a look for yourself.”
    Rhonda turned the file over in her hands and passed it to Kate. It was open to a page showing a color photo of a ship in terrible condition, surrounded by scaffolding in the middle of a shipyard. Like ants, dozens of workers were polishing the ship’s hull. A piece of the bow was in the air, and looking closely, she could make out the ship’s name in spite of the fact that its lettering was faded and covered in moss.
    Valkyrie.

VI
    An hour later, Kate got into a taxi and headed to London Victoria station with the purple folder clutched in her hands. She’d been surprised by how light the documents felt, but the sparse amount of information presented a challenge for her avid mind.
    She had accepted the assignment without much hesitation. It would give her more than enough to keep her mind occupied for at least a couple of weeks, and that time would be good for figuring out what to do with the shattered remains of her life. In the meantime, she would flesh out the story from scratch with nothing more than a loose end to work from.
    She took out Isaac Feldman’s picture and carefully looked it over for the third time since leaving Rhonda’s office. He had rugged features and an expression of determination. There was something magnetic about this man, but she couldn’t unravel the riddle he had tucked away. She went over the notes that had come with the photo.
    Isaac Feldman, son of Abraham and Lisa Feldman, born and raised in Merseyside, close to Liverpool. His father was a Jewish tanner from Kraków, and his mother was a housewife. The junior Feldman grew up in a tough neighborhood and was arrested twice before the age of sixteen. After a short, two-week stint in jail, he and a partner began a small battery-recycling company and, two years later, opened their first betting house. After some time, it grew into a network of online casinos that extended throughout the world. He was a millionaire by the time he turned fifty. He became a dual citizen of Israel and the UK, suspiciously. He was also suspected of having transferred vast amounts of money from Eastern Europe to the