From there, Malcolm drifted around Europe, selling heroin in France, stealing cars in Belgium, and selling stolen watches in Holland for money. He would occasionally appear at his mother’s door, always leaving her a little bit of cash before he would disappear a week later. She never asked him what he did.

On one of Malcolm’s visits to Cascais, he came home from a night of drinking to find a man shouting at his mother. He was an old john, a fat, rich Spaniard who’d occasionally employed Andréa’s services. His belt was undone, a bottle in his hand. Malcolm could see that his mother had been crying. He snatched the bottle from the man, smashed it across his head and used the jagged butt of it to castrate him. If his mother hadn’t intervened, Malcolm would have killed the man.

Malcolm served four years in a Lisbon prison. His sentence would have been longer if the man he’d beaten had not been a Spanish diplomat who wanted to keep the whole episode quiet.

Prison taught Malcolm about power dynamics, and how to clamp down his fighting fury into a more controlled seething. He emerged stoic and brooding. The violence was still there, but harnessed, exercised only when necessary and useful. The day he was discharged, he found out that his father had died, leaving Rausing Oceanic entirely to his bastard son.

The company was nearly bankrupt when Malcolm arrived at its offices in Aberdeen, fresh out of prison. His father had over-leveraged on new ships in the expectation of an oil boom that never materialized. Bestowing the failing firm to Malcolm seemed like a cruel, final joke.

The knowledge gained from a lifetime living by his wits, his ruthless efficiency, and an almost psychopathic absence of sentimentality made Malcolm an excellent CEO. Within five years, Rausing Oceanic grew successful under his watch. The company, which had previously specialized in undersea recovery and commercial diving support, expanded into custom shipbuilding, supplying littoral and amphibious watercraft for mercenary groups and small countries’ militaries.

Malcolm became wealthier than even his father could have dreamed. He had no permanent address, but lived aboard his fleet of ships worldwide. The Aberdeen headquarters were merely symbolic and vestigial. Rausing’s was a nomadic existence that suited him, living on the outlaw sea, free to sate his own appetites with no one watching.

In Sri Lanka, the Chinese were pumping money into infrastructure projects in exchange for long term leases on deepwater ports, city property, and airports. It was a part of their “Belt and Road” initiative that would give them a strategic foothold in developing countries throughout Asia and Africa.