‘That’s what I told her.’

‘So, if I can guess that, knowing your approach to life, then so can your main enemy.’

Haut sighed.

*

‘I cannot have my name and my family exposed this way,’ Natalia told Haut when she returned to London after a month’s convalescence. They met in Hyde Park. ‘The media here in England would crucify us if they learnt that my father was close to Putin and so senior in the security service.’

‘We could return to Australia,’ Haut said, knowing that such a move would be high risk because of Conquer.

‘That won’t solve it. Bleulance will pursue you and me to the ends of the Earth, which is where Australia is!’

Haut was crestfallen. He knew what was coming. Natalia held and kissed him.

‘I must return home.’

Haut sat holding her hand in his for several moments. She began crying. His eyes welled.

‘You are the one true love of my life,’ he said, wiping away tears.

‘I love you so much too, Al. But the situation leaves me no choice.’

They stood and held each other for several moments. She kissed him on both cheeks and walked away. Every instinct in Haut told him to run and beg her to stay. But he knew this would be useless and prolong the agony.

‘Watching her walk away,’ he told Cavalier, ‘was the saddest moment of my life.’

Without informing him, Natalia took a flight to Moscow the next day, leaving Haut devastated. He tried phoning her but could not get through.

Bleulance had succeeded in taking from him his most precious love.

56 A STUMBLE IN GRACE

56

A STUMBLE IN GRACE

Conquer’s interference in Haut’s business also succeeded. All his funds had dried up. The value of his company had plummeted and the shares were down to a tenth of a cent each. The Tasmanian government had finished the paperwork in the sale of his leases to a Chinese-controlled Tasmanian, Dill Lawry. Haut had no cash to play with.

‘God informed me that I had to be stripped down to owning no worldly goods at all,’ he told Cavalier on a cold early October day in London when they met for breakfast at a cafe near Notting Hill Gate tube station. ‘Then I would be most valuable to him.’

‘God must be a Scot then.’

‘How so?’

‘He wants you in a frugal state.’

‘In this position, I have no distractions. I can more easily follow the vision, the mission he sent me. God told me: “Now you have nothing, I can give you everything.”’

‘You couldn’t go to the pokies and win a modest amount?’ Cavalier asked. ‘Your old lecturer mate Harold Burnside told me how you won at an electronic poker machine when you needed five thousand for staff wages.’