Hugo Lang, a sixty-two-year-old investment banker, stepped down from his private jet at Zurich Airport and into the white Bentley waiting to take him home. The drive to his palatial home on the shore of Lake Pfäffikersee took just over twenty minutes, and he did not exchange one word with the driver. The ageing Swiss never spoke to the staff.
Calling Hugo Lang a banker was possibly an exaggeration, because all his wealth was inherited and he had never done a day’s work in his life. His father, the steel magnate Ernst Lang, had died seven years earlier; he had been one of Europe’s most successful businessmen, and his son might have been expected to carry on the business, but Hugo had sold all the companies he had inherited. He had kept the chateau in Switzerland, an estate on Bermuda, flats in New York, Paris, London and Hong Kong, but, otherwise, the one-hundred-year-old family business, LangKrupp, and all its subsidiaries were sold to new owners. Those who had been left nothing – uncles, aunts and other peripheral family members – had done what they could to stop him; the media had been full of accounts of horrified relatives going through the courts to prevent the sale – but he had pushed through with it all the same. Hugo Lang did not care what other people thought.
He let his driver open the door for him, and entered the chateau without looking at the staff taking his jacket and hat. He had more important things to think about, and today felt like a big day.
Hugo Lang had always been a collector, but it was not until his father died and left him all his money that he was finally in a position to buy anything he liked. His father had been a miser, but that no longer mattered. His mother had died when he was fourteen, but Hugo had never missed her. Ernst Lang had died from leukaemia, and been on his deathbed at the chateau for a long time; a new wing had been built purely for him, practically a small hospital, and Hugo had visited from time to time, not because he wanted to or in any way felt sorry for the old man, merely to ensure that the old fool did not suddenly get it into his head to leave his money to someone else.
Following the death of his father, he had got rid of everything that reminded him of his parents. Photographs, clothing, portraits on the wall. He saw no reason to keep them; he needed space for his collections.
He kept his car collection in several garages in the courtyard. He had lost count of how many he had, and he rarely drove them, but he liked owning them, touching them, looking at them, knowing that they were his. His collection included a Hennessey Venom GT, a Porsche 918 Spyder, a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, an Aston Martin Vanquish, a Mercedes CL65 AMG Coupe, and usually this would be his first activity after a trip abroad, inspecting his garages, running his hand over some of the cars, but not today.
Today he had more important things on his mind.
He went straight to his study, sat down in the deep office chair, turned on his computer and felt his heart pound under his shirt. This was a rare occurrence. Hugo Lang never got very excited about anything. When he made a new acquisition, he would occasionally feel a brief flutter of excitement. Like the time he had bought what had then been the world’s most expensive stamp, an 1885 Swedish yellow three-shilling stamp, the only one of its kind in the whole world. He had bid on it in secret, and bought it for just under twenty-three million Swiss francs, and at the time he had felt a kind of quiver in his body, but it had quickly passed. He had bought expensive wine the next day, a case of Domaine Leroy Musigny Grand Cru in order to revive the feeling, but it had made no noticeable difference.
But this. This was like nothing he had ever known.
He had never felt such pleasure. Maybe when he saw the sums in his bank accounts after all the companies had been sold, but no, not even that could compare to this.
Hugo Lang got up, made the long walk across the Italian marble floor to make sure that the door was locked, then sat down in front of his computer again. His fingers trembled as he typed the secret Internet address on the keyboard.
It was more than one week since the Norwegian girl in the wheel had disappeared from his screen, and he was missing her already. He had had his bed moved into his study, had all his meals served in here, so that they could be together all the time. At night when he could not sleep, he might walk up to her and touch the screen. It was so good to have her so near, but now she was gone, and he had not been himself since.
Hugo Lang had seen such things before. If you had money and you knew where to go, there was always something to watch, but it was rarely real. He could smell a fake from miles away, but this?
No, this was real.
He had found the advert a few months earlier in the darkest part of the Internet, and what he had liked about it was its exclusivity.
Five highest bidders only.
Only five people. Hugo Lang did not like sharing, and he would have liked to have had her all to himself, but five was not bad, four others he could cope with, as long as he did not know who they were, which of course he did not; nor did they know his identity.
She was gone now, and he missed her, but today a new girl would be chosen, and the sixty-two-year-old’s fingers were shaking so badly he could barely hit the right keys on the keyboard. He leaned back in the big leather chair with a smile on his lips, feeling his heart beat even faster as the webpage opened on the large screen on the wall in front of him.
An almost black page, a short text in English.
Who do you want?
Who will be the chosen one?
And two photographs below. Two Norwegian girls.
He was so excited he could barely sit still in his chair. His forehead was clammy with sweat and he kept having to wipe his glasses on his shirt in order to be able to read the names below the photographs.
Two Norwegian girls. One blonde. The other dark.
Isabella Jung.
Miriam Munch.
He had missed her so much, but soon there would be a new one. One of these two girls, and Hugo Lang decided that he already liked them both.
Hugo Lang thought about it for a moment before he clicked on one picture, closed the webpage, got up from his chair and went to his bedroom to change for dinner.