Oil & Corruption
Page 17
Jonathan had expected something like this and knew he had to be bold at this point.
‘I need to speak to your bosses.’ he said in a deeper voice than usual, in the hope it carried some semblance of authority.
The huge hairy hand in front of him cocked the hammer on the weapon.
‘I bring them valuable information about an oil deal that is going to happen.’
The Arab’s eyes narrowed and Jonathan thought he was going to finish the job that all those assassins in France had started.
More Arabic yelling emanated from within. The guard never took his eyes off Jonathan, just tilted his head slightly and yelled back. A single word came back that sounded like extreme hocking of phlegm from within. The guard stepped back and two other Arabs in white robes materialised from nowhere to thoroughly pat him down for weapons. They nodded to the larger man, who motioned for Jonathan to step in but also glanced quickly down at the gun to re-enforce that any wrong moves would result in an unnecessary and troublesome hole being added to his body.
Jonathan tentatively stepped over the threshold to enter the craziest hotel room he had ever seen.
The first thing that struck him was the colours. The entire room had been redecorated in the style of the interior of an Arabian prince’s tent. Long sheets of rich, multi-coloured material flowed off the walls and over every conceivable piece of furniture.
All the way around the outer walls, with a space of approximately one metre between them, stood Arab guards dressed wholly in sheets of white, with large scimitar swords stuck through a red sash around their waists. All their dark eyes followed Jonathan’s every movement in unison.
In the centre of the room was an extremely fat Arab in black robes, with a gold headband around his headpiece. He was lounging horizontally on a humungous cushion on the floor, while being fanned with palm leaves by what appeared to be two Ninja’s.
In front of the large man were clearly lines of cocaine on a mirror. Behind him on the couch were two European looking women in bikinis.
One of the women had just finished peeling a grape and leant forward to pop in into the large Arab’s mouth. Jonathan had to assume he was looking directly at the actual Nasty Arab.
Trying to get over the bizarreness of the room, he wondered where the second half of the partnership was.
‘Who is it?’ came a small voice from the far left wall.
Jonathan leant forward to look through a connecting door into the next room. What he saw in the other room was in complete contrast to the one he was in. He could see a small Jewish man dressed in a traditional black suit with white shirt and Yarmulke on his head. The man had a light beard and thin wire rim spectacles, which presided over bookish features. The small man was sitting at a plain wooden desk reading a book in an austere room that look like it had been decorated in yellow brick. There was a large yellow stone wall at the other end of the room, behind the table.
‘Bakalaka!’ yelled the Nasty Arab toward the door.
‘Shmwayley!’ the little man gave a pitched yell in return,
Ah. Thought Jonathan, The Crazy Hebe.
‘Come.’ The Nasty Arab motioned him forward. ‘You want a Rolex? Some Johnny Walker Platinum label?’
‘They don’t make a platinum label.’ Jonathan stated, still trying to maintain a brave façade.
‘They do for me.’ The Nasty Arab stated flatly.
Jonathan was stunned.
‘What does he want?’ came the small voice from the adjoining room again.
‘Ignore him.’ The Nasty Arab said, waving away the direction the voice had come from. ‘He sits in there with his Jewish iconography and fake wailing wall, with one brick in it from the real wall and thinks he is living.’ he shook his head and leant back to shout at the open door while raising a glass of his bespoke Johnnie Walker Platinum label, ‘He does not know what he is missing. Me, I demand a queue of bald dwarves with cocaine lines on their heads!’
One of the Arab guards headed for the door.
‘Meshtum.’ yelled the small voice.
‘Sit.’ commanded the Nasty Arab, as he turned his attention back to Jonathan. ‘You have five minutes with your proposal. If I do not like, I have your infidel face sliced off for seeing mine.’
Jonathan swallowed hard and sat down on the floor.
‘Right,’ he began, with what he hoped was a strong tone, ‘I work for one of the largest international oil companies in the world. Alright, the largest. Recently I have stumbled across a plot, of which I do not yet have all the details, but with which I believe some of your contacts could complete the picture. I also believe that two gentlemen such as yourselves could profit handsomely from.’ he had said it almost in one breath as the nerves got to him. He ended the sentence with a large intake of breath while trying to gauge their reaction as he paused.
The Arab’s left eyebrow arched two millimetres and he slowly reached for a small curved knife that lay nearby his stomach. All around the room the guard’s dark hands moved to the handles of their swords in unison.
Jonathan’s eyes turned to saucers and the colour drained from his face. The knife was lifted slowly up above Jonathan’s head and suspended there like a childlike Arabian sword of Damocles.
The Nasty Arab burst out laughing.
Huge, bellowing guffaws echoed around the room.
‘Relax, my pigment challenged friend.’ The Arab said, as the mirth subsided to snickering, ‘I just need to clean my nails.’ he lowered the knife and started to pick at the ends of his fingers with it.
The hands of all the guards slowly moved away from their swords.
‘You may continue, pasty face. I am intrigued. Look, you even have the chosen people of your god listening, even if he won’t enter the room.’
Still in shock, Jonathan looked slightly to the left to see the small Jewish man standing in the doorway to the adjoining room.
Ooh that was really nasty, Jonathan thought, this guy certainly earns his name.
The Jewish man made a rolling motion with his hands in an indication to speed the story up.
‘Right, ah, I’ll continue then…’ Jonathan said hesitantly.
He had no choice but to continue and hope the story impressed, so he could hopefully leave with some help - or at least with his life.
30
Madrid
The ‘El Rancho’ hotel in Madrid had two stars on its sign, both forged. Its landlord was studying the topless shots in yesterday’s tabloid when a shadow fell across his grimy desk. As his comb over hairstyle started to move from the lifting of his head, he suddenly found his air supply cut off as a behemoth of a hand came from nowhere to crush his throat in a vice like grip.
The landlord was lifted clean out of his seat to find himself dangling in the air and looking into the face of a man the like of which he had never seen and would never see again.
He gasped for air as he scratched ineffectually against the alligator coat his assailant was wearing. The Cajun was at least seven foot tall fully erect and half as broad again - the squirming Spaniard was held with ease.
The Cajun brought the man close to his face, under the brown leather hat he was wearing that was ringed with alligator teeth and the landlord, through rapidly dimming vision, still managed to discern how his skin looked like leather and the eyes seemed reptilian.
The Cajun sniffed the man and his face screwed up in disgust. The other huge hand appeared from nowhere and was held just in front of the landlord’s eyes. Protruding from each knuckle was an alligator tooth at least an inch long. It looked like they were part of the man’s flesh.
‘The French and Englishhhhh.’ The Cajun hissed in the Spaniard’s face, ‘owners of Renault car outside. Where now?’ The hand on the throat released slightly and the man gasped for air.
The other hand of The Cajun brought the teeth closer to the eyes.
The eyes bulged.
‘G-Gone.’ The man eventually got out. ‘Checked out…this…morning
.’
The hand around the throat constricted once more, even tighter this time.
The eyes bulged almost to the point of bursting.
‘What room?’ The Cajun hissed, before releasing slightly once more so the man could speak.
‘Six…teen.’
The arm of the Cajun that was holding the man swung slightly before the landlord was hurled clean across the counter and into the opposing wall. He smashed into a picture and glass shattered everywhere before falling with the landlord onto and through a small coffee table below. The Spaniard was knocked clean out.
The Cajun sniffed the air again before making his way to the room Jonathan and Julie had stayed in the night before. The car in the back had already been sniffed through; he needed to refresh the scent he had of them to accelerate the hunt. He kicked down the door of the hotel room and gathered up the bed linen to take a deep snort of the material his quarry had slept in the night before. His eyes flashed red and he let out a low reptilian growl as the fresh scent coursed through his veins and supercharged his hunting instinct. He threw the bed sheets down and charged out of the room at a run. He had been a day behind them in France and was half a day behind them now. With a scent as fresh as this – he would find them in hours.
He would catch his prey. He always did.
31
Madrid
For the first time in a long time, both the Nasty Arab and One Crazy Hebe were silent as they look at each other across the room.
Jonathan had told them everything that had happened and all the information that he knew. He still felt that these people, even if they were slightly nuts, held the best chance of helping him stay alive and find out why people were trying to kill him.
The man on the cushion and the man in the doorway were in a silent bonding that was greater than culture or religion - they could sense the presence of vast amounts of money to be made.
‘Yes.’ stated the Hebe from his doorway, ‘Very interesting. We have been tracking various things since the murders in Russia. Now the connections are becoming clearer. What is of course missing from your story, is some sort of proof.’
‘I don’t have anything solid,’ Jonathan replied, ‘I don’t have my laptop with the original analysis as it was blown up in Paris. The rest of the files are sitting on company servers. If I log onto the system they will immediately know where I am. There are severely paranoid people out there without much of a conscience. The only proof I have now is a trail of bodies, bullets and explosions that has followed me and others who also witnessed those.’
This wasn’t entirely true. Jonathan, like all good consultants, sent backups of his files to anonymous Internet email accounts. But this was the last Ace up his sleeve, which he wasn’t prepared to play unless he absolutely had to.
‘Jarg.’ spat the Arab, as he motioned to one of his bikini clad Barbarellas to peel a plum for him. ‘That stuff follows us all the time.’ The Arab said, ‘How do you uncivilised pigs say, “No big deal”.’
To emphasize the point he stabbed the short knife he had into the extremely expensive parquet floor. Jonathan winced.
The Hebe was now sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth with his hands under his chin. He suddenly turned red and yelled at the Arab, ‘Dimschlo! Shmuck.’
‘Dirkaluk!’ The Arab hollered back.
After a short silence, the Hebe spoke as if nothing had happened.
‘The question now of course is how we can profit from this. The Russians can be tricky. Nothing is what it seems in that country, but these people are the future as far as oil and gas goes. We need to get engaged. Take a seat on a cushion my friend,’ he directed his words at Jonathan, ‘let’s order up some room service and talk at more length over the nature of things.’
32
London
Within the curved columned building that was the headquarters of the largest oil company in the world, half of the office space on the twelfth floor was taken up by a department simply described as “portfolio”.
Jobs in this department were never advertised. Nobody ever saw requests for data coming out of the department, yet somehow any analysis that emerged from within its closeted walls contained all the latest company and industry information.
The work done by the department was top secret within the organisation, yet the outcomes of its analysis were the catalyst for many of the projects that rippled out around the world, affecting over one hundred and fifty thousand employees directly and millions of people more, indirectly, through what portfolio spreadsheets told them was a good idea.
The people who worked in that section of the twelfth floor originated all the divesting, market entries, merger and acquisition work that kept many people around the globe busy.
If anything big and scary was going down within the galaxy of the organisation - someone in the portfolio room knew about it.
A few floors below, Jorge Armando was banging away on his computer keyboard within the organisation’s internal consultancy. Jorge was a slick haired, goateed Venezuelan who generally yelled and butchered the English language as a matter of course. He always had Know Your Enemy by the band Rage Against The Machine playing on his laptop as he worked on projects. He had been given “coaching” by senior management that this was a bloody odd thing to be doing while working for the largest oil company in the world. Since they did not actually tell him to stop doing it, even though they were, but in a British fashion, and since many things about him harked back to the revolutionary tendencies in his Latino blood, he persisted.
He was, after all, a very good internal consultant.
He was also a mole for MI6.
The unknown fact about Jorge was that he had a British father who had remained patriotic to Blighty even after living in Venezuela for the remainder of his life. His patriotism remained, even after changing his name to match his wife’s noble family name, as well as raising his family in Venezuela. His father had instilled in the young Jorge a sense of the inherent greatness of Britain and the responsibility that Her Majesty’s Government needed to be served and defended by every member of future generations of their family.
Through his contacts in the British civil service, his father had also been able to get Jorge selected as a youth recruit into the network of British intelligence services that still covered the globe. Jorge’s graduation from University with a Masters in Economics coincided nicely with a recruitment drive in MI6 to bring in more agents that were loyal but did not look or sound remotely British.
Five years later and he was one of their best moles among the list of those stationed within the global multinationals. Ironically, his “foreignness” as a Venezuelan actually made it easier for him to get recruited through the usual channels into the British based Oil Company as it helped them fulfil their statistics on workplace diversity.
Jorge had been surreptitiously monitoring the portfolio department for weeks now. While the people in the office around him thought he was working on spreadsheets, he had hacked into the building closed circuit camera system and was monitoring suspects in little video screens on his laptop.
He was sure that the second lead MI6 had on the Dalton case, apart from Jonathan Marshall, the other person from within the organisation trying to contact the intelligence services with claims of information, was someone in that room on the twelfth floor.
In the last week he had quietly put his efforts into trying to find out who the people in the portfolio department were. There were also agents planted outside the building at all hours to monitor people going in and out – looking for anything strange.
Jorge had narrowed the list of names to ten possibilities. Two of these were internal consultants within the department he worked in that had been seconded to projects within portfolio. On his laptop screen, he chose two security cameras to watch these suspects all day.
As he furiously banged away on his laptop to the screaming sounds of Rage Against The Machine’s Know Your Enemy, he was th
inking that one of the names on his list knew what this was all about. He was thinking that one of them had better crack soon - before many more people died.
33
London
Warren Tarrant poured himself a soda water in his plush leather chair inside the latest of the company’s corporate Lear jets parked on the runway at London City Airport. A black limousine with tinted windows pulled up alongside the sleek white jet.
A well built man with short cropped hair in a black suit and tie got out of the driver’s door to walk briskly toward the waiting steps that led to the interior of the aircraft. The man took the steps two at a time with ease, which showed his dedication to his fitness and strength training. As he disappeared into the dimly lit interior, the plane door shut behind him. Inside the aircraft, once his eyes had adjusted to the light, the man walked straight towards Warren Tarrant and sat in a plush crème leather chair directly opposite him.
‘The plane was swept for bugs an hour ago. It’s clean.’ stated the man in the suit. He had a monotone voice that carried the accent of military instruction.
‘Good. Thanks Derek.’ Tarrant replied, with an approving nod.
The man in the black suit was Derek Munro, not a limo driver at all but the head of the company’s secret security, as was his father before him.
His father had been involved in all the good times of the last century, getting the company in and out of Iran, the Suez incident, the Mexican nationalisation, the Bolivian revolution. He had regaled his young son with swashbuckling entries and exits from countries, removal of troublesome politicians and installation of all sorts of prominent figures. So the son had dutifully done his time in the SAS and in private security firms before joining his Dad’s firm. The swashbuckling days that had tacit Government approval were sadly long over. The present action was all about how covert you could be in the interest of organisational business. Only the highest decision makers and only those who had been so long in the organisation that they could not work anywhere else - knew of the existence of Derek and his cadre of black suited men.