by Gareth Flood
‘Nooo!’ he wailed pathetically in a high pitched girly voice. ‘A life of such talent cut short! Struck down-’
‘Shut up.’ The agent interrupted. He then sighed and shook his head. ‘Relax you perverted deviant, it’s just a tranquiliser dart. We need you alive.’
That was the last thing Lambdon Bijlani heard before blacking out and collapsing in a heap of assless leather chaps, buckles and straps.
‘Great.’ The agent said, ‘How do I get this freak out of here?’ he turned back to the door and yelled, ‘Get in here number two, got a job for you!’
42
London
LambdonBijlani groggily wafted back into consciousness to vaguely become aware of his senses again. As his eyes unglued from chemical sleep and he tried to feel his hands, a wave of panic hit as he firstly remembered what had happened, and secondly, found that he was unable to move from being completely strapped into a chair.
As the mist cleared from his eyes and vision focussed again, he looked around wildly to see where he was. The room looked like it had stainless steel walls on three sides apart from the wall in front of him, which was not a wall at all but a huge mirror.
It all came flooding back to him now.
He had been shot! Kidnapped! A captive of sick terrorists or the religious, gay hating far-right!
It was all too much to bear. He started sweating profusely before releasing a blood curdling girly scream while starting to tilt and rock the chair left and right.
‘Have you read the book Murphy by Samuel Beckett?’ A hollow voice boomed from nowhere.
Lambdon’s eyes widened and he screamed again before swinging more violently on the chair until it reached tipping point and he went over to his right and hit the floor.
In the room behind the large mirror, the lead agent who had brought Lambdon in was standing with three colleagues, watching the event through the two-way glass.
The lead agent grabbed the microphone from one of the other agents.
‘Stop messing around.’ he said, as he lifted the microphone to speak into it.
‘Mr. Bijlani. We are coming in to talk to you, do not freak out. I repeat, do not freak out. We work for the government.’
Lambdon responded by freaking out releasing his loudest scream yet.
‘Oh for goodness sake.’ the agent said, as he put the microphone down. ‘This would have been so much easier if we had found the laptop in the laptop bag or the apartment. Deviant probably left it in the office. Now we have to be all nice to him and convince him to go back into the office and retrieve it.’ he snapped his fingers at the other agents. ‘You two, with me.’
A silver panel next to the large mirror opened inside the room and three men in black suits stepped through the large black square of the doorframe.
Lambdon’s eyes bulged in cartoon-like proportions and his sweat flow reached Babylonian measurements. His eyes began to blink furiously as the sweat dripped into them.
He screamed again and fainted.
43
Corsica
Jonathan Marshall stepped out of the private Lear Jet into blindingly brilliant sunshine. The sky was achingly blue and there was not a cloud in sight.
‘I could quite get used to this’, he said as he descended the steps towards a black Mercedes that was waiting on the runway below.
Then he thought of Falcus Loader and his mood became more sombre. He then decided he would maybe be better off getting used to a quiet place in the country, with Julie, cementing entente cordial through creating a horde of Anglo-Franco kids. There had been plenty of time to think on the plane and he had decided he was not cut out for all this modern swashbuckling or whatever the hell it was called. In the times gone by you knew exactly who the enemy was and you could see him if he came running at you full pelt with a sword. Or if you were part of the British Empire, they ran towards your repeater rifle with sticks or sharpened exotic fruit. Life was simple. These days you didn’t know who anyone really was and your life was ended by a high velocity bullet from a snipers rifle as you stepped out of a plane…
The sun was so bright he could hardly see. He turned while squinting badly to see his massive Israeli bodyguard descending on the steps, closely followed by the Arab with the Desert Falcon on his arm.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Jonathan asked.
Avi the Giant made a symbol in front of his face that looked something like a question mark. ‘Ah, we are in a special place – Corsica.’
‘Corsica?’
‘Yes, to see a very special man, come,’ Avi said, motioning to the black Mercedes, ‘we cannot keep him waiting. We must get there before his four ‘o clock phone call. If it comes today.’
Jonathan decided not to ask. If this guy was anything like on the same strange scale like the Nasty Arab and One Crazy Hebe, then he was in for a special treat he did not particularly savour.
He got into the car dwelling on the unbalanced nature of the people running the planet today.
44
London
LambdonBijlani stood in front of the sweeping headquarters of the largest oil company in the world.
Next to him stood the lead MI6 agent, the agent that had in the last twenty-four hours, shot him, tied him to a chair and threatened to end his world, as he knew it unless he helped expose history’s potentially largest oligopoly in the making.
Curved marble columns rose above the two men that were interspersed by statues representing wisdom and timeliness.
Lambdon had started to have a slight panic attack as they approached the entrance. He had become a lot more co-operative with the agency when they had promised him amnesty for anything he had been willingly or unwittingly involved in, including a lack of prosecution for any other illicit files they would find on the hard drive of his laptop. All he had to do in return was lead the agent into the building and get his laptop with the project files on it.
After a few more deep breaths and some leading at the elbow by the agent, they started heading toward the door.
‘You’re sweating more than is acceptably normal.’ The agent said in his controlled monotone. ‘You need to be cool here. Just another day in the office - are we cool?’
Lambdon huffed and wiped his brow, ‘Cool, cool.’ he said.
‘Good. Just a walk in the park buddy.’
All these Americanisms annoyed Lambdon. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I don’t even know your name. What if I have to introduce you?’
‘My name is Jerry Cornell.’ The agent said.
‘Jerry is an American name.’ Lambdon stated.
‘My father was American.’ The agent said.
‘Is Jerry Cornell your real name?’
‘No. Keep walking.’
‘Is your father really American?’
‘No. Keep walking.’
By this time they were at the reception desk for Lambdon to sign the man in as a guest visitor. His hands were threatening to start shaking at any moment as his entire nervous system screamed for him to run at an ever increasing internal volume. The receptionist was a pretty African lady with a crevatte of the company colours cosseting her neck. ‘Are you alright, sir?’ she asked as her right eyebrow raised ever so slightly.
‘Um. Yes. Fine. Sorry. Big meeting today.’ Lambdon said.
‘Ah.’ was all she said, as she looked at the visitor pass again before sliding it across the desk.
Lambdon took it a little too quickly and they turned together to head for the elevators. Once on the twelfth floor of the building, the rehearsed plan swung into action.
The agent called Jerry hovered by the coffee machine in the hall, casually reading the Financial Times, while Lambdon would casually go and fetch his laptop.
The door to the portfolio office had a separate card entry system to everywhere else in the building. Lambdon, as he did every morning, pulled out another magnetic identification card and held it up to the card reader embedded in the door. Every day the door dutifully beeped when
he did this and let him in.
Today it did not.
It did nothing.
Lambdon initiated full body sweat.
They were onto me! They’ve frozen me out of the office. The whole thing has been shut down. Panic! RUN! His mind screamed.
‘Scuse us guv.’ a rough voice came from behind.
‘Eep!’ Lambdon gave a little jump and turned around quickly.
He was shocked not to be standing toe to toe with the grim reaper but a team of in-house East End removals men complete with requisite tattoos, ponytails and shaved heads.
‘We need to ge’ in there.’ One of the removals team said.
‘Uh, sure.’ Lambdon said, stepping aside.
The head removals man pushed passed him to beep the door with a card and start to file his men into the office.
‘I uh, need to get my laptop, what are you people doing here?’ Lambdon could see inside the door that the office was a crazy mess. Half of it was strewn over the floor and the other half was all boxed up.
‘Office move,’ came the reply, ‘we have to box all this stuff up and take it to the basement.’
‘Oh, okay’ Lambdon continued to stand still by the doorway to see at what stage of removal the office was in and whether his laptop would even still be in there. He could see that the removals men were just carting away all the cabinets wholesale, without emptying people’s belongings.
Standard practice in these office moves was that the owner of each lockable cabinet or shelf in each cabinet removed all their belongings before it was taken away. It seemed they were in such a hurry to clear the office that everything was being removed exactly as it was. The shock that the office had been shut down apparently overnight had not yet registered with Lambdon. His future security purely lay in securing his laptop and handing it over to the intelligence services. His high profile project in the portfolio department, his job in general - none of it mattered anymore. It all paled into insignificance with the threat of interminable detention and the ruination of his reputation among his extended family if the nature of his sexuality was publicised.
With this driving force limiting his vision, he strode into the office, regardless of personal safety.
‘I need to get my laptop.’ he pre-empted the looks of the removal men.
‘Yeah guv.’ replied a ponytailed man next to his cabinet that was throwing paper into a wheeled bin.
The removals men did not care.
Lambdon thought that if they wanted to get all the sensitive information out of the room it would have made more sense to put someone on the door who cared for something more than earning five pounds an hour in the morning with the aim of spending it on Stella beer in the afternoon.
Lambdon unlocked his cabinet, grabbed his laptop and walked out.
As he exited the doors of portfolio, he heard a voice clearly directed at him from nearby,
‘Hey! What are you doing in there?’
Lambdon quickly turned to his right to see a man in a black suit striding towards him down the hall with a can of soft drink in his hand while reaching for a two-way radio on his belt. As the man unclipped the radio and brought it to his mouth he was moving past the “rest station” where the coffee machine was housed. A hand shot out from nowhere from the rest area to chop into the throat of the black suited man. The two-way radio fell to the floor and the man’s face contorted as his air supply was cut off.
Just as his legs buckled the MI6 agent appeared and supported the man at the shoulders while half forcing him to walk, half dragging him towards a nearby fire exit stairwell on the opposite side of the corridor. The agent pushed the fire door open with his shoulder and threw the man down the concrete stairs. The whole incident appeared to be over in a few seconds and no one else had appeared in the corridor.
The agent coolly turned around and moved to grab Lambdon by the arm to start walking him out.
‘Be cool.’ he said.
‘Uh, okay Jerry.’ Lambdon said.
They walked straight back out of the building using their passes and straight into an unmarked car that was parked illegally directly outside.
‘Well done.’ The agent said to Lambdon, once they were underway.
‘You ever get excited or phased by anything, Jerry?’ Lambdon asked as he clutched his laptop to his chest.
‘Oh, I’m very excited,’ the agent replied. ‘I can’t wait to get this thing back to base see what’s in Pandora’s box.’
Lambdon hung his head and whimpered softly.
45
Corsica
The brown hills of Corsica rolled luxuriously past Jonathan’s car window. He fell to contemplating what strange situation he would be walking into next, as well as the strong possibility that he might still die out of all of this.
He had almost given up trying to pry out of Avi the giant, any details of the person they were going to meet. Avi always declined to let slip any information “until the time was right”. Given they were now driving towards this person’s residence, Jonathan wondered when the “right time” would be.
He hated being given information just before walking into a meeting. It happened quite often in the consulting world, particularly when consultants had been brought in purely to further political ends of senior managers. This would typically manifest itself in the political businessman telling the consultant as they were going into the meeting, something to the effect of: “The board will never agree to this anyway. The whole project was done just to discredit the ideas of X.”
Jonathan could not shake a nagging feeling that maybe he was being used in just such a format by the Crazy Arab and One Nasty Hebe. The problem was that you had no way of knowing until the trap was effectively sprung.
Jonathan was troubled enough that he turned away from the view of the picturesque brown hills to have one last crack at Avi before they arrived. As he opened his mouth to speak, the words died in his throat due to the sound of a large explosion in the distance.
Jonathan recoiled into the seat.
‘What the hell was that?’ he yelled at Avi.
‘Ah,’ contemplated Avi, clearly not perturbed at all, ‘now is not a good time to arrive. He will not be in the best of moods, still,’ he shrugged, ‘we must persevere.’
‘I feel I would be safer leaving this car and walking away from you - right now.’ Jonathan said in return.
‘No need,’ replied Avi, ‘It is time to tell you about the man we are going to meet. His real name is no longer known. He is only known as Mr. 3.64 Percent.’
Forty minutes later all the men were standing on the wide marble veranda of the finest hotel in Corsica, in the presence of Mr. 3.64 Percent himself, who looked resplendent in a freshly pressed white suit.
Avi had explained some of the mystery behind this powerful and secretive player in the oil industry, who had connections seemingly into everything. Jonathan had heard about the deal in The Gabon and the battle of wills being fought against the Corsican Liberation Front through the medium of Villas.
As for Mr. 3.64 Percent himself, his immediate mood was for sure, not great, as he sipped his lemon tea and noted that his view of the sea was being blocked by a strange assortment of men.
The ill mood was compounded by the fact that he was currently again “between villas” due to the earlier explosion. He had not yet made his phone call to order a new, grander villa and this was in the back of his mind as he surveyed the apparent assortment of madmen who were standing on the veranda in front of him: A huge Jewish fellow, An Arab with a falcon on his arm and scimitar glinting in his sash and an occidental who was dressed far too much in the ‘casual’ fashion for his liking.
‘Vell.’ he said flatly in his thick Belgian Dutch accent, as he looked on them with eyes as grey as duck pate. ‘You all have the expressions of someone who is looking for an answer…
46
London
Within the secretive intestines of MI6, William Gladstone and the heads of thre
e different departments as well as the agent called Jerry Cornell, all sat in chairs around a conference table and whistled in amazement.
‘This is dynamite.’ One of the head agents said.
LambdonBijlani had slipped into ‘presentation mode’ for the last forty minutes and professionally elaborated as only highly paid consultants could.
He had detailed the top-secret financial model that made up the internal business case for the entire scheme of shipping oil East to West in vast quantities. Lambdon had just finished presenting and was taking a sip of water while his audience absorbed the magnitude of it all. Although Lambdon only presented and had knowledge of the financial model, it was soon pieced together from the intelligence sources around the room the implications of the larger program of shifting that amount of crude oil across many countries and the property and political issues involved, even at this early stage. Those in the room were still unaware of the plan for the oil to pass entirely over land that was privately owned by the consortium, the same consortium that would also own the pipeline. They also still did not know who were involved as stakeholders behind the whole scheme.
Yet all were taken aback by even the limited amount they knew of so far.
‘All those people affected.’ Another of the head agents said, ‘and the decision to do it is driven by a number in a spreadsheet.’
‘Essentially…Yes’ Lambdon said, as he placed his glass of water back on the table.
‘Tell me,’ asked another agent, ‘what happens when you are doing this modelling, which is based on a hypothesis based on one of the big guys wanting to make a name for himself, and the number comes out less than expected?’
‘Well, the inputs to the model are revisited: GDP’s, income levels, sell out prices, taken from different but equally reliable sources. The GDP forecast from the World Bank versus the International Monetary Fund can vary by as much as 1.8 percent for a country, but on a project like this, that equates to a couple of billion dollars. Normally the model is reiterated until it comes to within five percent variation of the initial hypothesis.’