Oil & Corruption
Page 25
Tarrant could be seen at the far end of the garden. He was on his knees facing away from the men, hunched over a bonsai tree with tiny clippers, as he tended the miniature leaves. Wires leading off earphones in his ears could be seen as he relaxed to classical music while fully immersed in his hobby.
This was a good break for Jonathan and his crew. They were clustered on a square metre of brick at the entrance, taking one more step meant crunching the stones under their shoes, which would alert anyone in the garden to their presence. Depending on how loud Tarrant had his music playing; they would still be able to get close to him whilst still retaining the element of surprise.
Having concluded that the scene looked relatively safe, Avi motioned them forward and they all stepped up onto the stones to begin crunching their way towards Tarrant with guns drawn and pointed at his back. Jonathan felt that he would have no qualms about shooting such a villainous swine in the back - even if he was holding a real weapon.
The crunching of the stones underfoot was quite loud but Tarrant obviously liked his dramatic music even louder. The men stopped when they reached within two metres of him. There was an odd moment of silence as the man on his knees serenely clipped away at leaves, completely oblivious that he had four guns trained on his spine.
Anger welled up from deep within Jonathan.
This is the bastard who set things in motion to have me killed - to have Julie killed! To have who knows how many other people killed. He reclines in his luxury pad and strokes tiny leaves while people die! he thought.
‘Warren Tarrant!’ he barked at the back of the man.
Tarrant looked up to the wall in front of him with a questioning tilt to his head. Then he slowly turned around before his body jerked with shock at the scene that confronted him. He stood up rapidly while whipping the earphones out of his ears.
‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he demanded, before looking past them with alarm in his eyes. ‘Look what you’ve done to my garden!’ he yelled, as he surveyed the damage done by the feet of peasants through his carefully raked stones. His inner Chi was shuddering at not only the intrusion but also the destruction of his inner sanctum sanctorum. At the moment Tarrant was about to let rip by screaming at them as though they were subordinates who had forgotten to put sugar in his coffee, the Arab pulled out his huge scimitar sword from the large red sash around his waist. There were a few flashes of silver as the blade swirled keenly through the air in slash movements around the Arab’s body before the razor sharp tip came to rest within inches of Tarrant’s throat.
‘You only answer.’ The Arab said, ‘Otherwise no speak. Down, back down.’ The blade tapped Tarrant a couple of times on the shoulder to indicate for him to drop back to his knees.
‘I will not-’ Tarrant began to protest but the blade came forward to rest ever so slightly on his neck until a drop of blood squeezed out of the skin. Tarrant’s eyes widened as he registered pain and realised the men were serious. He could not bully them and they would not obey him just because of who he was. The blade tapped him on the shoulder again and he slowly sunk back down to his knees.
‘You’ve come to kill me.’ he stated flatly.
‘You deserve no less.’ Jonathan replied as he looked down at his former employer.
‘Trying to kill your own employees, setting up dodgy deals with even dodgier Russians - then trying to kill them as well.’
Tarrant’s eyes darkened. ‘Who are you?’
‘Just another faceless employee who is about to let the world know what a two timing scumbag you really are.’ Jonathan said.
‘You don’t scare me. If you’re assassins - then get on with it. Otherwise you have no proof of anything.’
‘Au Contraire.’ Jonathan replied excitedly, as his emotions began to get the better of him. ‘Au very, very Contraire. Listen to this!’ A small micro cassette recorder appeared out of Jonathan’s pocket and he held it up in front of Tarrant’s face as he hit the play button. The sound that came out of the tinny speaker was slightly muted but still distinct; it was the conversation they had recorded in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, with a now dead Russian yelling in a public payphone at who he thought was Tarrant himself.
‘This is how you contact us?’ The mechanical tinged voice squawked. ‘My boss is extremely upset about the man you sent. This is not the behaviour of international businessman, especially head of major oil company!’ Tarrant’s face turned from defiance to shock in an instant.
‘We send you a message when we kill him.’ Tarrant’s face turned ashen at this.
‘We kill everyone associated with this deal and make the pipeline never happen. You think I am afraid out here? We have men everywhere. You cannot touch us!’ The voice was cut off and drowned out by the sound of gunfire over the tape. Jonathan clicked it off.
‘They killed Munro.’ Tarrant said softly to himself in disbelief.
‘That’s right.’ Jonathan said, ‘Whoever you sent is dead. And now the person the Russians sent to communicate-’ he shook the tape recorder in Tarrant’s face ‘Has been killed as well. So it looks like your business partnership has been terminated and your now ex-partners will be seeking recourse, um, how shall I put this? Ah yes, outside the courts.’
Jonathan’s facetious tone caused Tarrant’s face to darken again into the mask of arrogance that had been in place for many years.
‘Be that as it may,’ he said icily, ‘there still seems a distinct lack of hard proof linking me to any Russian organisations. I can distance myself from what you have without a problem. Nothing is over. Since you don’t seem to be here to kill me, or you would have already, who you are is an irrelevance. Now get off my property.’
‘Irrelevance huh?’ Jonathan replied thoughtfully while tapping the tape recorder against his chin. ‘How irrelevant is the report that was sent to the top floor? The report that caused you to send assassins after your own employees? The report that hypothesised the building of the pipeline across former Communist states that could only be achieved by nefarious means?’
Tarrant’s eyes widened, shocked that apparent outsiders knew of the existence of the report. ‘That was just an internal analysis for an ideas meeting. It never left the company.’ he countered, though there was a note of uncertainty in his voice.
‘Wrong, big man.’ Jonathan said strongly while leaning forward, ‘I’m Jonathan Marshall. I’m the author of said report. I still have copies and tomorrow morning the report, along with what we have on tape, will be splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the English speaking world. You and the company will be investigated from every angle and if the authorities don’t get you - the Russians will. Either way, you’re finished!’
‘No!’ Tarrant cried.
‘Yessss!’ Jonathan said.
Tarrant’s body shuddered a little before deflating slightly as his head and back bowed while his carefully constructed world of power came crashing down around him. There was a moment of silence before a gut-wrenching sob was heard from the bowed head, then another.
He knew it was all over.
‘And the final kicker is that I’ve just recorded this entire conversation as well. This will also be with the press tomorrow’ Jonathan waved the tape recorder around again. He had surreptitiously pressed the record button soon after playing the Russian scene.
Tarrant looked up with tears in his eyes, ‘You bastard.’
‘No, you’re the bastard,’ Jonathan replied while raising the gun that was in his other hand to point it at Tarrant, ‘you’ve had people killed and screwed many more over on top of that - just to further your own ego. You deserve no less.’ he depressed the trigger of the gun and fired into Tarrant’s leg.
Tarrant screamed like a little girl who had fallen off her bike, thinking he had been shot. His eyes quickly dilated as the drug in the dart immediately took effect. His body swayed slightly back and forth before he fell forward to plant his face in deep within his precious Zen stones.
&nbs
p; ‘How about that.’ Jonathan said smiling at the others, ‘I finally got to shoot someone.’
‘Well done,’ Avi said as he clapped him on the shoulder, ‘the whole thing - very well done.’
Zlatan and the Arab also smiled and nodded in appreciation of how he had handled himself.
‘And now…’ Zlatan broke in with an evil tint to his voice, as he pulled a knife out of his belt and began to approach Tarrant’s inert form, ‘We give him Romanian Gypsy shave.’
‘What? No.’ Jonathan said incredulously.
‘Our work here is done.’ Avi said calmly.
‘In Ploiesti, this man would get stripped, shaved and shot. The triple S! I already compromise. Just want shave. One S!’ Zlatan yelled, as he made a dive for Tarrant’s eyebrows.
The next few minute were spent with Avi and the Arab restraining Zlatan from shaving the unconscious Tarrant in unspeakable places while the Gypsy kept yelling ‘I want shave! I want shave!’
Eventually Jonathan shot Zlatan in the backside with a dart and he collapsed before passing out with, ‘I want shhhhhh-’
The Arab hoisted the unconscious Gypsy over his shoulder and they all set off back towards the car.
‘How about that? I got to shoot two people in the end.’ Jonathan said happily, as they rounded the house. ‘Avi, give me your cellular phone.’
He pulled from his pocket the small SIM card reader for what he hoped would be the last time, looked up a number and dialled it into the phone. It rang three times before being picked up.
‘Harry. It’s Jonathan. Yes, yes, I know. Tell your boys I’m coming in.’
53
The morning editions of five international newspapers broke the story.
It took up most of the front page with headlines running a range of angles from ‘Global Oil Conspiracy’ to ‘Sleazy CEO and Russian Mafia Bed Mates.’ The stories were full of quotes from the audiotape and extracts from the report.
The global effect was explosive to say the least.
Everyone from Government agencies to underworld dons were hitting the roof. By midday it was in the afternoon edition of pretty much every paper on the planet, as well as being run on fifteen-minute intervals on all the cable news channels.
By mid-afternoon the Oil Company in question was already being investigated by the authorities in fifty of the countries they operated in. Intelligence agents, anti-trust investigators and lawyers were having warrants and depositions printed on a volume to make a large commercial printer smile. By four o’clock in the afternoon, the International Oil Company issued a statement that Warrant Tarrant had been summarily dismissed for misconduct. It also stated that he had lost all rights to the golden parachute of stock options and additional pension payments that departing CEO’s came to expect. This was very rare in corporate Europe but particularly rare at the Oil Company, which gave insight into how angry they were over what had happened and the internal ructions it was causing.
Tarrant himself had woken up from the effects of the drug to be confronted by MI6 agents, Interpol and Scotland Yard officers. They had arrest warrants ready for offences ranging from corporate fraud to murder. He issued a statement from prison later in the day through his lawyers, denying all charges against him and promising to sue the company for unfair dismissal.
The evening editions were by now focussing on the people side of the story, carrying cartoon pictures of Tarrant, drawn to show him drinking dollar signs coming out of petrol pumps with headlines such as ‘Utter Hubris of Egomaniac’ and ‘Tarrant finished for good.’
54
London
Jonathan took another sip of freshly brewed coffee as he surveyed the daily newspapers laid out on the desk before him.
He broke out into a large smile when he saw how much the company stock had dived.
He was sitting in a windowless meeting room deep within the interior of the MI6 building on London’s South Bank. Sitting around the room were the senior agents that had been assigned to his case.
Harry Shaftsbury was also there and looking rather pleased with himself in front of the assembled seniority. All the agents kept looking at the door as they awaited the arrival of Sir William Gladstone.
Jonathan had been dropped off last night within walking distance of the building by his erstwhile band of strange colleagues on their way back to the private airfield. They were all going back to their bosses after a successful job to regale and delight their employers with the downfall of major oil companies and politicians. These were the events that really juiced the type of men for whom money no longer held any potency to delight. Their parting had been short and Jonathan was told that his association had been good all round. Avi and Zlatan each gave him an unlisted number on a card in case he needed to contact them again. The Arab grunted an affirmation and gave him a feather from the Falcon before turning to leave.
Once he had been admitted to the MI6 building, they had hurriedly rushed him to the lower levels to begin questioning him. It had gone on for a few hours before the stress of the last week had begun to leave his body and he had started to fall asleep.
They had given him one of the guest rooms in the underground complex to sleep in and then resumed questioning him in the morning. Once the debrief was complete and the summary finally sent upstairs to Gladstone, the word had come back down that Gladstone himself wanted to meet Jonathan.
The head of the clandestine agency soon swept in amongst a blur of dour colours, tweed jacket and carefully combed grey hair.
‘So, you’re the plucky bugger that has caused so much grief to so many, eh?’ Gladstone stated loudly while examining Jonathan from beneath a raised eyebrow.
‘It’s amazing what you can achieve while desperately trying to stay alive and find out why people are hunting you.’ Jonathan replied. One of the side effects of his recent experiences was that he no longer feared people in power. They were there to be questioned in what they were doing and were not unassailable in authority. So while all the MI6 employees visibly cowered in their chairs and Harry broke out in another cold sweat, Jonathan reclined back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head in a relaxed manner that he knew would probably infuriate an ex-public schoolboy like Gladstone.
‘I need to know if I will be safe from now on. Do I have to stay in hiding or not?’ Jonathan asked.
‘I should think not,’ Gladstone replied while shooting daggers from his eyes at Jonathan’s relaxed posture. ‘The whole affair is out in the open. Tarrant is already done for, it is just a matter of time till they root out any colleagues he had at the company that were complicit in his dealings. A major shakeup within the company has just been announced and I very much doubt that anyone having anything to do with Tarrant will have a job by the end of the week.’
‘And what about the Russians?’ Jonathan asked, ‘They’re even more ruthless.’
‘Well, there will now be so much pressure on the Russian government, that they will have to launch an investigation into the Vice President and he will probably have to resign. Again, a large shake up will happen, in the government and in the security services, since the two are intimately linked. The only reason they were all after you like a rabid foxhunt was to stop the entire affair becoming public. That has happened, so there is no reason to keep chasing you for your death. It is pointless. All these people have much bigger issues on their hands now. You should be perfectly safe from now on. Don’t go on CNN or anything daft like that. Keep a low profile and you should be fine.’
‘Great, just what I wanted to hear. Don’t worry, I won’t be selling my story or seeking celebrity status like the rest of the British population. I just want to be in control of my own life again.’
‘Good Man.’ Gladstone judged, as he nodded in affirmation. ‘We are all done then. I just wanted to meet you and I’m bally glad I did, we need more of your type in the world. Possibly even in the Intelligence services, given what you have done. Have you considered your next move?’
‘Fine, well get in contact through Harry here if it interests you. Is there anything else you need now?’ Gladstone asked.
‘A lift to Waterloo station would be good.’ Jonathan said.
‘Done. Shaftsbury.’ Gladstone clicked his fingers.
Harry bolted upright in his chair.
‘Take your friend where he wants to go.’ Gladstone said as he stood to leave. There was another streak of grey and tweed and he was gone from the room.
Harry was beaming like a kid that had just unwrapped the ultimate Christmas present, for Gladstone had not only remembered his name – he’d said it correctly.
Jonathan winked at him and signalled he was ready to go.
55
Moscow
In the plush offices of the Vice-President of the Russian Federation, a few dark suited men were involved in an all out brawl. Once the entire story had broken, they had eschewed tradition by skipping the vodka and instead immediately began fighting.
The Vice President himself, Anatoly Kirkov, was in the thick of it, fighting through the red mist that obscured his vision as he attempted to beat his closest advisors to death with an oversize ashtray that had been a gift from the dictator of Kyrgyzstan.
It had been during one of his personal cabinet meetings that the story had broken. After initially nearly falling off his chair, Kirkov had ordered a television to be brought into his office so they could witness their careers, lives, ambitions and fifteen years of careful planning come crashing down around them.
The obvious recriminations and finger pointing had begun almost immediately, to be quickly followed by physical assault.