The Devil's Handshake (23 page)

By the look on the face of the advisor,
Thomas immediately thought he had just threatened to kill him,
though he didn’t understand what he had said.

He certainly understood though what Wasir,
having turned his gaze back towards to him, and said to him in
Italian in an effort to show him he wasn’t just some peasant from
Somalia who could, be pushed around by rich white men.

“
Only if you send me your
whore for the night!”

Instantly Thomas’s eyes flashed his demon
appearing with force. It was a look that made Hussein feel a shiver
down his spine.

In measured flawless Italian like the devil
Thomas replied, “You will leave my boat in the morning! You will
take the two million I have offered. If you do not, I will cut off
your balls and feed them to fishes for your insult.”

In any other circumstances, he would have
made Wasir pay the two million for the insult to the love of his
life on pain of death, but he had given his word to his friend so
instead he had offered the pirate a way out.

The fact that Litchfield had replied
unexpectedly in fluent Italian to his insult just as Wasir’s
teachers did as a small boy had taken aback the pirate for he could
tell Thomas meant what he said.

Although Hussein had no idea what had been
said, the former teacher could sense both parties were at a point
of no return. He was thoroughly terrified and not just because of
the threat, he had just been on the receiving end of from
Wasir.

While the ex-pirate, sensing through
experience that now was not the time for a fight, not to mention
still in shock having been called out by the Englishman’s fluent
Italian, he chose to listen to his survival instincts.

“
Two million is acceptable,”
he said taking the offer and allowing Hussein to breathe again as
catastrophe had been avoided. Having being a teacher in London
before returning home, he wasn’t used to ‘the sharp end’ of
life.

“
I will let the Captain know
you’re leaving in morning Minister,” Thomas said with finality,
letting Wasir know he was no longer welcome under his roof. He
promptly left the room to join Nara.

As he did so, Wasir turned to the relieved
Hussein and ordered, “Go and get my bitches and tell them to join
me in my room!” in Somali.

“
Ybeeldaaje,” meaning
“Chief,” said the advisor in a subservient manner, praying that
Wasir didn’t carry through on his threat to cut out his
tongue.

Sitting in the Master cabin on the sofa at
the end of the bed having retired in the evening, Thomas picked up
the phone and made his call to Adwalland to let the President know
how the meeting went with his problem Minister.

He hadn’t been on very long though before he
was momentary distracted by Nara exiting their bathroom wearing the
most incredible lace silk teddy. Covering the receiver he said, “La
mia Signora di Bellezza!” receiving blown kisses in return from
her.

Returning back to his call, he decided to
finish it as quickly as possible so he could get his hands on Nara.
He proceeded to brief the President as to his thoughts, including
his disappointment at Wasir’s attempt to extort fifty million for
his own personal pocket.

With the conversation now reaching a natural
end, not to mention Nara giving him her “best come to bed” look as
she sat by him on the sofa stroking his arm and sinfully using her
toes to rub his crotch that in response was stirring to life, he
wrapped up the call.

“
We will need to deal with
him in the near future, Mr. President.”

The President chose to ignore him. “I will
see you in soon?” the President asked hopefully as he knew he
needed Thomas’s financial strength and help to ensure the chief’s
loyalty.

“
Next month,” he promised
his friend.

Call ended, the phone replaced, Nara pounced
and arrived on his lap, straddling him with her feet either side
whispering huskily in Turkmen as she bent down to kiss him. “Take
what is yours, my love.”

As Thomas and Nara started to make love on
The Libertine, the conversation between him and President started
simultaneously downloaded by two listening posts, one at GCHQ in
Cheltenham the other at the FAPSI listening post based in
Syria.

The download completed, the communication was
immediately forwarded onto Navjot and Rebecca respectively under
the terms of their nations shared intelligence agreement and the
analysts of the SVR by the FAPSI.

On the shoreline in Nice, three surveillance
teams of MI6, SAD, and SVR unbeknownst to each other were also
sending their images from the day on their respective laptops to
their masters.

22

Washington D.C. / London / Moscow

Arriving in Washington, London & Moscow
almost within minutes of each other, yet unknown to each recipient,
the transcript of the telephone conservation between the
billionaire and the President of the world’s newest nation was
handled differently.

Navjot and his team retreated to the Cube
together to listen to it.

Rebecca left it on her laptop unopened, as
was the case with regard the photos that had been emailed as
well.

Alexei was still unaware of the call and
would remain so until his analysts had summarized it for him.

Navjot left the images to one of his team,
who deemed the photos of limited importance and as such parked them
in a file.

Later still Alexei was still unaware of them,
he too having left them for his analysts to deem whether the
information was important enough for his attention to be included
in his Report.

Rebecca dropped her coffee the second she saw
the pictures of Wasir Osman Hassan boarding his yacht!

23

Kenya 2006

“
God’s Place” is the loose
translation of the word “Kenya”, and for Rebecca would forever
represent both the place that she had fallen in love and the place
that had then cruelly taken that love away from her.

After a challenging tour in Baghdad’s Green
Zone liaising with the contractors tasked with the security of
Iraq, the tracking and then relocating members of the failed
state’s abandoned chemical weapons program to ensure that
terrorists or States engaged in the development of weapons of mass
destruction didn’t get their hands on them, she was then
transferred to Nairobi. There she was to monitor the growing
problem of Islamic terrorists from Britain and Pakistan that were
making their way to Somalia for training to become the next the
‘lambs to the slaughter’ in the fight against the great Satan.

She had first met Chris Anderson on the
famous Lord Delamare Terrace of the Norfolk Hotel where they were
both staying while setting themselves up in Nairobi.

With his blonde hair, piercing blue eyes,
sun-washed face scattered with one or two lines from his years
spent in-country working for the Red Cross and at a muscular framed
six-feet, to Rebecca he looked like her image of Hercules, and he
had quickly swept her off her feet.

Until Chris appeared, relationships in
Rebecca’s life were just moments in time. He changed that in the
instant they met. A surgeon by profession, principled, committed to
injustices of the world, he had said to her in their first night
together that he could never leave Africa.

“
Africa haunts your soul,”
he had said and told her every time they discussed it.

Although they had been together for nearly
two years, and despite knowing she was in love with him, Rebecca
still hadn’t him told him what she did really for a living.

Her reasoning was simple—she was terrified of
losing him.

He knew her as “Cathy Benson,” the Regional
Asset Manager for London and Africa Loss Adjusters, not as “Rebecca
Leriris,” East Africa Section Chief for MI6, despite HR clearing
him.

In the past, she had often used the service’s
regulations as justification for the ending of her relationships,
as officers of the SIS weren’t allowed to marry non-British
nationals or even disclose their real names until they have been
security vetted. But because he had become such an important part
of her life she took the plunge and had declared their relationship
to her superiors.

With her tour ending in just a few months and
fast approaching in the back of her mind if not in reality, she was
resigned to the fact that she was either going to have to bite the
bullet and tell him or end it like she had always done in the past
and return to Britain back to her real life.

It was a prospect she couldn’t bear to think
about but as was typical in their relationship he beat her to the
punch so to speak. Lying in bed together after Chris had spent a
hard month in South Sudan supporting the overworked doctors in the
field, he had asked her to come to Lamu and Kiunga on the coast
over the weekend with him so they could have a “mini-break.”

Ever the agent, Rebecca had jumped at the
chance to go with him having been tasked for intelligence on the
area on the growing influence the Al Shabaab that had taken over
much of south and central Somalia.

“
We need an on-ground
assessment whether AQ has established training camps in the area,”
Michael had said in their weekly briefings over the sat
phone.

“
I’ll get on the case,” she
had replied without a second thought.

For adventure driven tourists of the world,
Lamu is the epitome of what happens when the film the Arabian
Nights has a relationship with the Blue Lagoon.

For the rich wealthy jet set of the world, it
represents the end of a party circuit that starts in Gstaad and
ends amongst the poverty of Lamu. The reason why the area had
become so popular over the years amongst this unique set of
adventure seekers was because for some of them who were backpackers
in their youth in the 1970s, had returned to build their guarded
villas on the Shela Beach, making the small little town Africa’s
own “Sodom and Gomorrah” with an underground of sex and drugs, with
some of the beach boys doing the delivering in more ways than
one.

Yet for all its excesses, it is in its
proximity the border with Somalia there is an area called Kiunga,
which is the nearest thing on Earth to purgatory outside a gulag in
North Korea. With its islands it shelters an extensive system of
creeks, channels, and mangrove forests that were the perfect safe
haven for smugglers and pirates alike who in turn were the
lifeblood of the terrorists.

The fact that Chris had just asked her to
come to Kiunga was too good an opportunity to turn down even if she
did feel guilty using her lover as an intelligence source.

As a direct consequence from having worked
for many aid agencies over the last ten years the simple fact was
his intelligence sources were much better than hers would be.

As they drove up to Lamu, he had told her had
arranged to meet one such pirate with a good reputation for always
delivering to get much needed supplies into Ras Kamboni.

“
How did you meet him
darling?” she had asked, ever the intelligence officer.

“
One of my runners set it
up,” he had said without actually explaining how, despite her
attempt to push him.

What Chris had told her though was that the
little community on the Somali side of the border that had been on
the U.S. radar since the early days after 9/11, when the U.S. had
thought the town was used first for the bombings of the embassy in
Nairobi and then the Mombasa hotel bombing by the Jihadist
fighters, was in a desperate situation due to a takeover of the
town by Al Qaeda.

Later on that night having had arrived at the
little hotel while they had sat on the beach with a light wind
brushing against her face looking at the map of the area Chris
suddenly had said, “I know why my locals call it Dick’s Head
now!”

“
Pardon?” she had replied
giggling.

“
Because it’s a phallic spit
of land extending out from the village!” he had added, showing her
the map.

“
Oh gosh! They’re right! It
is!” she had said, still giggling.

“
Marry me?” he had said out
of nowhere, interrupting her.

“
WHAT!” Rebecca had replied
her laughter stopping dead in her tracks as her mind had processed
what he had just asked.“You heard me Cath,” he had
responded.

“
I….I…” she had answered in
s

hock.

“
It’s okay. I know darling,”
he had said, interrupting her and taking hold of her
hand.

“
Know what?” she had said,
completely thrown by not just his proposal but also his line of
questioning.

“
That you’re not just a Lost
Adjuster,” he had said squeezing her hand in the
process.

A flood of emotions hit her all at once as
her deception of the man she loved was out in the open and not
because she had told him.

“
How?” she had responded
weakly.

“
About a year ago, I sort of
worked it out, when I had a series of probing chats with several
friends from other NGOs, at the time it felt like an interview …and
well I put two and two together when I suddenly realized that I had
never met any of your friends or family.” He had smiled at her.
“So, yes or no?” he had asked as she sat there in shock processing
his words.

“
This was why I fell in love
him!” she had thought. “He has never put pressure on me to meet my
friends or family, he accepted me warts and all.” Her mind had
processed all at once.

“
But But… You don’t know my
real name” she had replied, tears in her eyes.