Sword of Allah (9 page)

Jeff Kalas sat by the pool at the Manila Diamond Hotel and watched the waiters scurry from guest to bar, shuttling drinks. The hot sun danced on the inviting blue water fed by a waterfall tumbling through faux rocks. The guests lounging poolside were the usual mix found at fivestar hotels throughout the region: businessmen of various nationalities, but mainly Japanese and American, accompanied by wives with dimply thighs and designer costumes, and a family or two with noisy children. One particularly attractive blonde also occupied a chair, her every languid movement kept under surveillance by the married men who wished they weren’t and spent the day dreaming of what might have been had their wives stayed home.

Jones and Smith. Smith and Jones.
Kalas wrote the names on a napkin already covered in figures, the record of his meeting with the pair. An unlikely duo, a camel jockey and a power point. Kalas was unsure of the source of their wealth, but it certainly wasn’t legal. The question Kalas asked himself was whether he wanted to know
what
that source was, and immediately decided that, no, he did not. They obviously had money and plenty of it, with more to come. Surely that was all that mattered?

This was Kalas’s first face-to-face with his new clients. He’d received the ticket, itinerary and one thousand US dollars in crisp hundred-dollar notes in the UPS handdelivered package. There was also a typed note promising another ten thousand US dollars if he turned up at the appointed time at the Manila Diamond Hotel. And here he was at the specified place and time. Smith and Jones had been good for their word. He eyed the pregnant envelope on the table in front of him and replayed in his head the relevant parts of their earlier conversation.

‘We are making a lot of money in your country and we want to get it out,’ Smith had said.

‘If I can be blunt,’ asked Kalas, clearing his throat, ‘how much money?’

‘Anywhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred million US.’

Kalas had somehow managed to keep his poker face on at that moment, frowning professionally when, inside, he was doing cartwheels. This was, quite possibly, The Jackpot.

Other aspects of their requirements were quietly discussed and then, finally, the question of his fee. They’d argued that, given the sums, he should expect no more than two percent. That was ridiculous, of course, because he was taking on the risk of imprisonment. As such, he argued his return should be far more substantial, in the vicinity of twenty percent. There was much haggling, but eventually twelve percent had been settled on. Twelve percent! Jesus Christ! He did the sums and shook his head slowly with disbelief and pleasure.

The club sandwich and San Miguel he ordered arrived,
bringing Kalas back to the present. Droplets ran down the beer bottle’s sides as it sweated condensation in the heat. He held his hand up to stop the waiter from pouring the beer, ruining it. It was a little thing, but Kalas preferred no head on a beer, maximising its effervescence, the cleansing effect. He took a bite from the sandwich and wondered what his fellow bankers would be up to back at the office in Sydney. Worrying about various currency movements, no doubt, that and plotting their rise up the corporate ladder, treading on co-workers they pretended friendship with while they swapped footy observations and guessed lewdly at the sexual proclivities of their female colleagues. Kalas could feel his heart rate rise.
Steady, Jeff. You don’t have to do that shit anymore…

Twenty years he’d given the bank, and the bastards had rewarded him with retrenchment. His computer and potplant had been passed on to his successor, some bitch almost fifteen years his junior. The bank had handed him his redundancy cheque – four lousy months’ pay – accompanied by a bunch of crap about what a worthwhile asset he’d been. And then, because he was so shit-hot at his job, they said, they’d employ a placement consultant at their expense to find him ‘something else’.

That something else had never materialised. Banks didn’t pick up foreign exchange screen jocks pushing forty. If he hadn’t done a little strategic financial planning on the side for one of his clients, he’d have been cactus. Mortgage payments on both the family home and beach house, car payments, boat payments, school fees for two children by his second wife, alimony for his first wife…the money dropped out of his account at a frightening rate every
month. He was down to his last twenty thou’ when the envelope with cash and the ticket had arrived. It was like manna from heaven, a lifeline, fate. Whatever, it was meant to be.

As for that work he’d done on the side? Financial planning, he’d called it. Others less charitable would have said money laundering. He’d done it for a restaurant syndicate with a chain of noodle houses owned by a well-known Melbourne family of crooks. Why not do it for Smith and Jones? There was a mild concern: how did they know Kalas could organise things for them? If the word was out, surely it wouldn’t be long till he came to the attention of the authorities. Perhaps the advertised specialty of his failing consultancy business – offshore currency dealings – was the bait in this instance. Kalas fingered the thick cotton napkin with the scribbles on it.
Twelve percent. Jesus Christ almighty. Twelve percent of three hundred mill’ US was
…The figure in Australian dollars made him feel somewhat giddy and he drank half the beer to steady his excitement.

A movement caught his eye. It was the blonde. She was no longer lying down sunbaking, but standing. Her skin was golden and her hair hung thick and straight, the colour of caramel-flavoured milk, halfway down her back. Her bikini was brilliant white, brief and worn low, tied at the hips with thin spaghetti laces. She grabbed a purse from her bag and began to walk towards him. A breeze caught the edge of her sarong, parting it, revealing long brown legs. The breasts were small and firm, but her nipples were hard, Kalas guessed, from a recent dip in the water. Kalas was aware of the stirring in his groin. He took
another tug on the San Miguel as the blonde swept past his table towards the bar, trailing the scent of coconut oil and jasmine, her firm buttocks moving rhythmically up and down as she walked like two eggs in a wet hanky.

Kalas was no ladies’ man, but he felt powerful, charged by money and opportunity. He twisted the wedding ring off his finger and weighed it against the fact that he was a long way from home. He tried to rein in the growing force between his legs and cleared the dry feeling in his throat. Pleasure would have to wait. He had work to do, and that was how to launder a shitload of money.
Three hundred million!
The cash could not be placed in a bank account in Australia where the income would be earned, because the banks were required by law to report deposits of over ten thousand dollars to the Australian Tax Office, the ATO. Deposits of lesser amounts, say nine thousand nine hundred dollars, would overcome this but when millions had to be socked away the number of banks and bank accounts required would make that kind of strategy unworkable. No. Back to the drawing board.

‘You wan’ ’nuther beer, sir?’ asked the Filipino waiter, interrupting his thoughts.

‘Yes…thanks,’ he said, not looking up, concentrating on the nest of scribbles in front of him.

‘Can I get you some paper, sir?’ asked the waiter, eyeing the linen tablecloth covered with circles, lines and figures.

‘Huh?…er…sorry, yeah, if that’s okay.’

The waiter removed the empty glass and bottle and returned to the bar.

Kalas continued to doodle. He’d leave a tip to cover the minor vandalism. What if cash businesses were purchased,
such as pubs? Half a dozen cash registers could be operated, but only a handful of them declared to the ATO…No. Again, the money requiring a good scrub would accrue too fast for that – over a period of between two to four months. Horseracing? He could always find a bookie who, for a healthy commission, would write winning tickets
after
races had been run…Again, no. Any mug could do that kind of inelegant crap, and besides, the taxman would smell that a mile away.

Kalas realised there was something important he was missing. And then it struck him. The people were earning money
fast
and needed to get it out of the country
fast
. They didn’t have long-term business interests with profits that needed to be hidden. They just wanted to
make
their money in Australia, not spend or invest it there. Okay, then – this was different. The problem wasn’t that they needed the money laundered, they needed it
exported
.

Kalas absently admired the blonde’s arse as she loitered at the bar. He wondered how old she was and decided probably around twenty-eight. The perfect age: enough time on the planet to have learned a little about life, but still young enough for her assets to be winning the continual fight against gravity. He again felt himself stir. It was a bloody long time since he’d had a fuck – a fuck with a capital F, U, C and K. Sure, he had regular sex with his wife, if monthly could be called regular. But doing it in the missionary position in bed with the telly on had become about as exciting as ironing his own shirts.

The waiter returned with a small sheaf of paper serviettes, which brought him back to the problem at hand. Exporting money. It wasn’t practical, let alone possible, to
leave the country with suitcases stuffed with cash. The serviettes, he noticed, were heavily branded with the hotel’s moniker: ‘The Manila Diamond Hotel’, with the initials DH in a twee kind of script. Kalas wondered why the hotel’s logo didn’t have any pictures of diamonds around it, and then decided that perhaps that might look cheap. And then Kalas smiled. The answer was right in front of him. Shit. The timing would be tight but…Kalas saw the plan clearly in his head as if it was three dimensional in form.

He would have to leave the country. The ensuing investigation would nail him. With twelve percent in a Swiss account, who gave a shit? His wife might be a stumbling block…and the kids were still at school…

Kalas took a deep breath to clear his head of the negatives. He could start a new life, and leave behind a lot of mistakes. The blonde had finished her business at the bar and was walking towards him with a plate of fruit, on her way back to the pool. Kalas wandered how he could possibly attract her attention without appearing to be sleazy. A timely breeze caught the stack of serviettes on his table and lifted them swirling into the woman’s path. The distraction caused her to stumble and she dropped her plate of fruit. Kalas launched himself from his seat and caught the woman before she, too, toppled to the pavement.

‘Christ. Sorry about that,’ he said, helping her to her feet. ‘The serviettes –’

‘Oh, that’s okay. Wasn’t your fault,’ she said with an American accent, straightening her sarong. ‘Say,’ she said, smiling, ‘is that a phone in your pocket, or is this my lucky day?’

Kalas looked down at himself, following her eye line, and saw the ridiculous bulge in his pants. His face flushed hot with embarrassment and he glanced up, expecting to see the woman’s back as she walked away from him disgusted. The last thing he expected to see was a room key swinging from her finger.

Skye Reinhardt woke with the sunrise and stretched languidly between the cool linen sheets. Her clothes on the floor were like stepping stones to the bed. The man beside her breathing regularly in sleep was a stranger, or at least had been until mid afternoon of the previous day. They’d shared each other’s passion and it felt to her more like an adventure than a one-night stand.

Skye wanted to shout and punch the air. The plan she’d laid out for herself back home in the States was working better than she could ever have hoped for. The cloying, stultifying life that had threatened to claim her just as it had her parents in the West Virginia town, working as they had at the local university riding out the seventies in a fug of marijuana haze, she’d driven into the earth as surely as one would grind a cockroach under heel. As soon as she’d earned her degrees, Skye had joined the CIA as a researcher. It had taken three years for the overseas posting to come up and she had grabbed it. The Philippines. Skye would have preferred Europe – Paris, in particular – but anywhere would do as long as it was far away from West Virginia.

Skye propped herself up on an elbow and looked at the man beside her. He said he was thirty-eight. She was twenty-eight. A good age spread. His name was Jeff and he
was nice-looking without being pretty; a bit short maybe, but he kept himself in reasonable shape, and still had all his hair.

The researcher had been hoping something like this – an opportunity for excitement – would present itself. Her heart had beat fast, drumming on her rib cage when she’d seen the three men at the pool. She’d recognised two of them. Not this man beside her, not Jeff, but the other two. She’d recognised them because their pictures were on the Most Wanted board – the dartboard, they called it – beside the water cooler. ‘
If you see these men, do not approach!
’ warned the line that headed the list of instructions about what exactly should be done. It was a big world out there and Skye never gave a moment’s thought to the possibility that she would see these men anywhere but on the dartboard. The black and white photos of the men were just two out of more than twenty pinned up on the wall. Skye had seen these photos at least three times a day since she’d arrived at the Manila bureau at the start of her twelve-month stay. But they were just part of the general background noise of the place.

And then she’d seen them at the hotel on her day off. In the flesh.
Was it them? No, it couldn’t be, could it?
She didn’t know who they were – their names. Nor had she known what they’d done to deserve a place on the dartboard. They were just photos, not real people. What were the chances that they’d turn up in Manila and that she, of all people in this crazy, violent city, would spot them having a drink by her favourite pool?

‘Tahiti sounds nice,’ said the man beside her in his sleep, a smile on his lips.

Skye looked at the ceiling, and traced the movement of the slowly turning fan with her finger. This was her big chance. Of course, she had completely ignored the command that these people should not be approached. But then Jeff wasn’t one of
them
, one of the photos, she reminded herself. So there was a loophole if she ever needed one. The two men had left and she hadn’t known what to do next. Follow them? She wasn’t a Halle Berry type, she was a political scientist, an academic, a researcher. What was she going to do? Bail them up with a textbook? But she had to do something. Did she work for the goddam CIA or not?