Chapter 5
David (and Caroline) had hot footed it up to Madrid as soon as things started to turn pear shaped, and he was getting more and more perplexed by the hour. Whilst I was in the meeting he had been ‘approached’ (his word not mine) by a lady of indeterminate origins, not of her nationality, but her employment, and was immediately insulted, ‘where do your loyalties lie’. ‘With Mr Michael is of course’, he had replied (which made me very happy when he told me about it much later on) but it was apparently the wrong answer, and he was then blanked by all and sundry, even the two heavies that he had helped train when they were a lot lighter. As soon as he arrived back at El Campo he started to do a bit of surreptitious digging into the background of Jeremy and his sister, and quickly his natural ‘OCD’ went through ‘Paranoia’ and into ‘Conspiracy Theory’. Jeremy was clearly what it said on the label, a diplomat, who had spent most of his political career in the Middle East. He spoke two dialects of Arabic passably, with a ’smattering’ of Persian and Hebrew, but his Spanish was appalling - so why had he ended up in Spain? Sherri’s history was another thing altogether, as she was ‘family’ helping out in a crisis there was virtually nothing in official records, except for the occasional bland comment in the odd communiqué, ‘took up his new post, accompanied by his sister’ etc., so David, with the help of a few friends started to dig a little deeper, and quickly lost the majority of them, but not quite all.
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Jeremy and his first wife were inseparable, but suddenly, just as he started to find his niche in the Middle East they separated and then quickly divorced – and David could find no reason why – and then his ex-wife ceased to exist. Rumours circulated in the ‘tittle tattle’ press for a short while that she had moved abroad (perhaps she had dallied, it was speculated), then she just disappeared off the face of the earth. Usually divorces cost money, even uncontested ones, but the families modest fortune was untouched by it, in fact according to Itza it started to grow out of all proportion to his income (and what was Sherri living on all this time, they both thought at the same time). Then the plot thickened, he finally got a look at her passport, or rather both of them. On arrival at El Campo she had requested a ‘manual safe’ (that couldn’t be ‘electronically’ tampered with), (but she didn’t say anything about it not having a camera inside of it) and as the door closed it picked up a Diplomatic Passport, not only that, but it was a QUEEN’S MESSENGER – COURRIER DIPLOMATIQUE one, issued to Queen’s couriers to enable them to take a ‘diplomatic bag’ (anything from a Tesco’s carrier bag to a shipping container) safely through any airport, without it being searched, x-rayed, weighed or otherwise tampered with, then a matter of minutes later she handed him a normal passport, which of course sailed through the scan which every visitor’s passport went through, and her fingerprints, which were required to enable her to get through the ‘family’ doors, didn’t show up on any data base when he sent them off a few minutes later, anywhere in the free world, although her passport did have her date of birth in it. Not a startling discovery except that it confirmed that she was twelve years younger than her brother, who, according to an article written by him in his university magazine, described himself as ‘an only child’, he was twenty at the time.
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David was in a quandary, he had no hard proof that Sherri wasn’t what she claimed, Jeremy might have had a tiff with his baby sister and ‘disowned her’ in the article, the second passport could be genuine, he knew two members of the ‘Corps of Queen’s Messengers’ and knew that they were ‘bullet proof’, he wouldn’t get anywhere trying to dig deeper, and would more than likely burn any remaining bridges that he still had standing, and realistically that might explain where she fitted into the diplomatic intrigue, but it didn’t fit into his ‘conspiracy theory’, and he was an avid ‘theorist’ in his own time, so he would say nothing at the moment, and ‘wait his time’.
Two days later, when I finally got around to introducing Sherri to Lady S (the floating one) she was suitably impressed with everything, even though she was tied up alongside the jetty, and as we wend our way along the corridors, in and out of rooms/cabins/gyms, and up and down stairs and lifts, I was starting to get ‘positional dysfunctionality’ (confused at where I was), but as we made our way along a rather bland corridor Sherri pointed at an innocuous door, with no name on it, and said ‘that reminds me, I spoke to Robert this morning and the lines are being activated from tonight’, and then she seemed to realise that she had made a boob (or two). One, even I had to think hard about what was behind the door – it was the secret ‘junk room’ that the Royal Navy had created when Lady S had been press-ganged, and it certainly never showed up on any plans or videos that she may have seen, and two, Robert, AKA my old First Officer, AKA ‘Jimmy the One’ when Lady S was transporting Royalty around the world, and now my Chief Officer – with designs on becoming her new Captain, as Carol (my Director of all things Nautical) was now doing more and more of her Director’ing on dry land. To that last end he was on one of the essential courses that he needed to have under his belt before becoming my ‘permanent’ skipper. He had been for two weeks – and he would be for another one, and to my knowledge nobody had mentioned his Surname, let alone his Christian name, if he had ever been mentioned at all.
‘Did I mention that I met Robert, your Chief Officer, when he was in the ‘Grey Funnel line’ (Royal Navy), he is the key holder for the room isn’t he?’ she quickly added.
‘Yes’ I said, ‘and so am I.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and then quickly changed the subject to something much more appealing, ‘is your sea cabin mattress as comfortable as the master cabins?’
‘Let’s go find out, I said, and forgot all about the ‘junk room’.
The next morning Sherri was up bright and early and off in her jogging gear, for two hours, and didn’t even break into a sweat, although I didn’t realise it, I was swiftly back in the land of the nod - but it was clear that something was going on between her and David.
‘What’s going on between you and David’ I asked her as we sun worshipped later that afternoon.
‘I think he thinks I am a spy’ she said, and we both laughed.
‘Well are you’ I said, still LOL (‘laughing out loud’, not ‘lots of love’ Mr Cameron).
‘It depends if the day of the week starts with a T’ she said, and we stopped laughing, it was Tuesday.
Sherri was not a spy ‘per se’, she was an ‘international facilitator’, and according to her she used her communicative and social organisational skills to get people talking to each other, or as a last resort acting as a go between. Not being directly on the pay-role helped, along with her nondescript appearance, and the fact that she understood the ‘Middle East’ like no other infidel. ‘I look on the region not as individual Countries, but regions, tribes and families. Just one marriage - or a death of an elder in one area can affect the thinking and decision making process over a huge swath of sand, that certainly does not respect man made borders, it could change a militant council or even a government into one open to change, almost overnight. I have the knack of sensing these nuances and fortunately certain people, in various positions and Countries have noticed this, and I am stating to make inroads into possibly something huge, if we can keep the Politicians out of it for a little while longer’.
‘We’ I said in disbelief, obviously she meant the ‘Royal we’, not me.
‘Yes - me, you and David’.
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