Chapter Eight
The smartphone of Hari was connected to the one of Hakeem, whose phone link was labeled H, as in capital H, with an icon on page two of the desktop. Clarity pressed on the agenda icon, but the file of Hari could not be opened without an additional password from his retainer. As Clarity walked back to the dinner table, she spotted Hakeem standing about one hundred feet away, moving in the darkness behind a large tree. Instead of walking towards the table, Clarity stepped into the grass and hid behind another tree, avoiding a sprinkler used to water the grass. She pressed the H icon and a conference call option icon appeared before her. She pressed the icon and brought the smartphone to her ear, without speaking.
"Hakeem?"
"Yeah, it's me."
"The Shawab here, have you decided?"
"Yes, we have nearly found the account of the Sheik, it is about seven or eight million dollars that the father has stored there, and we think it is stored in the offshore branch of Kuwait Capital here in Tortola. It is tied to a board certificate issued a few months ago by the father of Hari, which is part of the documents for the current lawsuit with the wealth magazine Argyris on the amount shown for Hari in the billionaire ranking. The information on the certificate was leaked to the magazine, but no one knows of the account."
Clarity remembered the name of the person speaking to Hakeem from her previous stay in the British Virgin Islands. The Shawab was involved in the smuggling of alcohol throughout the Caribbean, and he was relaying to Hakeem that he was interested in expanding the business into expensive alcohol. She turned up the volume of the phone slightly, to listen to the private call more closely.
"Work for me, Hakeem, you will do well, I want you to help me move into the prime alcohol business, the one that only the very wealthy drink. Give me access to the plane of the Sheik, I want to be among those that his family sees on a regular basis. Use your connections to provide me with a contact and banking instructions at the Banco Inter Central del Caribe y Cuba. Your money, all of the money that you plan to get from the Sheik account will be safe there. How do you plan to take it out of Kuwait Capital?"
"We have to find the money first," said Hakeem. "That lawsuit with Argyris and the investigation from the consortium of journalists, is a pain. We're going to have to work a lot to get rid of them."
"Do what you have to do. That moron of Haroun Al-Najib should become the poorest person of the Emirates, his money is inherited, he is not worth diddly. Keep me informed of all which you find on this. We will make an arrangement with one of our contacts from Panama, Chubby Caddy, so that he meets you in Cuba, after the money is transferred to BICCC, so that he provides the information you will need to work with us."
The sprinkler began to work, washing the legs of Clarity, up to her waist, and spraying her eyes when she turned her face towards the noise of the watering item in the grass. Startled by the water drizzling on her, she moved away from the tree, and returned to the path, ensuring the smartphone was dry. The phone began to vibrate in her hand. An icon on the desktop depicting a small, wooden dummy named 'Timthumb', lifted a black and white checkered flag, announcing an incoming email message for the Sheik. Recovering her seat at her table, Clarity handed the phone to Hari after reading the text sent out to him.
"Here is the phone." Hari stared at the dress of Clarity, which was soaked.
"Anything happen? You look kind of wet."
"No, just freshening up. You received a message from someone at Augiers Urbina."
"Thank you, Clarity."
Hari checked the icon flashing on his screen announcing the message. He forwarded it to Hakeem, knowing any messages from the Panama law firm was banned information territory for him. He asked his retainer a question, by sending him a message, knowing there was a good chance Hakeem would dismiss it. Anything important from the law firm Hakeem? A few minutes later, the reply came from his retainer's phone. Octavio is coming tomorrow to review the living arrangement of Nora.
The following morning, Clarity had a good breakfast, and she listened to the first argument between Hari and his official girlfriend Nora.
"I don't want to live in the Caribbean, Hari, I like London. There is work for me in London." The Sheik grabbed some roast beef and slammed it into the plate of Nora.
"Just nine months out of the year, you can work in London the other three months."
"No Hari, I like to work. People, the whole staff of Vanity Gloss, are in London, not in the Caribbean." A piece of roast beef picked up by Nora landed on the plate of Hari.
"London has crappy weather most of the year. You may need a coach, to take your mind off work, you work a lot but you don't know why you work. On the other hand, I know why I don't work, it's because I like to enjoy people. I am not confused."
A pull on the pants of Hari made him look down. One of the dwarves, Floyd was requesting to leave the island with his two friends, to return to the palace of the Sheik in the Emirates. Floyd also threw in the idea of a bonus for himself, for the extra throw across the firewalk. Merhab came to grab him by the hand, leading him and his two friends to a taxi headed for the airport. Hari wondered whether Floyd would make a better counselor than Hakeem or Merhab, although he wasn't completely displeased to see him and his friends leave, for some reason.
"I'll have to be careful now. Without my dwarves here and a venting outlet, things are going to be more difficult for me," said Hari.
He reached for an olive, something that validated his individual effort, knowing he had done that without assistance from anyone else. Nora threw a spoonful of mayo on the plate of the Sheik, some of which hit Clarity on her nose, while she was adding a few tomato slices to her scrambled eggs.
"I am not sure we are compatible Nora." Clarity wiped off the mayo and added some ham to her eggs.
"You are compatible with everyone, with women definitely," said Nora.
"You knew about my lifestyle. According to the official rules, I can marry up to four women, as long as I can pay for their living expenses."
"Yeah, but you said there was a favorite. Who is your favorite?"
"Sometimes there is one, sometimes several, sometimes none. That is irrelevant Nora, you are living a lifestyle, fact that someone may have more things in common about some things is irrelevant." Nora plucked an olive with a fork and dropped it on Hari's plate.
"Then, I will renegotiate my living arrangement, I think it is a good time to do it." Hari brought his plate and the plate of Nora to their breakfast table, sighing, while Clarity joined Plum and her friends on a neighboring table.
"Fine, talk to Hakeem," said the Sheik, "he will do that with you at the bank, he has all the papers."
After breakfast, Hakeem gave the day off to Merhab and took Hari to his first day at work in Tortola at the offices of Kuwait Trading House Capital, the capital markets and investment company known as KTH Capital, or simply as Kuwait Capital. Clarity, Plum and her friends were also there to help out with the installation of the robo adivising software, which Hari insisted on learning how to use at the bank. The taxi drove from the marina in Tortola through Road Two and Blackburn Highway, to the offices of the bank, located on Nibbs Street. The bank was a non descript low rise building with horizontal blinds, a roof top painted green with the logo of the bank, and floor to ceiling windows showing on the second floor, which provided a lot of light to the various offices inside.
A banking official who had been living in Tortola for over ten years, Ahmed Norizi, welcomed them and led them to the new office of Hari on the second floor.
"This is the office of our previous wealth advisor. He left yesterday because several customers left the bank. Wealth management is becoming difficult. We hope the arrival of the Sheik here will bring some business." Ahmed led Hari and Hakeem to a tour of the bank, leaving Clarity, Plum and her friends in the office, with a bundle of cables, a laptop and two computer screens to connect.
"I have no clue about any of this, never worked with a compute
r," said Plum. "Why are we doing this," Asked Nives, "Merhab is the coach, he should be here with Hari's security guards, so that they install the cables and the software that Hari needs."
"I've been a teleoperator, I might be able to do something," said Clarity. The videographer lifted one of the cables, before letting it drop on the floor again. "Not sure, maybe Hakeem wants Hari to fail again. Yeah, all of this is kind of odd. We need to know who is that law firm, Augiers Urbina, and what they do for the Sheik." She turned to Clarity. "Well, you do the work then."
Clarity sat on Hari's desk, and noticed a speakerphone on the left corner. She tapped on the speakerphone button, and began to hear the voice of Nora speaking to Hakeem in another room. The day before, a client had requested to speak with the person occupying the office of Hari prior to him, the wealth advisor. The man had told the client through speakerphone, that he was staying in his office, alledging that he needed to look at financial screens of Bloomberg and Reuters to provide reliable investing advice. One day later, on the other room, neither Hakeem nor Nora had noticed the speakerphone was still activated. If Clarity did not speak, neither Nora or Hakeem would hear her or those around her. Clarity used her index to tell Plum and her friends not to speak.
"The living arrangement is not working Hakeem."
"You keep asking for more. Hari does not appear to love you a lot, you are not spending a lot of time with him."
"I want a lower ranking in the life of Hari, below Lohvia and the other four women Hari brought. And I want a bearer certificate acknowledging me as part owner of the assets of Regina Holdings with a twenty percent stake."
Twenty percent of the hidden part of SRA-199, several billion dollars, amounted to several hundred million dollars. Too much money for a nosy journalist, thought Hakeem.
"Who told you about Regina Holdings, those assets are not on the balance sheet."
"I told you you should have given me what I wanted the other day. Things are not going to move favorably for Hari from now on."
The speakerphone went dead, even after Clarity pressed the on-button several times. She glanced at Plum, who said nothing, and turned to the cable mess below her, to do the computer work that Hari was avoiding.
After three hours of going through several manuals and calling service centers, Clarity managed to connect the broadband connection to Hari's computer. She also installed the robo-advising software, called 'yourmoneyplace', a computer program with built-in intelligent algorithms, which offered investment suggestions, some of them more complex than others, after simply presenting the profile of the potential user. Some of the solutions also used faulty, or higher risk algorithms, but that part of the software was not available to the user, officially. The original money place in the software was not good, it was a dangerous place to invest, but then it became good, when the company was short of cash and needed to sell the software, comparing the money place, to a shelter for money. The place where the money went was safe, they said. In any case, it was 'yourmoneyplace', not mine.
Clarity filled in a few forms on behalf of the Sheik, after checking with Hakeem. She had to feed his investment preferences, which corresponded to companies in the luxury segment. To test the software, she prompted the robo advisor for a first opinion or suggestion for Hari. The software bot, called 'faulty', replied with a remarkable answer.
'Take that moron out of a job, before he creates his own financial crash'. Clarity looked at the first message of the robo advisor which flashed onscreen, seeing in a tutorial associated with the moneybot that 'faulty' was compatible with 'Timthumb'. She pressed on the link for the explanation of the feature, and found an additional set of suggestions in the tutorial. 'yes, the Timthumb in his Highness smartphone. Timthumb gets lost in detail, and faulty may reason either not completely, or correctly, or it may not attend to the relevant at times. Exchange their advisory at your own risk.' The tutorial added that those were anti-features, those features the user probably did not want offhand, but were part of the software anyway. When you began using 'faulty', you were married to all of it.
Clarity returned to the comment of the moneybot, and prompted the system for a source, the identity of the person that the word moron alluded to in the comment. The moneybot showed that it did not know didly about diplomacy, and answered Sheik Haroun Al-Najib, right away. Clarity turned off the software and told Hakeem they were finished. The retainer ordered lunch for them and Hari joined them, happy to see that the new sophisticated software was working.
Hari began tweaking with several buttons and within half an hour, he had generated losses amounting to several million dollars in the precious metals, currency, stock indices and commodities markets. Thinking that the risk taking had been appropriate, the Sheik pressed on the stop-loss button.
Plum walked to the other side of the computer and turned Hari away from his thoughts about what he would say to Hakeem. She pushed Hari off his seat and began a lengthy explanation about how the video gambling business operated. Hari simply needed to tweak investment odds in his favor, to slow down or get rid of losses, and invest in the online gambling business. Combining it with a chaturbate business which could be used to sell bonds issued through Kuwait Capital was the safest way to moneymaking and recovering losses made on that day.
"You are full of ideas," said Hari.
"I see a lot of people, nobody pays attention to ideas." She slid her hand in his white shirt pocket, reaching for his smartphone.
"Your Highness, can I take a look at your agenda? I will tell you how to spot those who will help you make money."
The Sheik slapped her hand off, ensuring the device was in place inside his shirt.
"No."
Before falling asleep that night, Clarity combed her hair in her room, in front of a large mirror, looking at the old book that Plum had given her for the night, labeled with the HSAF library stamp, 'The Rose of the Initiates'. She began leafing through it, realizing that Plum was bent on following some of the ideas in the text. Following others with their thoughts on the spiritual path, was all right, but she wanted to gain her own knowledge, understand what was behind the blissful sense of warmth, which resonated in her body, and behind the allegories described in the book. The pages on her fingers had the rugged feel of parchment, they felt reassuring.
One of the chapters spoke about the existence of a sacred city, Kailasi, a name which was used in allegory, representing a place in the body. The consciousness lifted upward through the tree of life, and then blossoms as the lotus in the golden city, rising from the material world, as a flower of wisdom. According to a diagram on the page, the golden city was a physical area in the body, the frontal sinus, and that was also where a person held the seat of the divine, a fine essence usually referred as spirit. In the West, the lotus had been replaced by the word rose, and referred to the blooming of new qualities in a person, and also to a part in the body, which acted as center to the flame, or the lamp. Placing the book carefully on her night table, she got inside the bed and began to think about how to get her own copy of the book, or access to it, from Plum.