Michael Reagan - The Devil's Handshake

Thomas quickly decided that he liked the man sitting across from him dressed like a British lawyer in his bespoke Saville Row suit with an understated tie.

“Please call me Thomas,” he offered towards Sergei just as Sgt. Tan walked into the study with black tea and coffee, earning a smile in return from the Director of the Zaslon as an acknowledgement as the old Ghurkha asked if he would like tea or coffee.

“I don’t suppose I could have some sweet English Breakfast Tea, please Sgt. Tan?” asked Sergei.

Again Thomas raised an eyebrow slightly by his use of Tan’s previous rank and at his request of a cup of tea the way all members of the British Army took it.

“This Petrov is definitely an interesting man!” he reflected.

“Why of course, Sir!” answered the Ghurkha with a beaming smile pleased that an English friend of his former commanding officer had used his former rank.

Twenty-four hours later the BBJ plane was on its way back to Adawlland with ten million U.S. dollars in cash for chieftain’s whims, along with Thomas, Mikhail and his long standing permanent security team of Benny Zaguri, Barak Levi, Yossi Spungin and Avi Ohana and a team of ten men known as Unit B from Zaslon.

All veterans, experienced in the dark arts of counter-intelligence and insurgency Unit B had spent the last six months in Syria training and assisting Assad’s intelligence service. Led by a thirty-three-year-old dark haired man with his hair cut crew cut style with brown eyes and olive skin, due to his mother’s Chechen heritage, called Igor Valeriyoych Protasov.

Although Sergei had been less than forthcoming in terms of his experience, he did admit to them he was a graduate of the Foreign Intelligence Academy and over the last six years had seen service in the Middle East.

As with all the members of Zaslon, he spoke four languages other than his native Russian, but it was because he was fluent in Hebrew and English that Sergei decided he would be the best qualified to work with Thomas and his men.

Assessing him, Thomas could see he had already seen enough action for two lifetimes from the look in his eyes. It was the look he once had before Nara and Victoria had entered his life.

Still probing the young officer the only time in the last couple of hours he had managed to catch him off guard was when he had spoken Arabic to him. Immediately Igor had responded with a Jordanian tint in it, but he could see he was surprised that he had spoken the language as fluently as him.

Thomas knew then that the young man had spent time undercover in Amman with the ten thousand strong, exiled Chechen community. It was something Thomas had said to Igor as well to test his reaction. Yet again though although Igor had smiled politely he didn’t comment.

He had of course read the background files on all them. So the officer knew they weren’t your usual civilians, plus Sergei Andreyvich had warned him he was no ordinary Oligarch, but nevertheless he was still impressed “Blagoeodnyy” had picked up his Jordanian accent.

Despite this, for the moment neither Thomas nor any members of his team had shared their information with respect to the observation team that had been watching them in Borama, as Thomas had wanted that kept in his back pocket for the moment. The logic was simple.

“If they were Russian, there was no point letting on about them, but if they were American and things started to get out of hand, then the information about the presence might represent a useful bargaining chip for TLH.” So instead, they had briefed Igor and his men on all the stress points in the capital, covering off on their maps and satellite photos the locations of the hotels, hospital, TV station, airport, petrol stations, government ministries, electricity hubs, communications towers, embassies, and residences of key individuals before finally the various Ministries.

The advance team of the Russian Foreign Service that was tasked with the setup of the embassy had been very helpful with this respect. So it was a job made easier by the excellent photographs they had taken on the ground.

During this time, not offering any value, Thomas took the opportunity to touch base with home first, then read the encrypted notes that Saul, who had stayed behind in Moscow on the GSG business, had sent him. The report covered everything that good due diligence on a potential acquisition target should provide, if that was the goal. One name stuck out “Litchfield Hirsch,” his father’s firm. They had acted as one of advisers on the other side of the joint venture of his mining deal in Alaska. He decided to park that revelation for a moment when one of the plane’s staff said dinner was ready to be served. It wasn’t a hard decision. Whenever his father’s name popped up it always brought a mixture of emotions within in. None of them ever good!

Litchfield Hirsch was originally founded in the mid-1800s in Hong Kong as a trading house by one of their shared ancestors. The business was originally an importer of opium but by the 1880s Henry Litchfield, his great, great grandfather, recognizing the opportunities offered by the emerging rise of the oil industry, instead started to ship cask oil from Russia to Japan. His business began to do so well that he was able to commission his own ships for bulk oil transportation.

By the twentieth century, flush with the excess capital, Sir Henry’s third son and Thomas’s great grandfather, Edward, started the Merchant Bank in partnership with his other great grandfather, his Jewish partner Arabham Hirch. Together they then set about turning it into one of the best natural resources merchant banks in the world.

When Thomas’s father Rufus married his mother, the eighteen-year-old Emilia Hirch, the only child of Abraham’s son Isaac, many saw it as the as the final merging of the bloodlines into one on the birth of Thomas.

History though chose otherwise. Despite the many affairs of his father over the years, his mother had steadfastly refused to divorce him. It was only when Thomas was up at Oxford when his father told her that he was leaving her finally for his young mistress who was pregnant did he finally push her over the edge. It was as though the loss of her husband and son at the same time was too much for her to bear.

Her funeral at the family estate was the last time he had ever spoken to his father despite his father’s many attempts to reconcile. Indeed he had never met his thirty-year-old socialite twin half-sisters who were always in the society pages and their many efforts over the years to engineer a meeting. In Thomas’s mind, the best way to punish his father was to be better than him in business, something he long surpassed.

Sitting around the table waiting for dinner, the three men started to fill in their situation assessment grid together. It was something neither he nor Mikhail had used since their days in their respective army careers, thus rekindling memories of times gone by for both of them.

The meal included a starter of smoked salmon with traditional garnish of endive salad of goats curd and sweet mustard dressing, followed by Australian lamb cutlets with new potatoes with a very good white burgundy by Corton Charlemagne, Grand-Cru, Rapet père et fils, and finally a vanilla crème brûlée served with excellent Sauternes by Chateau Laville. It was something that even a seasoned professional like Igor or any of his team couldn’t turn down despite being on an operation.

Thomas chuckled watching them all. Soldiers always enjoyed a good meal before going into battle. It was also because of meals like this he personally worked out at every given opportunity in the morning for an hour with each member of his protection team in turn. If he didn’t, he would be the size of a house.