Retribution Book 1 - Seeds of Revenge: Retribution, #1

By David Harvey

Alexander Jack Lightfoot and Ethan Hunter experienced all kinds of hell in Afghanistan.

When they became targets of a drug syndicate based in Cape Town, South Africa, they resorted to the only thing they knew. Meet force with greater force.

First came the extortion.

Then the harassment.

Then it became personal.

Which was a serious mistake.

Because that's how retribution started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave
• Release date: Nov 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781729486313

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was the start of September 2016, a powerful Berg wind bringing high temperatures that tightened the stranglehold on the gradually declining state of Cape Town’s dams. It would inevitably get worse by the month as the wind aggravated the rate at which water levels were evaporating following a long, below-average winter rainfall season.

The unseasonal Cape wind had been blowing steadily for the last two days and leaning against the partially open doorway of their office, Ethan Hunter was speaking to his lifelong best friend and brother of Dallas, his life partner.

‘Tell me again why we moved all the way out to the village at the end of the highway where every time the wind blows, they council spend the next three days sweeping sand off the road?’

‘Because we saw the village at the end of the highway and fell in love with it and how close we are to the sea. Besides, where else could we have gotten this piece of magic?’

‘You’re right, little brother – where else in the world? And I do love it. I love it even more though when the wind stops blowing.’

Ethan, tall and lean with his hard edges groomed to perfection through ten years in the United States Rangers, grinned at Ajax and opened the door to let Dallas in. She’d gone the hundred or so metres up the road to fetch four coffees and now walked in, balancing them carefully in the takeout cardboard holder, before putting them down on Carol-Anne’s desk.

‘I thought they’d blow away at one point,’ she said, removing each one with their names written on the lid.

‘Thanks,’ said Ajax, putting his down on a coaster on top of his desk as she walked across to Ethan, gave him his and then the last but hers, to Carol-Anne their receptionist and in reality, fourth partner and office manager.

Dallas was Ajax’s sister. Ajax, whose actual name was Alexander Jack Lightfoot, was taller and broader than Ethan, with short black hair, cut close to the scalp. The Ajax nickname had started somewhere in junior school and had never seemed to deviate from that no matter where he’d lived.

Ajax had always been the in your face let’s take this outside and sort it out kind of guy. In college, a coach had suggested he take his brawling habits off the streets and into the gymnasium. After careful consideration, he opted for boxing and wrestling as his sports. He prided himself that in all his years of brawls and matches, no-one had ever managed to break his nose.

He’d been referred to several times as too clever to behave like the thug he could be and had the look of the person you wouldn’t want to meet in the proverbial alley.

Until he looked at you with eyes that were so blue he could’ve been wearing contact lenses but wasn’t. While Ethan had opted to join the Marines and go for Rangers, Ajax had opted for the Army Air Corps and go for helicopters. His eight years had taken the hard edges and smoothed them out.

He was and had shown himself to be way tougher than Ethan but was mostly so laid back that people mistook him for some bumpkin farmer boy red-neck who knew nothing and was from the back of nowhere, from a place not to be found even with a GPS. The long thin scar down the right side of his face didn’t help, neither did the thicker one that ran from his hairline to just above his left eye.

The long thin one had happened when Ajax and Ethan, all of seven and eight years old respectively, were building their treehouse in the branches of a large oak tree in Ethan’s garden and the branch snapped, carrying them and their wooden house to the ground.

On impact, some of the wood splintered and hit Ajax in the face. The other one, together with a leg full of them, had been his going away present from Afghanistan after eight years. His wrap-around helmet had saved his face, but the leg, much better now, had taken a pounding. The inconvenient blemishes aside, overall, it wasn’t a bad looking face.

Dallas, however, hadn’t taken after her brother other than also being tall. Where he was broad, she was lean. Where he had short black hair, she had long blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail, was extraordinarily pretty as in she’d gotten all the looks and she and Ethan had been in love with each other since they were about ten years old.

When Ajax had proudly arrived back from the hospital with seventeen stitches in his face, he and Ethan had had their butts roundly smacked by Ethan’s dad and warned off doing it again. The theory behind the treehouse though had been good. It was the application which secretly needed reviewing.

At ten years old, Ajax could take a car engine apart, and re-build it once he’d studied all the parts and worked out what naturally worked where and why. That’s why the design around the treehouse had been perfect. It had been the branches they built it on that had been the problem.

They’d grown up as three army brats at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, but when Ajax was thirteen, his grandparents back in South Africa had died. They’d owned a large wine farm in the Western Cape and the ownership of the farm devolved to his Mom. The result had been her needing to move back to South Africa and so the dual world of Ajax, Dallas and Ethan developed into holidays spent on the farm and holidays spent with their fathers in America, learning to fish, camp and all things boating.

Right now though, his conversation with Ethan had been the property Ajax had bought on Victoria Avenue in Hout Bay, down near the bay where they’d paid a bucket-load of money for much of the block. His one neighbour was the Stationery shop that supplied Hout Bay with all things stationery and his neighbour on his other side was a block of flats.

Behind him were several houses, part of a suburb called Beach Estate with two behind them in Albert Street owned by their Company. Both had been refurbished and modernised before Ajax had bought them in the name of their company, Lightfoot and Hunter Auto Renovate.

Over the last two years, while Ethan had been finishing up his ten years in the Rangers, Dallas and Ajax had searched extensively along the Atlantic seaboard for what they wanted and eventually settled on Hout Bay, an alluring village at the end of the road with unique character. It connected to Cape Town by sixteen kilometres of beautiful winding road hugging the mountains on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

The most direct route from Cape Town city was Kloof Nek road which initially climbed up the long winding slopes of Table Mountain on the left. At the top, visitors could go left to park and take the cable car to the top of Table Mountain or continue along Kloof Nek road which became Camps Bay Drive. This road wound its way down the mountain into Camps Bay and onto the mountain-hugging Victoria Road, going past Bakoven, Llandudno and into Hout Bay, at times jokingly referred to as The Republic of Hout Bay.

The second road to Hout Bay from Cape Town wound its way through the mountains and forests of Constantia, eventually becoming Main Road. These two roads were in turn linked near the beach by Princess Road, which ran parallel to the bay, in effect creating a funnel-shaped area within which the bulk of the actual retail and residential village nestled.

At the Main road entrance to Hout Bay, directly opposite the Police station was the sprawling, continually growing informal black settlement of Imizamo Yethu. At the diagonally opposite end of Hout Bay, overlooking the harbour, was the sprawling but formal coloured community of Hangberg. Between those two worlds was the predominantly white community.

The mushrooming informal settlement grew in tiny overcrowded huts and corrugated-iron houses clinging precariously to their side of a mountain with scattered brick and mortar flats nearer to Main Road. The tiny huts and houses were stupefying hot in summer and mostly freezing and wet in winter, with paraffin lamps and fires a constant threat to safety when a knocked-over lamp could easily cause runaway fires.

The coloured community sprawled over their own mountain overlooking the bay, with some of the best views in Cape Town and very few of the benefits. The coloureds had lived in their village within a village known as Hangberg for decades, gainfully employed in the fishing industry. But when fishing quotas were readjusted to benefit connected persons and corruption bloomed, livelihoods started unravelling.

Dwellers in the informal black settlement, also known as Nelson Mandela Informal Settlement, flocked to Hout Bay in droves, a mix of legal and illegal families from mostly neighbouring states and it had exploded in size in less than twenty years. For them, Hout Bay had started out as a place where dreams could grow.

Now, with a shattered economy being brought to its knees by rank corruption and looting, it was more symptomatic of where dreams died, and hope was the only thing they had left in the remains of the current National Government’s economic garbage pile.

But people continued to flock into the only opposition-run province, Western Cape, even though the ruling Government’s election promises of a better life for all had cynically become referred to as the better lie for all, where a President, accused of corruption and racketeering used Faustian pacts to economically sabotage his country. In a land of absolute contrasts, Cape Town, the Mother City of South Africa was also the City of Parliament.

And it was the City where National Government politicians were driven in million rand luxury motor vehicles, air-conditioned against the pervading stench of corruption and misgovernment, ignoring reality amidst growing poverty and decay because the fundamental requirement was loyalty, not competence.

But, within the Western Cape, were the small villages like Hout Bay which even with its problems, made Cape Town worth living in, especially if you brought something to the party.

Over the last two years, Dallas and Ajax had brought a lot to the party. Dallas had been recruited by Amazon directly after graduating with her I.T degree and as her status grew, invested heavily in Amazon stock and her belief in the founder, Jeffrey Bezos.

Concurrent with that, Ethan and Ajax had taken a huge gamble in the early days of the Bitcoin craze and between the massive growth of the Amazon stock price and the fluctuating Bitcoin prices, an overall sixty thousand dollar outlay over several years had grown with rising bitcoin prices to a paper fortune.

Dallas, who was the money person, had sold roughly a third of their bitcoin stock and they had become real dollar multi-millionaires, even after the IRS had taken its share.

She still had her Amazon stock and collectively they still had large holdings of Bitcoin, which they’d hold on to for a while.

Bringing most of the funds left after the IRS slice with them into South Africa, with its significantly weaker currency had multiplied their fortune a little over fourteen times. With the vast amount of funds the conversion generated, they bought their Beach Club Villas, their ‘business street’, a boat and the two houses in Albert Street, together with personal vehicles and began the extensive renovations which ultimately became their motor vehicle rebuilding business.

Ajax and Ethan had shared a dream throughout their respective college years, which had been to own their own complete motor vehicle shop, specialising in rebuilding engines and bodies. Ethan was the body man while Ajax was the engine genius and now they owned the best part of eighty metres of a major road frontage, and they were about to open the dream.

Further up the road, was Sentinel Motors, but they were not competition, instead supplying complementary services where Sentinel serviced all things cars and Ajax and Ethan rebuilt all things cars. They’d met with the owners and now had a symbiotic relationship where when applicable, they’d feed the right customers to each other.

Adding to their location, Continental tyres, was directly opposite them, give or take a metre. It didn’t get better than this.

Chapter 2

The only intrigue so far, ignoring the massive amounts of red tape that the City of Cape Town had forced them to jump through to get what they wanted despite an investment upwards of ninety million rands, had been the peculiar note tucked into their door sometime the previous night.

It informed them that they shouldn’t open for business before they’d had a meeting the following day and to expect a visit when the staff involved in getting the premises ready for the opening had left for the day. So, out of curiosity, they were waiting to see where this would go.

By now, everyone else had left, so it was just the four of them. In their big office was a small coffee and drinks bar, complete with an automatic coffee maker, shelves with cups on one side and wine and assorted glasses on the other side, all in one row, as well as all manner of bottles of whiskey, brandy and whatever else anybody drank, below them.

A fridge behind the bar, a large mirror on the wall and five bar stools in front, completed the bar and behind them, a round solid oak table, two couches and four comfortable lounge chairs which served as the management meeting room. It would double up as a customer greeting room once they’d opened.

They were just getting into the coffee when the sound of tyres crunching on the gravel outside announced the arrival of, presumably, their meeting.

Ajax went to the door, opened it and waited as a silver Mercedes Benz parked and when the engine shut off, a door opened and after a few seconds, a short, overweight white man, his hair like a black fuzzy mop atop a pasty face that showed the ravages of childhood acne climbed out.

He was badly dressed in a black suit, and he struggled out, slammed the door closed, looked around for several seconds, looked at Ajax carefully and walked incongruously light-footed towards him.

Intrigued, Ajax moved aside, letting the stranger in and watched as he stood at the entrance, looking into the office, then looked around it carefully until his gaze finally settled on the other three people sitting with their coffee cups, staring back at him. Then he turned to Ajax, looked him up and down and said. ‘Who owns this place?’

Ajax looked at the three sitting comfortably in the lounge, looked at the fat man, smiled easily and said, ‘we all do.’

The fat man looked at Ajax standing at the door, then at the other three looking back intrigued at him and said. ‘Get rid of the women. We don’t do business with women.’

Ethan looked at him for several seconds and then laughed, while Ajax, saying nothing, walked back to where he’d left his coffee, sat down, took a careful sip, grinned and said politely. ‘No. All four of us own the business, so if you want to come in and start again, we’ll excuse poor manners this time, and you can tell us why you’re here, or else turn around, shuffle back out and get lost. We don’t care either way.’

‘Maybe you need to listen to what I said. Re-shuffle your management team quickly, get rid of the women and we can start again.’

‘And maybe you need to hear what we said,’ Dallas spoke up as she sipped. ‘Either talk to the four of us or go back to whatever you crawled out of.’

Walking slowly to the bar the man went around it, hooked out a glass, looked at the choices carefully and then reached up and took down a bottle of Auchentoshan American Oak Scotch, one of the few triple distilled whiskeys available in the country. Opening it, he poured a generous measure into a glass and drank it in a single gulp.

‘Glad to know that you appreciate your whiskey,’ Ajax said, looking at Ethan and smiling. ‘It took us a while to get some stocks of those and it certainly warms my heart that even though you have no taste buds, your eyes know a decent drink.’

From behind the bar, the man stared at Ajax, his eyes narrowed as he topped up his glass again and putting the bottle down, he came back out from behind the counter, sat on one stool and twisted his body around, looking at the ceiling, then the corners, looked carefully at the bar and finally turned back to look at them.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Should we?’ Dallas asked.

He nodded slowly, all the time looking at them as if they were stupid, took a sip, a small sip this time, licked his lips in appreciation and said. ‘You should.’

‘City council?’ Ethan offered.

Before he could reply, a car door opened and a few seconds later closed, followed by steps on the gravel and the door opened to a new arrival. He was significantly taller and broader than the fat man, with short brown hair, an angular face and a strong jawline. He was dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt showing an image of the guitarist, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, on the front. Ajax liked him already. Well, he thought, he liked the shirt at least.

The wearer looked to be in his late thirties, but he looked like what he was; street muscle, except for the t-shirt, which humanised him. Stopping in the entrance, he looked around, then spoke. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Just peachy fine.’

Dallas pulled a face at Ajax and mouthed, ‘Peachy fine?’

Ethan laughed as he looked at Dallas in genuine amusement. So far the only person not to say anything had been Carol-Anne, but now she put her coffee down and said. ‘This would all go a lot better if you tell us who you are and what you want.’

‘So the darkie speaks, does she?’

Dallas stood up, placed her coffee cup carefully on the table and walked across to the fat man, took his whiskey glass carefully out of his hand, put it down on the bar counter and then faster than he could react, slapped him across the face with enough force to make him fall against the counter.

As the recent arrival moved forward, Ethan and Ajax moved quickly out their chairs and put themselves in his path. Ajax was bigger than him, while Ethan was roughly the same height and blocking any movement, they heard Dallas pull the man up so that he was sitting properly again and say. ‘If you want to talk to us, think about being polite, otherwise as we’ve already said, go home. We’ve been polite, so far; you came here and abused us and that’s the only chance you’ll get.’

To their surprise, he laughed. ‘Its fine, Oscar, take a seat and have a drink. I can work with these people.’ Ajax looked around, not sure where this was going and saw the man now sitting comfortably again, but with a beaming smile that wasn’t reflected in his eyes. ‘I like you guys, and I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t normally get a push back when I come visiting and I was unsure how the meeting would go which was why I came in all hardass. It won’t happen again.’

Then he looked at Dallas. ‘You’ve got a set of balls, lady. I could use someone like you.’

‘From hero to zero in half a sentence,’ Ajax shook his head, moving back to his chair.

While Oscar stood there, as if not sure what Ethan was going to do, the man looked at the four of them, then looked at Ethan and said. ‘Please?’

Ethan moved back to his chair, picked up his coffee, sipped it and said nothing. Now it was all about the fat man.

‘For God’s sake sit down Oscar.’

Oscar moved around the bar, took a glass, looked at the opened bottle of whiskey, studied it for a long time and then poured himself a measure. Standing there, he sipped it carefully, smiled, nodded in appreciation and sipped again.

‘Let’s start again,’ the man said, his face showing a bright red mark where Dallas had slapped him. ‘I represent a business called G&B Specialists and we make sure that all business flows smoothly across your supply chain. Look at us as supply chain experts, so if you have delivery or parts problems, tell us and we’ll resolve it. That includes labour issues, council issues, you name it. Look at us as a one-stop-shop.’

Nobody said anything for several seconds and then Carol-Anne said, ‘I can see why you think everyone should embrace you. I can’t imagine how things could work otherwise.’

‘See,’ he beamed. ‘She gets it.’

‘So,’ Ajax said, ‘assuming for the sake of the story here, that we believe this is a must-have, a sort of ...’ he looked at the other three.

‘Like the cherry on the sundae?’ Ethan offered.

‘Can’t live without it?’ Dallas tried.

Ajax frowned, paused, looked at Carol-Anne and said. ‘I can’t think of it. Tell you what,’ he looked at the man. ‘Why don’t you fill in the blanks here?’

Fat man took a sip, looked at Oscar and said. ‘Tell them.’

‘If you don’t let us help, you will find that inexplicable problem creep in.’

‘Assuming,’ Ethan said, ‘that we understand you, which I don’t think we do, what exactly does this entail?’

‘Normally we look at a percentage of turnover, but I’m assuming you don’t have any turnover yet, so our standard starting fee is fifteen thousand rands a month. And there’s a starting up fee, a once-off you could call it, of twenty thousand rands.’

‘To start?’

‘Well yes, a modest fee to ensure that opening day goes well and then we’ll monitor your turnover and work things from there. There is a standard fifteen per cent escalation fee every year as well, over and above.’

‘Always terms and conditions,’ Ethan said, ‘and the start-up fee?’

‘That’s your ticket to our goodwill.’

‘And we’re assuming you’re going to tell us about how much we need your goodwill?’

‘You’re telling us that we must give you thirty-five thousand rands to start our business? Really? Who’s in charge of this outfit?’ Ajax asked.

‘I am,’ the man said, as Oscar nodded in the background, seemingly more interested in the whiskey than the conversation.

‘No, you’re not,’ Ethan said. ‘You’re just a messenger with I’m assuming, Oscar the muscle on the go? Who’s really behind this bullshit?’

‘Which one of you is Lightfoot?’ The man ignored Ethan. ‘Given that it looks as though he’s the one with the money.’

Ajax looked at Dallas and raised his eyebrows, as she looked at him, not giving anything away, but clearly, she did, as it was a gesture picked up by the man who said. ‘Okay, given that you put all the money in building this, call it your enterprise, maybe we should only deal with you?’

Ajax stood up and walked across the room, stopping in the man’s space while Oscar put his glass down and came swiftly around the bar, but stopped when Ajax’s hand moved out and touched his chest. One hand came up to catch Ajax’s hand, but he stopped when Ajax looked at him and said. ‘Don’t. This was supposed to be a chat which we were happy to accommodate you in doing. It wasn’t about you stealing money from us, so maybe you don’t want to let our goodwill in seeing you go to waste now.’

Ethan in the meantime had put his feet up on the table, looked at Dallas with a smile on his face and then looked at Carol- Anne and winked. She, on the other hand, didn’t seem to see things quite as amusing as Ethan did.

Dallas had taken off her shoes, put her feet on the table and was slowly stroking a foot up and down Ethan’s one leg, still sipping her coffee and looking as though Ajax was simply discussing prices with a prospective client. She’d been quiet since she’d slapped the man because she’d made her point. Now she looked at Carol-Anne and winked. ‘I’m hungry,’ she mouthed.’

At the bar, the man finally stood up, reached slowly into his jacket and looking up at Ajax, took out a wallet, opened it, slid a card out which he put on top of the bar and said. ‘Refusing our help would not go well for you. This set up here,’ he waved his hand around the office, ‘your houses, didn’t come cheap so think about it. When you’ve had time to think about our offer, call me.’

He looked at Ajax, then at Oscar. ‘Time to go.’

Stepping back, Ajax moved to the door, opened it and moved aside, letting the two out and watched as they walked across the gravel, their steps loud against the stones and got back into the car which started, backed out a short way and then drove out, turned left onto Victoria and drove off toward Camps Bay.

Closing the door, Ajax rubbed his hands together briskly and asked. ‘Is that all on tape?’

‘It will be,’ Dallas replied, ‘but right now I’m starving?’

‘Likewise,’ Ethan and Ajax replied. ‘Carol-Anne, grab your bag and let’s go.’

‘After what’s just happened?’ She replied, getting up.

‘An occupational hazard,’ Dallas said. ‘We’ll watch the videos tomorrow and talk about it. A chicken salad, some excellent white wine and,’ she spread her hands out, ‘what could be better?’

‘Where are we going?’ Ethan asked.

‘Dunes,’ Ajax and Dallas said together. ‘They don’t get the wind and with an evening like this, we can sit outside and watch the sun go down.’

‘Let me lock up and set everything,’ Ethan replied, ‘I’ll see you guys in the garage.’

He locked the front door, went behind the bar, pressed a hidden button beneath the mirror which slid to the side, set some switches which activated the alarms with a thirty-second delay, set the inside and outside videos to motion record. He slid the mirror back, and walked out the back of the office, through one door and down the passage to another door which he opened with a key card, went through it and into their private garage.

Ajax, Carol-Anne, and Dallas were standing next to Ajax’s Audi, a five-year-old RS4 which Ajax had bought a year ago and put through the mill, restoring it to showroom condition. He’d taken the massive V8 engine out, stripped it down, and re-built it while Ethan had re-done the body from front to back.

Now it sat in the garage under the lights, squatting like a massive British racing-green bullfrog. They’d go together, then come back, see that Carol-Anne got home safely and the three of them would then go home.

Chapter 3

Ajax parked in the street opposite the Restaurant and they walked across the road, up the stairs and were shown an outside table for four which overlooked the beach and harbour under two large umbrellas. The umbrellas shaded the table from the setting sun, placed in such a way as not to block any view of Sentinel Mountain on the far side of the bay.

The sun was falling slowly behind the mountains, not letting go of any heat, but the restaurant itself was sheltered from the wind by the Chapman’s Peak Mountain range which formed one side of the bay.

Carol-Anne picked up her menu, then put it down, looked at Dallas and said, ‘Thank you for what you did.’

‘We’re family,’ Dallas replied, ‘that’s what we do.’

Carol-Anne had been with them for the last eighteen months. She’d buried her husband of seventeen years, five months previously after a long fight with cancer. He’d been a gentle hard-working fisherman who’d taught Ajax and Dallas everything they needed to know about the harbour, the documentation necessary for their boat and where the best fishing was.

He’d arranged their berthing and managed the team who met them when they returned from each trip to hose down the boat with fresh water to remove the salt and dirt.

Then he would ensure that everything was wiped clean and stowed away securely. When they’d interviewed Carol-Anne and instantly taken her on board, they’d acquired a prodigious knowledge of the harbour and ocean in her husband at the same time.

Their boat was a thirty-two foot Magnum fishing/ pleasure boat called SkyJax which Ajax had purchased from Two Oceans Marine in Paarden Eiland in Cape Town and on weekends they did not go to the farm, they went out on the boat. On the back it had two 350 horsepower four-stroke outboard motors that he’d already taken apart to see what made them work, just in case, they stopped somewhere in the middle of the ocean.

It had a catamaran hull which provided excellent stability and the cabin which also housed the primary control station provided comfortable seating and a clear 360-degree view of the surroundings. The boat had a downstairs area with a galley, comprising a cupboard, a 12-volt fridge and a 2-plate gas stove. On the other side of the galley was a basin with a freshwater tap.

There was also a small bedroom with a double bed and en-suite head. Above the cabin was a high flybridge with a dual hydraulic steering system which also added another four metres in height when needed to look for fish or just plain leisure. It could either be covered or left open depending on the weather. Between the two motors, a two-step boarding ladder was mounted on a swim platform.

In those eighteen months, Carol-Anne had worked fourteen hours a day at times, to get from where they’d been to where they were now. She’d arrived at a collection of old buildings and a piece of vacant land, awaiting transfer and re-zoning which, once approved, was transformed into an ultra-modern auto body shop with spacious offices, showers and bathrooms in the back for all staff and a restaurant from which their stolen from another restaurant chef, turned out a healthy daily lunch.

With a coffee and food bar a hundred metres up the road from them, their coffee dispenser at the bar was mostly fully utilised by Carol-Anne and Dallas and occasionally, by all four of them.

Right now though, she looked worried.

‘I didn’t like that man, he scared me.’ she said. ‘He looks bad and he’ll bring us trouble. His eyes are evil eyes and you can see he has no soul.’

Ajax looked at her carefully and nodded. ‘He has evil eyes, but he’s our problem and not yours. We’ll see where this goes and decide, I promise you. We’ve worked too hard and come too far to jeopardise anything. But that’s for tomorrow. Right now ...’ he looked around, smiled hugely and pointed at Sentinel Mountain, the guardian of the Bay and a lookout from hundreds of years ago ‘... where in the world?’

Signalling to the closest waiter, he ordered four glasses and two large bottles of still water, some ice and asked for a wine menu.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘just bring us a very cold, very dry bottle of white. Something really good.’

With that taken care of, he picked up a menu, studied it carefully and then put it aside. ‘Are we ready for Wednesday?’

Wednesday was their open for business day which was in two days. They’d put adverts in the local Sentinel weekly and done a knock and drop to the businesses in the village and hired a few people to drop flyers in every post box. The flyers were pretty much