The Dahran Secret

By Gerry Taylor

An unexpected transfer lands Jonathan Martin a banking job in the Sheikdom of Dahra. From day one, he discovers that not all is as it seems on the surface.

This is his story, a narration of significant events as they happened to him. In a word, his story is a series of adventures, some of which the world is yet not supposed to

• Language: English
• Publisher: 3Plus Creative Media
• Release date: Jul 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218028596

Book preview

Prologue

I had a very fortunate if somewhat boring and ordinary life until I was in my mid-thirties. It was ordinary in the sense of hard-working, uncontroversial and rather unnoticed, except by those in my immediate business circle.

The Fates who direct our life – by spinning its thread and weaving its cloth – intervened. Two threads crossed and then some more. Before you could snap your fingers in the eddies and ebbs of mythology and time, my life had changed. Hence, the title of this, my story.

Some of the places of which I talk you will know. Some of the institutions and countries as well. By and large, the details I reveal here have not, as of this date, come to public attention. It is in the interest of various nation States that they never see the light of day.

Many of the issues raised herein are metaphors for modern life. Spot them if you can.

This is my story. More than that, it is more a narration of notes on events as I remember them and not intended to be a diary. In a word, it is a series of adventures, which I hope you will enjoy, as much as I have, in living them.

Apologies! I have not introduced myself. Martin, Jonathan Martin, at your service.

Dahra,

April20xx

Chapter 1: Ross Wells

Love is one of the games of life.

Dahran proverb

When I opened the door, he greeted me with the smile.

‘Hello, Boss, it is great to see you again.’

Ross Wells was his name and I had met him for the first time almost two years ago when one of the better agencies had sent him around. His light Saxon features were topped with soft brown eyes. An unusual combination, but one which pleased me.

‘May I take a shower, Boss?’

I nodded okay and as he went towards the large bathroom, he shed his clothes, leaving them in a neat pile on one of the armchairs in the room. He walked naked towards the bathroom and shower. My eyes feasted on his beautiful, smooth and well-toned body. He knew that he did not need a shower and that I was looking at him and I could swear that he wiggled him bum at me as walked across the room. His body was as I remembered it from previous visits – fine shoulders, a neat and tapered waist, tight buttocks. I followed him to the open door of the bathroom and, when he turned around in the shower, looking at me looking at him, he smiled the smile again and stretching like a big cat – his belly muscles enjoying the spray of the shower nozzle.

Ross was a well-built lad where it mattered in his profession. His uncut cock was thick and long with a small foreskin which retracted without difficulty. He could top or bottom, but for me he was always the latter. Having dried himself off, he did that little hop, skip and a jump of his out of the bathroom and onto the king-sized bed.

‘Boss, I was hoping that you would be in town again’ was all he said, reaching out to undo my dressing gown.

The first time I had him, in the biblical sense of the word, all of two years back, I had let him know who the Boss was. He had asked me, what I wanted to be called; I replied ‘Boss’. Being a fast learner, he knew that he would be a bottom that evening and ‘Boss’ was what he called me from that time onwards on each occasion on which me met afterwards.

His butthole was immaculate and clean, inside and out, as well as being already lubed as I knew that it would be. Having taken off my dressing gown, he folded it with care and put it over the headboard. He pulled down two pillows and laid his trim hips across them, raised up his backside in the way he knew I like to see his body in all its twenty-three-year-old splendour from that angle.

‘Boss, I am all yours,’ he said.

I am good at two things and one of them is sex. This is no boast. It is something which I have always excelled at, whose techniques I have tried in a consistent manner to improve upon over the years. For over three hours, I made love to him and had him on the edge of climax quite a number of times. He knew better than to come. He whimpered and cried out with the true pleasure of a young man being loved and knowing it. He jumped and twitched as his walnut hard prostate was hit time and time again with the modest, but solid, length of my cock.

My greatest pleasure is in the domination of a lover through the use of each of the erogenous zones of that lover’s own body. While not even half of these are present in everybody to any heightened degree, rare is the body which does not have some twenty or so of these very charged and sensitive sexual spots. It is always just a question of knowing where and when to find them.

Ross had quite a number of such zones, but his butthole was his most sensitive and why waste time playing with an unresponsive pleasure point when another will have a lover bucking for dear life itself as the one hundred and five nerve endings – if we are to believe Chinese studies – were subject to frottage and pleasured.

He had pleased me so much on this occasion that upon his leaving, I took out two hundred sterling from my wallet to give him. I had already paid the agency by credit card, so this was for him.

‘Boss,’ he said, ‘I do not want to take that. The agency will pay me two hundred sterling and I would much prefer when you are back in town’ – I had said, I was away on a frequent basis – ‘that, when you call them, you ask for me.’

He had revealed three things: one, he was working for the agency on a fifty-fifty basis. In second place, he had not said, ‘If you are back in town,’ but ‘when.’ Also, in final place, he was honest in a profession which was anything but. He had not tried to cut the agency out, but had said, ‘call them’ not him and he smiled the smile.

I went over to him – he was already dressed to go – and hooking my finger in the belt of his fashionable slacks and pulling the elastic band of his designer briefs away from his flat stomach, I put the two hundred sterling on top of his now sleeping cock, with a small smile, saying ‘A guy should always have a little extra down there.’

A poor pun, but he smiled the smile and pulled a card from his back-pocket wallet and said, ‘Boss, my mobile. No one, but no one has this number except the agency. Anytime, anyplace, anywhere! Ring and I will drop everything to get to you.’

I kissed Ross on the lips as I ushered him to the door. Once alone, I looked down at his card – ‘Ross Wells’ and a phone number. It was the first time he had trusted me with his business card.

Here was a young man whom I would want to see again without any doubt. He was never demanding. He never failed to please. He never came anywhere close to failure in love-making; always knowing what I needed and wanted. A nice guy and a greater lay. I went into the shower to luxuriate under its sprays for all of a quarter of an hour.

Chapter 2: Deckhams

‘Money makes the world go round.’’

Song lyrics – Cabaret

It is quite clear that the Fates have a hand in our individual destinies. While we can influence so many things in our lives, subtle events happen and have a knack of putting us on paths which, in a thousand years as a norm, we would never walk.

Looking back on events, I can indeed say that the Fates intervened that April morning when I went to see one of my partners at the Bank.

Let me explain, I am a banker, an Englishman and have spent all my working life with the same firm since I left public school – in reality, a minor English public school which our American cousins would call a very private and expensive one.

Our Bank, Deckhams, goes back just over three hundred years and is a private merchant Bank with our headquarters in the heart of the city of London. Our present Chairman is a direct descendant of the original founder, who in turn was a direct descendant of one of the nobles of William the Conqueror. By the mid-1600s, the family had changed the original Norman spelling ‘Deschamps’ to Deckhams its now English pronounced equivalent. We are up to our oxters in history at the Bank as Charlie Deckham, our present Chairman, is so fond of reminding us.

Though thirty of us are directors of the Bank, we call ourselves partners, because the business success of one will bring profit and success to all and a poor investment will hurt us all in the long term. Not quite the ‘all for one and one for all’ motto of Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers but close enough. We all meet once a month on the third Monday in the great boardroom, by either being present in person or by real-time private satellite video link from the fifteen subsidiaries around the world. This April morning was one such day.

Let me say for starters that we are very civilized at our Board meetings. Things are always done and thrashed out in advance. Our meetings are a confirmation of pre-arranged agreements and agendas – at times, a request to pursue a new avenue of investment and the reasons why – but in our customary fashion, we consider reports which have been circulated beforehand and limited to two-minute/four-page summaries which are our standard maximum.

I was not therefore overall surprised when the partner in charge of personnel, John Tunner, asked to see me before the meeting. He allocates the staff at whatever branch you happen to be and he takes them off your hands when they are no longer needed. In the normal run of events, of course, he would not take staff from your own area without first consulting you or vice versa. Today, he looked just a tad worried, but greeted me as charming as ever with a ‘Jonathan, come in. Thank you for taking the time.’

Another of the partners of my own age group so to speak, Tommy Elford, was there in his office to whom I also said hello.

‘Jonathan, we have a bit of a problem. Johnny Mahon is dead. They found him in his bed this morning. He died during the night.’

I must have looked a bit stunned because ‘our man’ in Tokyo was one of our star financial performers.

John Tunner went on. ‘You may not have known it, but he had an acute stomach cancer for years. It is amazing that he lasted so long.’

I was indeed sorry to hear the news and it did explain why the dead partner did not often attend meetings in person which I had assumed, in error, to a distaste of travelling half-way round the world each month for a meeting which seldom lasted more than two hours.

‘I had hoped just to inform the Board this morning of some less-pressing matters, but as you know we have those two major ongoing deals in steel and shipbuilding and the just partner here with sound Japanese and a knowledge of the Tokyo office is young Elford here.’

John Tunner regarded anyone under fifty as young.

I looked across at Tommy and nodded. He had been in Tokyo when I had headed up the Cairo office years back and like myself had made it to the top. I was even the godfather of his third and youngest daughter.

‘So, John, what is the suggestion?’

‘Jonathan, I want to recommend Tommy here for the Tokyo office. It will be a big challenge for him.’

By challenge, I heard and knew the coded implication. ‘Get the steel and shipbuilding deals done which were outstanding and Tommy, me lad, you would be in clover, with a million in various bonuses for self and a healthy end-of-year bottom line for everyone else.’

‘The bad news, Jonathan, is that to make this possible, I need you to head up the Dahra office. You have three great advantages going for you. You have Arabic, you are single and you are transferable without great family problems.’

I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. Our office in the Sheikdom of Dahra was a real earner. The country was, in geological terms, sitting on a lake of oil and three years earlier when drilling for water between two low mountain ranges, the geologists had hit the fourth largest deposit of natural gas in the world. Such misfortune in a desert! Such good fortune for an economy!

As an office, Dahra was not quite in the same prestige league as New York or Tokyo, but a very secure position. Tommy had taken it over six months or so ago and had seemed quite happy to do so. He and the wife, Janet, had gone out there; the girls being in school back home here in England.

Tommy Elford chimed in ‘You would be doing me a favor as well, Jonathan. Janet has not been able to settle in at all. She, in fact, hates the climate, the heat and the Arab culture. She seldom leaves the Bank’s Villa. It is a very male environment. On the other hand, Janet loves everything Japanese.’

Janet, I knew, could be an all-star bitch, if you can excuse the language, when she wanted to be and if she did not like Dahra, its climate, its heat and Arab culture, then the person who took her there was and would be in hell. Tommy had said nothing about the ‘challenge’ of the Tokyo office, but knowing his level of ambition, the future bonuses would make it all worthwhile and Janet would be off his back.

I pretended to mull over it for about twenty seconds, looking out the window and down at the traffic below on the road, smiling inside to myself at how readable some people and situations are when you strip them of the superfluous. Having studied the traffic until the lights changed, I said, ‘I am sure Pattie, my god-daughter, will just love Tokyo when the summer holidays come around.’

Tommy Elford almost bounded across the room and hugged me. We, Englishmen, do not hug, but he hugged me. I put it down to the fact that he was just relieved and excited.

‘Jonathan, I owe you one. I owe you big time. Thank you.’

John Tunner’s secretary and – very personal – male assistant put his head around the door and said ‘Sir, the Board is meeting’ and meet we did. The blank monitor screen for Tokyo was what I remember of that meeting and John Tunner saying that he was pleased to report that even at such short notice, two partners would be heading up the offices of Tokyo and Dahra without delay.

Chapter 3: Dahra

Things in plain sight are the most difficult to see.

Dahran proverb

Dahra is one of the hottest places in the world according to those who keep records. In Dahra, one single minute in the noonday sun will leave a European very uncomfortable. Five minutes and you will have a bad sunburn. Its coastline is its sole saving geographical feature, as far as geography, goes with two deep water ports. It has beautiful beaches, but even in December, except on cloudy days, it is uncomfortable to sit out on a beach. So, all who can, just sit at home in the shade of palm trees, under umbrellas by their swimming pools, or in air-conditioned rooms.

Dahra, however, has a number of things going for it. It is a Sheikdom with alliances with both the Emirates on the Gulf and with Saudi Arabia itself on whose Peninsula it sits. The Sheik is an absolute monarch and any form of Government, which a democracy might bring, is regarded by both the monarch and the people as too complicated, with no insult implied to ancient Greece, too distasteful, modern, undignified and unbecoming of the Dahran nation state.

Its second item worth mentioning is its oil. I am a banker, so I do not pretend to understand about things in the ground and such, but when I was stationed in Cairo, a geologist friend there explained a re-evaluation of Dahra’s oil some years ago to me by saying, ‘Think of a big ice-cream cone upside down. The entire country of Dahra is sitting on the very tip of the upside-down cone and almost everything else down underneath in the cone is oil.’

Well, my friend was almost right, because the third thing was that instead of there being just one upside down cone, there were in fact two cones, one of oil and one of gas which those exploring for water in the foothills of the mountains had discovered by accident.

Oil and gas – which summarizes modern Dahra in a single sentence – and of course, everything Arab which goes with both. It has a modern capital city, off whose pavements you could eat your breakfast they are so clean, that is if you could just stay in the sun long enough to eat the breakfast. The health and education system paid for by the Sheik is on a par with Switzerland or better. No crime to speak of – who would want to rob a car in one hundred- and twenty-degrees Fahrenheit – as one cynic put it? No real tourists as it is far too hot. An outward calm lifestyle of business for some three hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon and the rest of the time to do your own thing.

The historical Dahra was a darker story. Its two deep water ports were once the main slave entry points into that area of the Peninsula. That was centuries ago.

I had arrived without any delay on my part a week after the ‘famous’ April Board meeting. The Dahra office, at management level, was headed up by a Swede, Gustav Ahlson, whose English was better than mine. He was unusual in that he had been there for over twenty years and as the most senior non-partner Deckhams banking executive, not just in Dahra but in the world, he could have asked for any posting world-wide in the Bank and got it with the snap of his fingers.

I had heard it said that he had turned down two offers to be posted as a partner elsewhere, preferring to stay in Dahra. While he did run the office, the volume, value and prestige of the business required a partner to be there to deal with the many relatives of the Sheik, who were in every key post and facet of Dahran life and who would not deal with a mere general manager, no matter how important other bankers thought he was. It was a matter of prestige to deal de rigeur with persons of equal rank.

Our merchant Bank had the business of investing some the country’s billions. It was a continuing battle to find worthwhile investment opportunities and not have the money just sitting in various national Government bonds and stocks.

As a consequence of all this, I found myself the day after my arrival meeting with the deputy of the deputy Finance Minister to convince him to invest two billion euro in a Finnish geo-thermal venture which would in some fifteen years make a twenty-fold or so return on the investment made and being backed by the Finnish Government, it was as safe as houses, as we say in banking circles.

The meeting was not in a bureaucratic finance office but in one of the Four Diamonds hotels as they were now being called, ever since the dropping of the star-rating system now regarded as more appropriate for second class establishments and venues.

I went alone. No briefcase, no papers, no mobile phone, the facts and figures in my head. As I drew up to the hotel in the Deckhams Rolls, I noticed a rather large fountain in what appeared to be a very green park and a lot of activity around it including a TV crew. I asked the driver over the intercom what was going on and he informed me that the new fountain had just been switched on.

It was quite an extraordinary sight. Maybe it was the dry heat of the day and it was still just nine o’clock in the morning, but the air around the fountain shimmered with its own mirage of refracted lights in every cascading droplet of water over what appeared to be the purest of white marbles.

Out of the heat of the morning, cooled in part by a cascading fountain, I stepped into the Four Diamonds hotel where we were to meet, with the air-conditioning already hard at work