From ENRON to Armenia - The Inhuman Network: Part 4

The Armenian Diaspora is thriving in Cyprus, but not so much when it comes to the music industry. You could say it’s non-existent. So this company, that had just acquired one of the most prestigious plots of land in the capital, must surely have a pretty good revenue stream to afford something worth millions of Euros. If there isn’t much money to be made in sales of Armenian folklore music, either home or abroad, what else does the company do?

Looking into the files at my disposal, this little shiny gem of a company immediately turned opaque. Institutions such as ‘Ernst & Young’, ‘KPMG’, were mentioned, but there was nothing seemingly unusual in this. As an employee, I had every right to know if the IRS or any kind of ‘agency’ was about to knock on the door, didn’t I?

The company appeared not to be involved in anything other than DVD and CD production, with an odd concert tour now and then. Those must be pretty expensive CDs, and the tickets for concerts must sell for a pretty penny? Well not so. I knew that the Armenian music we sold was cheap, and concert tickets, as evidenced by a recent tour of Syria, changed hands for mere peanuts.

Does anyone have an idea what it takes to ship over 400 people, and concert equipment, and filming equipment, hundreds of miles to the Middle East, in the middle of July? Especially from Lebanon into a country like Syria, where you need a visa to walk from point A to point B at the airport? Seriously, it’s as crazy as going hiking in Iran. You just don’t do it. Not for a concert ticket with the face value of twelve dollars.

When equipment brakes down in the middle of a public performance, how is it possible to get new equipment shipped into the country overnight, crossing border checkpoints and custom clearance agents to reach the stage by 2.pm the following day? So quick and easy, no questions asked.

Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, interesting countries with plenty of connections to Cyprus no doubt. It’s reasonable to assume that the revenue stream must originate from one of these areas.

The Lebanese Connection

Before ENRON, there was a financial accounting scandal that rocked the upper echelons of the corporate finance world, and caused many high-flyers to literally jump out of the penthouse window, but it’s all forgotten now. Lost under a deep pile of mud, I was caused to dig it up one day while curiosity got the better of me again. I discovered something quite bizarre in the process.

To get back to the original question of who or what this company really is? To understand this you have to ask another question. Who is this Client? It’s relatively easy in the digital age, where the Internet speeds the access to information. Not like the old days of quiet libraries and dusty old parchment. There is a wealth of information at our fingertips and you don’t have to be a research scientist to decipher it anymore.

Reading through some online newspaper articles penned by reputable investigative journalists, and some tedious court papers, and US government documents, a picture began to emerge. Coupling this with the ‘chatter’ on various web forums, I picked up on some unflattering things being said about him. I won’t repeat them here nor will I mention his name. There are a lot of sources of information which make for interesting reading (see end of article).

Apart from being the Godfather of my old boss, he is the CEO of a myriad of companies based in Lebanon and Armenia. He’s involved in diverse industries like carpet manufacturing to hot water boilers, and imports and exports for various industries. He owns a few hotels, and a couple of restaurants. He is 100% shareholder of the company I use to work for, and has links to the USA, Canada, France, and Singapore. He started out, together with his brother, inheriting their father’s business interests, and slowly building a quiet empire in the middle-east, a post-1982 Beirut as his command centre.

On reading the articles and court papers things started to click into place, but in a most unexpected way. In my fervent search for more information I stumbled upon an article over at whatdoesitmean.com on April 9th, 2009, not the most reliable site I will admit, outlining among other things, news about the world’s elite controllers in the process of building underground bunkers to protect themselves from the coming destruction.

Did I hear someone say conspiracy theorists? That maybe so but stick with me… I remembered the approximate date (around January 2009) when building started on our expensive underground recording studio in Armenia. Work was abruptly halted in May when, strangely enough, noise problems from an underground (metro) tube connection were detected. Apparently nobody thought to test the noise level from the nearby trains before giving permission to build a ‘sound studio’ below. Incompetence or something more sinister?

I knew we bought expensive recording and editing suites, we hired freelancers to travel from Germany to test our systems, and we commissioned world renowned music producers to film our concerts. The boss would travel to France and Germany, to London and back, to Lebanon and back, all in the name of Armenian folklore music.

I read an e-mail that was freely available to me in my inbox where the client had filed a law suit in a California court to recover monies lost from a past concert tour organiser. The lawyer for the defendant mentioned ‘all that stuff on the Internet about you’. What could he mean? Like a ‘no trespassing sign’, I had to take a look. This is where things get really weird.

The client, our benefactor, was also embroiled in the Lernout & Hauspie scandal of 1996 as a private investor. It was the biggest fraud case pre-ENRON, where KPMG were accused of ‘creative accounting’. His name is mentioned along with the unflattering term ‘money-laundering’, on blogs and news articles surrounding the scandal. In brief, he made a 36 million dollar bank transfer on behalf of the speech recognition company.

Now it gets really really weird. The sloppy accounting led to further investigation. It has since emerged Lernout & Hauspie’s revolutionary listening, recording and deciphering technology (some of which has been used by Microsoft) was developed primarily for German Intelligence to spy on the Middle East – a story that was broken by the Belgium newspaper De Standaard in 2001.

Accountants had made a mistake trying to hide the huge sums of money moving around front companies. Nobody thought anyone would notice the link between the Western intelligence agencies and a new tech company like Lernout & Hauspie.

I began to wonder if the crazy underground recording studio that my boss was building was actually a secret bunker, or even a government listening/deciphering station. Had I seen too many movies and this was just another one of those strange coincidences? Why was the recording studio big enough to house ten large families? What was really under that raised access parquet floor?

It was Christmas 2009, and shortly after discovering the link between our Client and German intelligence I was ‘made redundant’. Another coincidence? One can only speculate. How do I get myself into these situations? Why does my curiosity get the better of me every time? I continually find myself drawn into strange circumstances by accident or design.

Now my career direction has taken a different turn, and I work for a ‘family clinic’ which regularly carries out abortions. Yet again, no one asks questions, everything is done matter-of-factly; no one is looking or saying much, as babies are vacuumed, or scooped up, and put in a green bag to be collected on Monday mornings. Just like the empty suitcases at the old job, no one touches them nor looks inside, nobody asks questions. It’s obvious they’re destined for some other place far far away. I wonder… is anyone listening?


Online Sources/Links:

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4607/1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20060420133237/http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/how_high.htm
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2004.1265626
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/business/08audit.html?_r=1
http://www.the10b-5daily.com/archives/000311.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB107930245364754839-search.html?collection=autowire%252F30day&vql_string=lernout%253Cin%253E%2528article%252Dbody%2529
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/03-2704-01A.pdf
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr17782.htm
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp17782.htm
http://www.coursehero.com/file/2891046/2003819f01c0311566/

From ENRON to Armenia - The Inhuman Network: Part 3

This is just me ‘hypothesizing’. The Significance of R is no Wikileaks. This is my own personal speculation. I knew for a fact that the company produced, distributed and sold music CDs and DVDs, doing everything from recording, producing, editing, and distribution, as well as graphic design, not to mention all advertising and international sales. The drawback was… we only had one client.

I began to think that perhaps the company could be a front operation, (visitors often made sly remarks about it), perhaps it was a money-laundering scam outfit, shipping guns or drugs from Asia through Lebanon to fund allegedly, I’m just speculating for the hell of it, Hezbollah in Syria? At least I thought it could, perhaps…allegedly.

This ‘client’ represented a handful of musical artists, mostly relatives and their friends, each with some musical talent or other. I had great respect for these artists, and the work of the designers and their vision, even the Pitbull was an accomplished photographer and knew a thing or two about art. The ‘client’ was a mystery.

As time moved on I began to notice odd things, like the fact that we only sold about ten CDs a month, while the production line made hundreds every six to twelve months. It didn’t make any kind of economical sense. Our overheads ran in the thousands per month. Doing the simple math you could see red flags popping up everywhere.

We spent a fortune on recording studio equipment, microphones, speakers, synthesizers, computer hardware and software to run the stuff, furniture to stack the stuff, and the biggest plasma screen in Cyprus, to play the stuff. All the while we made approximately a hundred Euros monthly in sales!

Like all modern security conscious offices, ours had a camera in almost every room, the entrance to the building, the front corridor and reception, the kitchen, the screening room, the computer room, and the door of the storage room. However, these cameras didn't all work, which never seemed to bother the CEO.

The office flooring was designed with raised access parquet tiles. You need a special mechanism to lift the tile off. We usually had the thing handy because the I.T. technician (the boss used friends of friends rather than specialists like CISCO technicians), they would be forever coming to fix the under-floor wiring.

On many occasions the mechanism, a sort of iron suction handle, would disappear. We would search the entire office but never find the damn thing. The next morning it would appear in the CEO’s office or stationery room. One day the storage room door was ajar and noticing the handle on a table inside, I commandeered it for future use.

The CEO and his brother would often take the thing into the storage room and close the door behind them. They would reappear without it and be holding an envelope or something else. It was common sense that they were lifting tiles in the room. The storage room, it appeared, stored more than CDs.

I never told anyone about the lifting of the floor tiles because it wasn’t my business. If they were hiding their ill-gotten gains under my feet, money which paid my salary at the end of the month, I wasn’t about to snitch.

Their monthly trips to France, Germany, Armenia, Lebanon, and back to Cyprus, began to show more red flags when they coincided with regular trips into the storage room to remove suitcases which were left by a ‘weekend VIP’ visitor, to be picked up the following Monday morning. It was obvious to me, and the employees, that an empty suitcase turning up in the design office meant someone was collecting or dropping off items of an unconventional nature.

My curiosity peaked as I knew DHL had their own schedule for delivery and pick-ups from our office, so I took to research and reading up on the history of the company. I wanted to find out who the ‘client’ was. What I discovered on the Internet, teamed with what I knew professionally, caused me to seriously re-think my future with the company.

…to be continued

From ENRON to Armenia - The Inhuman Network: Part 2

The producers of ‘24’ have a special relationship with CISCO. This is a source of great employee pride. The guys I worked with loved to pretend that they lived on the set of the show, causing their egos to skyrocket. I use to think they were ridiculous, as egoists go. It’s one thing to be an expert in the field and it’s another to think you are God.

A salesman once tried to pass on CISCO routers with missing serial numbers to the Cyprus government. But someone with a keen eye and even keener pocket called their hand and the deal had to be rebuilt.

Integrity is something that’s lacking in today’s business world, or maybe it was always a sparse thing. On my part, I like to think that I have an ounce or two of the stuff, especially where my career and service to the world is concerned. At least I use to have.

Talking of egos, my next boss had the biggest one of all. Just to set the stage I’ll bring to mind the rap/hip-hop artist called ‘Pitbull’. When I see videos and pictures of Pitbull, I think of my last boss. He wore the exact same clothes and sunglasses, and sported the same goatee.

Sexy in that ‘millionaire boss’ kind of way. I recall how he pushed me into a corner once to show me how the stationery cupboard needed dusting. Suffice to say, I ignored his advances, which was probably (yet again) the beginning of the end for me in that company.

Being the professional I am, from years of experience in office environments, sexual harassment has become par for the course, and I shrug it off now. An old friend that I don’t see often enough says, “It’s amazing how you get yourself into such strange situations; you lead an exciting life of intrigue”. I wish it were so, but instead I feel it is more like a bizarre twisted fate, and that I have been cursed by the Wicked Witch of the East.

It began when I answered a very tiny newspaper ad for a manager; I was soon invited for an interview. The office was located in a prestigious building that houses many ‘blue-chip’ companies. When I entered the reception area I was confronted by Persian carpet, plasma screens, and high quality interior design, a rarity in Cyprus. Visitors comment that it’s like entering the office of a movie mogul.

The boss and his brother, two dashing Armenians in their 30s, greeted me and we had a brief meeting which led to being offered the job. Well sort of. They told me, go home and think about it, if you want to work for us let us know. The first and only time I was ever given such an option.

I was offered my own spacious office with great city views, the latest computer technology, mahogany desk, Herman Miller chair, private parking, short hours, and a ladies room with mirrored tiles, gold fittings and low ambient lights. Not forgetting a good monthly salary. Who could resist? Little did I know that... not all that glitters is… well you’ll see what I mean.

For several weeks I was left to my own devices in the office, discussing colour ‘bleeds’ with graphic designers for the first time in my life, firing unruly staff, and deleting junk mail, until the day that the boss, who frequently travelled overseas, turned up to make us feel like we were living in ‘Hitler’s bunker’ for the duration of his stay.

We clocked in, we clocked out, the CCTV watched our every move, through clear glass partitioned office walls. Our computer use was monitored, our phone calls were logged. The strange thing was, were weren’t dealing with anything confidential or ‘sensitive’, but I guess in this day-and-age you need to keep a good grip on what is happening around you.

Over time it became obvious that we were going through the same ‘ole same ‘ole every month. Things never seemed to progress, nothing moved forward, we were constantly going backwards to re-do everything, we moved furniture around, we constantly changed advertising, constantly rehashed company policies and documents, we bought things, returned them, bought them again. We were playing at ‘playing office’.

The designers would put this down to the boss being an uber-perfectionist. However, there was more to it than that. Time is money they say, and our precious time was being wasted on an hourly basis, as we constantly changed and amended and re-amended paperwork, drawings, adverts, policies, staff …a little to the left…a little to the right…and so it went on…

…to be continued

From ENRON to Armenia - The Inhuman Network: Part 1

I evacuated my banking career of fourteen years, mainly because I was sick of people lying to me, and I didn’t much like all the money laundering that was going on under the watchful eye of the Central Bank of Cyprus, and my bosses, while I humbly awaited my annual pay rise of 2%.

During the months of bad luck finding a well paid job to help me prop-up my freelancing gigs, I realised that ANY job would have to do. When an offer of a short term contract at a sales office came up, I jumped to it.

The company was ‘CISCO’, one of the world’s premier computer technology companies. I was managing the local office administration, and finding out from ‘the horse's mouth’, that there is NO SUCH THING as a SECURE Internet banking transaction (this is why I don’t use the service). And that theoretically speaking (depending on whether there’s a client manager in the room) all our e-mail accounts can (and possibly are) being compromised, copied, altered, and then forwarded on without our knowledge or ability to trace back. Interesting stuff indeed. The reason for this I do not know.

CISCO has built a huge world-wide network of ‘connectivity’ where governments can move information around within seconds, and monitor every piece of ‘traffic’, not to mention ‘listening in’ on the neighbours. They call it ‘The Human Network’, but from my experience it is anything but human.

They plan to inter-connect everything in our daily lives which society uses to function, like the water supply, the electricity supply, our electronic communications, the money systems, all transportation… not just in America, but the entire world.

On the blueprint towards this aim, CISCO has also built several international R & D facilities, including a huge one in Israel, where teleconferencing has taken on a whole new meaning. Now they use live holograms. People can interact with each other anytime, anywhere, while still being thousands of miles apart, providing they have access to CISCO’s live hologram transmission technologies of course.

A couple of years ago they showcased ‘Telepresence’ at the Nicosia Hilton, during their annual I.T. industry event. I was blown away, like many people who watched this for the first time. Forget Apple and the iPad, or Virgin's space plane, this is sci-fi art becoming life, and it's coming our way very soon.

...to be continued

Extraordinary Rendering – You are what we eat!

In August 2006 I was offered the role of PA to the CEO of one of the island’s oldest and most prestigious companies. As I was in desperate need of a full time job I accepted. Freelancing didn’t cover much, especially not the mortgage payments.

About a week before I was due to start, my new boss had a heart attack and promptly died right in the middle of his yachting holiday. I got the call asking me to start a little earlier than scheduled. This was due to the fact that I’d now be working for a new CEO, the boss’s daughter. She and the Co. Secretary (her brother) needed help desperately.

Friends told me not to go, that the death of the old CEO was a bad omen they said. Being a person who sometimes revels in tempting fate, I laughed out loud and said, “Bring it on!”

Background: The Company’s activities are primarily in the fields of energy supply, healthcare and environmental management. It owns and operates the country’s largest power plant, and has moved into oil and gas, as large deposits have been found off the coast, in waters shared with Israel and Egypt. It also operates the largest waste management treatment plant in the country, with a capacity of 60,000 tonnes pa. It supplies and maintains hospital equipment in 90% of the hospitals and clinics, as well as collecting the clinical waste generated by these establishments.

My office was located in the upper echelons of the five-storey building, along with the CEO, and her brother. I had to do the usual PA stuff, and at lunch-time I would frequent the staff kitchen/diner and learn about the day’s events ‘below stairs’.

I would learn how the company had only two service engineers for the entire country. When the capital city’s new General Hospital ventilator broke down, both men were 100 miles away, so the poor soul hooked up to the machine was left with little chance of survival – scandalous.

I was sceptical about the things I heard, but the following week a UN representative of some rank, kept calling me asking to speak to the CEO. He wanted to know why our company hadn’t kept to contract and picked up the waste on schedule.

Within a couple of days the soldier in full uniform, complete with blue beret, turned up in my office demanding to see the CEO. She was conveniently on her way out.

Words were crossed in the hallway. The Major, or whatever he was, announced that no more funds would be forthcoming from the UN and that the contract was cancelled.

The CEO replied that the UN had to pay, “Too bad - it’s required by the Government.” The Major, angered at the general lack of respect, turned around and left with an official, “You’ll be hearing from us.”

The following morning I entered the office to find a distressed engineer (about 60 years old) shouting with my boss that another pipe had burst at the rendering plant and water had short-circuited everything. More crossed words and then the Co. Chairman decided to take matters into his own hands, and drove down to the plant to see the mess for himself.

I was beginning to think there was definitely something in the stories I was hearing. This is when the old engineer sat down in my office to compose himself and began to reveal the truth about the forever problematic state-of-the-art waste rendering plant. (Rendering: reducing, melting, transforming, through heat)

Production had begun before the entire plant was completed; joints and piping were always needing to be reassessed. Sometimes the ‘separator’ malfunctioned. I asked the old engineer what that meant. He explained that sometimes the human clinical waste got mixed in with the animal waste or the non-organic waste.

I asked him outright, “You mean bits of humans get into the machine which renders the other stuff?” He nodded his head and gave a muffled laugh. I felt sick.

What does the company do with the waste? They produce and sell among other things, ‘Blood and Bone Meal’, that’s dried and powdered blood/fatty tissue/bones of animals, for fertilizer, animal feeds, and pet-food additives, to companies in the EU.

Luckily during my short stay with the company my duties didn’t extend to visiting the fiery pits of hell, sorry, the plant. It often had malfunctions, and because it consists of several specialized machines, you needed a specialist to fix it and that costs a lot of money.

We had such a specialist working for the plant but he refused to continue unless old unpaid invoices were settled for maintenance. On hearing this news, the CEO told me she would ‘deal with him once and for all’.

She got the specialist on the phone and a conversation ensued where my boss threatened him with deportation (he was a British national). His response was to hang-up. She proclaimed “I was only joking!” Everyone who knows her, and the power her company wields in government circles, knows that she was being deadly serious.

Things took a decidedly sinister turn when the following evening, I was sitting watching the evening news when an alarming thing happened. There was the specialist on the 8 o’clock news, standing outside of his house which had just been ‘fire bombed’ by persons unknown. Asked by the reporter if he knew who was responsible, the distraught specialist replied that he had ‘a feeling’ he knew who was behind the ‘terror-tactic’ but couldn’t name them. I had a feeling too.

A day or so passed, and two policemen arrived in my office for an apparent scheduled meeting with my boss and her brother. I didn’t schedule the meeting so I was guessing it was a personal visit. By now, I had decided that the money wasn’t worth it, and I was looking for a new job.

The old engineer who had previously been so loud in the CEO’s office turned up to advise me that there had been a power-cut at the rendering plant again. I felt like walking out while the police sat in the adjoining office.

My phone rang and Chrisy, one of the secretaries from Sales and Marketing, asked me if I was going to go down to the kitchen for lunch. “We’re all going to share Pizza, are you in?” My stomach turned. I declined and waited until the next day before I announced that I was leaving.

With a heavy sigh of relief I threw my few belongings into my bag and headed out the door. Nobody seemed very surprised to see me go.

Look Who's Talking

I’ve been reminiscing a lot these past few weeks, trying to put the vignettes of my life into some kind of chronological sequence, if only to remember the little details that have been squeezed under what they call ‘cold-hard-facts’. But the truth is in the details.

With the anniversary of my brother’s death, Sept. 9th, and thoughts about life and death swirling in my mind, trying to write about it is difficult. I still can’t bring myself to put it down on paper.

Instead and apart from, the slowly dissolving issues of guilt, fear, and loss, I’ve found myself trying to contemplate the question of why we are here, that ‘meaning of life’ conundrum. I’ve reached the conclusion that everything is ridiculous and meaningless, and all a complete illusion…I will probably revise this stance next week.

After lately being thrust into yet another new world-of-work, where the people all around me, the people I work with daily, have literal blood on their hands due to it being the medical profession, I am still finding it difficult to adjust from advertising via international (corrupt) banking through to paediatrics and (murder-on-demand) gynaecology.

The abortion clinic (and it is an abortion clinic because the ratio of terminations to births is approximately twenty to one), has made me lose faith (what little I had) in humanity’s future, and shaken me to my core.

A good friend tells me I shouldn’t judge, and to think that the poor baby may have had a terrible life. I know this, I don’t want to judge, but I simply can’t help it. As I see girls/women of all ages and races walking in and out the clinic on a daily basis, I know some of them have no choice, be it health reasons or otherwise.

I also see women who act as if they are having a hair-cut, other women returning on a regular basis and changing their ‘preference’ between staying pregnant or ‘dropping it this month’, as it is called often.

Another friend tells me I am naïve and know nothing of the world, and tells me not to be so shocked that so many women are having abortions weekly, and that it is the way of the world.

When I see a women selling her baby girl for Euros 3000 (in cash) and walking out with a smile on her face, or the old man that brings his 'maid’ to be ‘sorted out’ on the hush-hush, or the student that is selling her eggs, and doesn’t feel too good today… I am sickened to my stomach… I am angry… and I am judging.

I knew the huge salary I was getting from my old employers was ‘blood money’ and the ill-gotten-gains of the money-laundering and gun running rackets of the Middle East. It was money probably garnered because someone somewhere got shot in the head. I was disgusted with myself but I took the money anyway, and pretended that I was a bimbo and naïve and knew nothing about the world.

Nowadays, I eat birthday cake, while the ‘congratulations balloons’ hover above my office door, and a doctor hands me a piece of paper with a bloodstained edge.

Maybe it wasn’t pretence after all.

SOLDIER OF FORTUITY

For LVB – The synchronicity is stifling as I look at the date on the document, it was Monday 12th August 2002 when I wrote the following...

...The heat is as intense as ever, taking a shower every few hours, but to no avail. Sweating buckets and donning frizzy beach-hair around the city cannot be avoided, as well as the irritation that comes with the soaring temperatures and constant need to drink water, followed by the urgency to find a toilet in the most inconvenient place.

Having just found out that the Bank was restructuring my whole department, and yet again the promised promotion would disappear into the dust for another year. The prospect of a stress-free weekend seemed low.

“How would you like to meet Yoshko?” my friend asked. “He’s a 30-year-old, six-foot-tall, blonde blue-eyed Ex-UN Special Forces Soldier from Slovenia!” I stopped to think for a minute, but it was about half a moment. “I think you know the answer to that question, don’t you?”

As we drove down to the coast I spent time in the car imagining my rendezvous with Yoshko. I knew nothing about Slovenia and its people, or the language, and even less about Special Forces soldiers. Did it matter? As it turned out he was a good English speaker.

Over dinner he showed me and my friend his tattoo of a crying eye, and the scars from knives and two gunshot wounds that he had received while serving in some war-torn area of the globe.

“They trained me to be a killing machine.” He said, “What am I supposed to do, that’s life.” He may have been trying to impress us, but his tone said otherwise.

He started to talk about Bosnia, and what the soldiers did there, and how many Americans got killed, and that the real horror was not Kosovo. A place I had some knowledge of through an old friend who was serving with the RAF, not pleasant things, things that changed the direction of people’s lives forever.

On one occasion he was tasked with checking out and ‘clearing’ houses in villages on the outskirts of Kosovo, searching for small arms weapons and insurgents. Yoshko and his small crew were almost out of ammunition and their radio had stopped working. They had no contact with their commander or base.

As they toured the area, going from empty house to empty house, they came across one that was still occupied. A Serbian man came out looking nervous and ‘twitchy’, talking loudly, but they didn’t understand him. Yoshko entered the house and went into the living room (lounge). Turning over the furniture, it was soon apparent why the Serb was anxious.

Hidden in a hole in the bottom of the sofa, and in the soft-chairs, were dozens of M48s and AK47 rifles and hand guns.

Time stood-still for a nanosecond. A Serb appeared from somewhere in the house with a rifle in hand.

“That’s when I knew, it was either him or me.” Yoshko explained, “It’s war, I’m a soldier, they pay me to kill so I kill. He pulled the trigger and missed, I shot him in the head. That’s life!”

I told him to stop; I didn’t want to know any more. I preferred to live in a world of horrors created by Hollywood, and stoned studio executives, not politics and the blood-thirsty war games that seem to be so easy by hiring young men in search of adventure, to go get themselves killed protecting my so-called freedom.

I felt guilty in a way, after listening to Yoshko’s stories. I had worried about my petty problems, not realising that there are people who sacrifice everyday to supposedly ‘keep the peace’, and stop the whole world falling apart. They allow me to live in relative safety. Never knowing about the dirty side of life, the things we are never told because they are too harsh for our sensibilities. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?

It was now time for a well-earned drink or two, some loud music, and dancing ‘till dawn amongst the debauched British tourists, and forgetting the troubles of the world. The best place to do this would be Ayia Napa, a favourite holiday resort for thousands of visitors looking for the best the island has to offer.

Yoshko had already arranged a spot, to meet up with a friend of his and, if brave enough, join in with the karaoke. I definitely needed something to drink, something to take my mind off the images of death that replaced the taste of my aperitif.

“We’re going to the Bedrock Inn.” Yoshko revealed. I knew the place as a Flintstones themed bar, quite a well-known hot-spot where the staff apparently dressed like characters from the popular cartoon.

I cringed at the thought, but sooner than I imagined I found myself dancing and singing to everything from ABBA to the Blues Brothers. Yoshko’s friend however was quite subdued. Had he graced him with stories of war? God knows they were enough to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm.

The guy didn’t have the physique of a soldier but was blonde and tanned like Yoshko, clean-cut, and wore Bermuda shorts and shirt. He scarcely spoke two words all night. He smiled occasionally, but didn’t sing only happily danced along and drank his beer heartily. I attempted to speak to him, but he was quite oblivious to our requests to join in with the singing.

I guess I’ll ask Yoshko tomorrow, or should that be today? I had lost track of time, and a few of my senses, as my eyes wondered to different men in the vicinity. As the night/morning wore on we were all too exhausted to sleep and decided to go for a late breakfast. Yoshko’s silent friend disappeared with the dawn.

“Who was that guy anyway, he didn’t say much?” I pried. Yoshko was sober enough to reply, “Oh, that’s Prince Willem, we met yesterday, by accident on the beach. Great guy.”

“What?”
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange, heir apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and probably his mother’s, Queen Beatrix, 60% share in Royal Dutch Shell.