An Elephant on Your Nose by Warren Reed

Author:Warren Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For Pity Sake Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Kiyomizu Fishing Village near Nagasaki

Thursday, 0510 hours

Yumi’s surveillance teams were the first to pick up movement by Dr. Roberto Cruz. Middle-aged and slender, the Preacher had graying hair around the temples and a dignified, even scholarly look about him that fitted neatly with his academic research cover. His benign looks served him equally well when he was spreading the Christian gospel.

It gives me a measure of the man, Bella mused as she watched the surveillance footage up on the big screen. Visuals can tell you so much. He’s definitely a man of conviction, even if it is perverted. But it’s what drives him that we need to know.

The Preacher had collected an unmarked delivery van from a local hire service the previous evening and left it in the car park at his hotel. There had been only one incoming call for him, on his smart phone, and that was from UZ1 saying that he expected to arrive in Kiyomizu around 0600 hours. The call was truncated by the Preacher in an odd way.

‘Is …?’ UZ1 said, attempting to ask another question before the Preacher terminated the call.

‘Yes, yes,’ the Preacher had replied petulantly, cutting across him mid-sentence before hanging up.

The abrupt end to the call told those in the operations room that UZ1 had carelessly strayed into extremely sensitive territory. Clearly, he should have known better.

The Preacher had slept for a short while before getting into the van and heading out to the fishing village at one side of the inlet. It was an ancient settlement renowned for its clear water springs. For centuries, fishing vessels had called in there to replenish their water supplies, delivered directly onboard via an elaborate network of bamboo pipes.

He’d reached the boat shed and ramp belonging to the trawler master just before daybreak. After waking the master’s Japanese employees who worked and lived there, including the Indian twins, they all shared breakfast together. The Preacher told the employees that he and the twins would soon be embarking upon a research trip around villages and towns in Japan that were fading away, many even closing down, due to the exodus of young people to the cities. In these places, the elderly were left to fend for themselves. Aid packages were coming from Korea on their master’s fishing boat and would be distributed during this trip.

Over breakfast, the Preacher noticed that the master’s three young local workers and the twins had developed quite an affinity. This worried him, not because they might reveal the terror plan they were part of, but because their current lifestyle and the friendships they’d formed might prompt second thoughts about their mission.

The plan for Japan, of which the Preacher appeared to be the prime architect, meant everything to him as a Muslim. Bella was about to brief everyone in the operations room on why that was so. Only minutes before, a short background report on the Preacher’s motivation, provided by Chinese operatives in the southern Philippines, had been received by Li from his Beijing headquarters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.