The Valletta Deal

What not to do on your holidays - short story with a mystery-thriller tinge

The taxi that dropped me off in the late afternoon sunlight at Malta International Airport at Luqa took just about the last of my Maltese money. Some places would still accept Sterling, after all these years, but with no greater preference than other European currencies. It was all a bit academic, seeing as I had no money in other currencies either, and, in any case I was leaving. The job that I’d flown out to Malta for had fallen through, I was broke, and all I wanted to do was get home. At least I had my return ticket. Resigned to being processed like a piece of cargo, I shuffled up to the departure desk and dropped my ticket on the counter. The flight attendant, in her prim, Air Malta uniform, flicked through it.

"Mr Bishop?" said the slightly accented voice.

"Yes?"

"This ticket is for the six o’clock flight to London Gatwick."

"Yes. That’s right."

"Oh-six-hundred hours. The flight was at 6 a.m. this morning."

I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t believe it. All the years I’d been travelling to various corners of the world, some of them loosely describable as flesh-pots, some of them not even loosely describable, and never once had I confused the 24 hour clock for normal, "What time do you make it?" and glance-at-your-watch time. I understood perfectly the difference between a.m. and p.m. and zero hours through to 23 hundred and fifty-nine hours and I had never got them mixed up. Until now. I had arrived expecting to catch a flight at 6 p.m. that had left twelve hours earlier at 6 a.m.

I could only put it down to exhaustion. Exhaustion and frustration. Frustration at having come all this way for a job, when I so desperately needed money, and the job had fallen through – if it had ever existed, and I had felt utterly at a loose end. Exhaustion, frustration, and bonehead stupidity.

The flight attendant evidently could read my thoughts from the expression on my face. "Don’t worry, Mr Bishop. Providing there is room, we can move your ticket to tomorrow morning. All you need to do is to find a place to stay for the night."

She consulted some kind of computer terminal, and, after some tapping of keys and fiddling with bits of paper, she printed me a fresh ticket. As she handed it to me, she said, with an encouraging smile, "Don’t forget – tomorrow morning."

I tried to smile back, but I felt like I’d just stepped out of a dentist’s with a face full of Novocaine. Where could I spend the night? I could not go back to my hotel in Valletta, the capital, as I had no money left, and the rows of airport bench seats looked like instruments of torture. I had just about enough money for one bottle of Hopleaf and that was it.

"Your name is Bishop, yes?" said a voice by my shoulder. A small, middle-aged man, with receding black greasy hair, was talking to me. "You are English?"

"That’s right."

"Good. I like English very much. I hear what happened. You go to England in the morning."

"Yes."

"You have no place to stay?"

"No."

"It will be my pleasure to offer you a place for the night. If you wish. I like English."

"I’m afraid," I could hardly talk, I was so embarrassed, "I’m afraid I have no money."

"It does not matter. I like English. My name is Camilleri. Come. You stay the night. Perhaps you can do some time something for me."

I wondered what he had in mind.

Mr Camilleri was a perfect host. He drove me in a blue Vauxhall Cavalier that seemed to have dusted embedded into its paintwork. We headed past Valletta to his flat in Sliema, on the northern side of the Grand Harbour opposite the city, where he got me a light meal of salad and fish, mercifully finished off with a bottle of Asbach Uralt brandy. He showed me to a small, clean room that had a bed made up ready and waiting as if he had been expecting me. Next morning, he woke me very early with some incredibly strong coffee, and some toast and marmalade. Then we set off back to the airport.

In some countries they drive on the left, in some on the right. In Malta, they drive in the shade. It was not yet five in the morning and a Mediterranean dawn was just preparing to launch itself into a riot of colour. With some light and little traffic, Mr Camilleri, with typical Maltese zeal, drove like a man possessed, even though there was plenty of time to spare.

He waited while I checked in, this time with no problems. I was so relieved to be going home, yet I had enjoyed my evening with this stranger. I was grateful but didn’t know how to thank him, and I said so.

Again, it was almost as if he had been ready for this moment. "You will be passing through London?"

"Of course?"

"Then I was wondering if you would be so kind as to drop off this postcard?" He pulled a small picture postcard from his inside pocket.

"Don’t you have a stamp?"

"The post!" he turned up his hands in a mild gesture of dismissal. "So slow. A small detour? You can do this for me? There is some money to cover your fares." He also handed me an envelope. Inside was a small collection of £20 notes.

I took the card. It was a picture of Valletta harbour. On the reverse was an address in Belgravia, in slightly shaky capitals. I could not read what was written on the correspondence side of the card, which appeared to be in Greek. It would mean a couple of Tube journeys, nothing more, a lot less than the cash. How could I refuse?

My flight was called and I said goodbye to Mr Camilleri. On the other side of the boarding pass gate were some shops. I bought some overhead projector marker pens. My only souvenir.

At Gatwick, I was diverted, as if by random, by a customs official as I went through Nothing To Declare. He went through my one bag nonchalantly yet thoroughly, as if following a practised routine. He found nothing – there was nothing to find – but he noticed the picture postcard of Valletta harbour. He studied both sides of it with more interest than I felt it warranted. "Forget to post this?" he said.

"I ran out of stamps. Guess I’ll just have to hand it over in person."

He seemed to read the back of the card. Then he lost interest and let me go.

In the toilets, with a damp tissue, I wiped off the English I had written in large print, with the water-soluble overhead marker that I had used to cover the original message. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t like the idea of carrying a message in a language I couldn’t understand. I took the card to the Belgravia address, handed it personally to a man who could have been Mr Camilleri’s younger cousin, and went home.



Mehmet Ertegun – known as "the banker" by those who had dealings with him – was delighted with the picture postcard. It told him just what he wanted to know, and that was the number of a safety deposit box that contained $500,000 in Kruger rands. He used his own method of communicating with his colleague that payment had been received and delivery of the merchandise could go ahead. Duly, thirty-four Kalashnikov AN-94 "Abakan" assault rifles, with a maximum fire rate of 1,800 rounds per minute, and 22,000 rounds of 5.45 calibre ammunition left Piraeus in Greece by ship for Marseilles. They had been moved from Russia, through Chechnya to Albania and on to Greece, and this was probably not the end of their travels.

No banking system in the world had handled any part of the financial transaction. No radio, telephone call, email, or telex had been transmitted that could be picked up at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. No mail intercept had taken place. The deal might never had existed.

Face-recognition software attached to the surveillance cameras at Malta International Airport had spotted Mr Camilleri, and soon had a host of other names for him. Mr Bishop’s face the software did not know. Still, MI6 put Bishop’s name and description on a watch-list at airports around the world.

The next time Mr Bishop showed up late for a flight on which he was booked, he would have a lot of explaining to do.

THE END.

Astronomy – The Greatest Show On Earth

Non-fiction popular science article about how literally pin-pricks of evidence have led us to learn about the entire Universe.

Every single night, over your head, over my head, over every single person’s head in the entire world, something utterly remarkable takes place. It will happen tonight, tomorrow night and every night for as far as we can imagine into the future, as it has done for as far as we can imagine into the past. Every night, it goes dark.

Now at first you may not think that this very much to get excited about. After all, nightfall is about as predictable as anything can get – as predictable as the dawn that will follow. And yet, it is in the minutiae of things, the details, the tiny, that, at first glance, seem so trivial, that so often lie the greatest wonder, the most amazing discovery and the most challenging concepts to face the human mind. In this particular instance, all I should need to do is ask you a simple question for you to see why. That question is, "Why does it go dark?" In attempting to answer that question, we are taken, in almost a single bound, from the mundane, the trivial, to the heart of some of the greatest of mysteries.

Let us add to this mystery, before even attempting to answer our simple question. If you are lucky – and it happens to everybody sooner or later – I ask you to trust me on this – the weather at night will be fine, and the sky, we say, is clear. But it is when the sky is what we call "clear" that it is anything but! The merest glance at a cloudless night sky reveals even to someone with eyesight as limited as mine, thousands of tiny pin-pricks of light. Tiny, twinkling and terrifically important. For they are the stars, the populace of the vast "everything-ness" we call The Universe. It’s the greatest show on Earth.

It is because of the fact that we live on a planet that is round, held to its surface by a force called gravity and that once in every twenty-four hours this planet turns its back on the closest star, the Sun, that it goes dark at night. But there is still more to this mystery. A lot more. For example, if the Universe is infinite, there should be a star in every direction that we look. But there is not. The gaps between the stars are dark. This leads, though a chain of reasoning, to the astonishing, astounding conclusion that the Universe had a beginning. It has had an evolution. We have yet to determine whether it will have an end. And as for what might come after that, well, your guess is quite literally as good as mine or anybody else’s.

For thousands of years – more probably, tens of thousands, our ancestors looked up at the night sky, and wondered – surely one of the most striking of human characteristics. That wonder hungered for explanation. What were the stars? How did they work? What held them together? Various mythologies were created to feed this hunger. Gods and familiars, creatures and creations, the scintillating ciphers that would seal our fates. Poetic, strange, beautiful and believable, but, sadly, fictional artefacts of man’s mind – not a verifiable explanation. For a hundred thousand generations perhaps, this was all we could tell of the stars. Now, suddenly, within a single generation, we have worked out most of it.

Most stars are vast aggregations of hydrogen gas – the stuff you put in party balloons to make them roll around the ceiling, instead of rolling around the floor. The tiny points are in fact staggeringly huge balls of fire – the average star would encircle both the Earth and the Moon that orbits it. Indeed, three quarters of The Universe is just hydrogen, most of the rest is called helium, which we will meet again in a moment, and everything else makes up just 2%. But it’s that 2% that makes us, amongst other things, and in turn makes the 2% so interesting. Again, it’s the little things that count.

The hydrogen gas is brought and held together by gravity – not the mightiest force in The Universe, but its feeblest – having one distinction from other forces such as magnetism – it is always only one way. To gravity, everything is down. It makes no exceptions. Unopposed, gravity’s effect accumulates from seemingly trivial to tremendous, until it has dominion over all. Gravity takes the lightest of gases, and crushes it till it glows with incandescence. And it doesn’t stop there. Once greedy gravity has squeezed every iota of energy from its prisoner, the very heart of the particles begin to fuse together to produce newer, heavier elements. It is only fitting that the first of these was found in, and named after, the Sun, the element helium, from the Greek word for the Sun, Helios.

Gravity knows no mercy. It continues to crush the elements together, releasing yet more energy. In doing so, each one gives out a characteristic signature of light. Those tiny pin-pricks in the sky - still pin-points even through the most powerful telescope, can have their light dissected, like a specimen on a slide, to reveal that signature and thus give away the star’s components, its age, its true brightness, hence its distance and a fair few other facts besides. Not bad for a pin-prick. Forensic science, hunting for the fingerprints of creation.

And so many of the chemical elements with which we are familiar on Earth were and are created – carbon – essential for all living chemistry, oxygen, phosphorus – a key part of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Not to mention water – the key to life, and alcohol, the key to a good night out. If you want to wake up with stars in your head, that is!

But then comes a twist in the story. Once a star is so crushed that it starts to create the humble element, iron, one of the first and most useful metals humans ever extracted from rocks, the process hits a brick wall and halts. Creating still heavier elements uses energy rather than releasing it. The alchemist’s dream, of turning base metal into gold, remains, for the moment, beyond reach. But not for long. Gravity knows no mercy. If a star can’t burn, it is crushed still further, like the stubbing out of a cigarette. The star abruptly collapses in on itself. Like anything crashing to the ground, this releases more energy – enough to convert iron to lead, lead into silver, platinum and gold, and gold into uranium and beyond. Then the star explodes, like a cross between a smelting factory and a junk yard, scattering its trash and treasures through the heavens.

Then, gravity, tireless gravity, slowly, irredeemably, irresistibly, begins to haul the stuff back together again. This insistence of harvesting matter creates new stars, and metallic-cored planets such as the Earth are formed. Planets with carbon dioxide and water, ammonia and methane, phosphates and sugars, the ingredients for life. And what does life lead to? Wonder.

The study of the stars – astronomy, as it is known – is, in a way, the study of everything. It is wonder put into practice. Where we came from, where we are going and above all where we are. We live in a Universe that may have had a divine creator, or it may be that it is the way it is because it could not be any other way. What you believe about who you are and why is really up to you. But the "how" and the "what" that makes us, our planet and our star, along with all the other stars, comes from our looking at the skies and making the logical deductions from our observations, from a forensic examination of the dark sky that makes CSI Miami look like bumbling guesswork!

This is wonder at work. And it all starts with looking at those little spots of light on a clear night.

It’s something to think about when it goes dark this evening. It’s the greatest show on Earth.

The End