Free Secret Skin by Frank Coles

round of off-plan installments. They’ve got another investment show next week.’
    ‘What sort of figures are we talking?’
    ‘The project is supposed to cost $200 million and return around half that again. The guys have washed about 80 mill’ already with about 20 reinvested. There was 60 mill’ from the platinums when I left and about 40 in off-plan sales. All gone of course.’
    I wrote furiously in my notebook, doing the math.
    ‘Let me get this right, $180 million has gone in, but only $20 million to the project. The rest just goes straight to these guys?’
    ‘That’s it. Just enough to keep up appearances and pay the first round of interest.’
    ‘You think they would just build the damn thing. They’d make a killing.’
    ‘Yeah but fucking people over is a way of life for these idiots. The guns and small wars they are involved in already make them plenty.’
    ‘Right. Why would you want to keep a bunch of needy middle class investors happy when you’ve got dictators with billions of dollars of development money to spend?’
    ‘You bet. Money for nothing.’
    ‘Is it Sunset Heights?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, suspicious, ‘how did you know? Lucky guess?’
    ‘Nope, I wrote it up as a good buy for European investors last week. Eight designer skyscrapers on the edge of nowhere, with some landscaped desert for the kids to burn in.’
    He sat there grinning inanely, as if the joke was on me.
    ‘Did you make anything from it?’ I said.
    ‘Just my salary and bonuses. I’m an honest man after all.’
    He wouldn’t stop mugging me with that conceited grin.
    ‘So let me see, you’ve just ripped off millions of dollars for a giant Ponzi money laundering scheme and you haven’t got a penny to show for it?’
    He shrugged his shoulders, still cheerful, as if it had nothing to do with him.
    ‘Don’t you get it? You created it. When the walls come tumbling down on this make believe development who do you think is going to be their fall guy?’
    He stopped smiling.

Chapter Ten

    I finally had a story. A killer story. If I could corroborate the bank manager’s information it would sell in any country where investors in the project read newspapers. That could easily lead to some healthy syndication, Middle East correspondent offers and the chance to work on some meatier subjects.
    It deserved following up and I told him so. Not that this calmed him down. I assured him that if he could give me names of anyone who might confirm his story it would take attention away from him as the sole whistleblower.
    Dipping into my bag of clichés I mixed a few metaphors and told him that it was ‘better to go down fighting than to be left hung out to dry’.
    He gave me the name of a local investor, a signatory for the holding company, Sheikh Hamza. Apparently he had been unaware of the real motives of his partners and was set to lose everything. I would approach, but carefully.
    I left the banker’s office and tried to figure out how to get to him. My phone rang. This time I recognized the number.
    ‘Yasmin,’ I said, ‘hey, I was hoping you might call.’
    ‘David, I can’t talk now. Can you meet me in half an hour at the café on Beach Road?’
    ‘Sure, wait upstairs for me. It’s quieter. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

    ***

    Sheikh Zayed Road was the main highway through the heart of Dubai. It wavered in notoriety as one of the most dangerous roads in the world with a daily body count higher than some war zones.
    The driving was so bad that alien anthropologists could be forgiven for imagining the road as some sort of elongated sacrificial altar to a pagan god.
    Top of the line cars bore the image of the roads namesake, Sheikh Zayed, the UAE’s first ruler. They tore along each lane of the highway casually breaking the speed limit of 120kph. At 140 they set off the speed cameras. At 200 they might get accused of dangerous driving.
    For insecure individuals with tribal status to maintain, driving like an