Chapter 67

The crowd was getting restless.

James and Dusty had watched them for ten minutes before he decided they had fretted long enough. The longer he took to show up, the faster they were plotting to kill each other.

“Greetings,” he said in English, knowing they all spoke it since it was considered the universal business language.

His sudden appearance shocked many. Not the least because he looked exactly as he had before he had been declared dead. Hiram scowled when James appeared. He had noticed that Ali wasn’t there, but his guards were. He wondered what Ali was up to.

He didn’t know that Ali was currently chained to the bed in his dungeon or that he had been raped by his four male slaves while the female slave had committed other indignities to his body, his castration being the least of them.

The property had already been signed over to them and his money, minus the Mercenaries share, had been transferred into the joint accounts for the house.

Once the ex-slaves had exhausted their frenzy of revenge, Ali was destined to live in the dungeon alone and poorly fed for the last month of his miserable life before he managed to strangle himself using the chains he wore. He wasn’t missed by his previous slaves at all.

The few associates who did eventually ask after him were told that he had gone back to Earth.

Hiram searched the crowd.

His fretting about what Ali and his guards were up to didn’t alleviate his fear, his high blood pressure or his stomach ulcers. His hatred of Hasid didn’t abate either.

Once the crowd saw James, they settled down and took their seats.

James told the people in the room that he was the new Shah of the Merat Kingdom and that his father was dead. He ignored the questions tossed at him and told them to settle down.

He then explained that all he wanted from them was to present him with their name, what they were employed to do and then give their reports. They were to keep to the salient points, not waffle and keep the report to less than five minutes.

After pointing to his first victim to the podium, he took a seat in the front row to listen. He didn’t follow a standard meeting procedure. Once the person on stage had exhausted their information, he just pointed to the next person and told them to get up and speak.

He ignored any questions from them. He’d simply glare at them until they continued with their reports or got off the stage. Once or twice, he cut the speaker off mid-sentence and told them to have another go at the truth or to quit waffling.

Most got the message. He pointed his finger at those who didn’t get it quickly enough with his thumb cocked, and then they got the message. He ignored any murmurs around him.

Meanwhile, Dusty, Ada and Zed were using the low-orbiting satellite they had launched on their arrival to access any system they could find to verify if the facts that were given agreed with what information they had already compiled.

The new report for James hinted at any irregularities between the two sets of data. He was also building a picture in his mind of what Fiaz thought he had built and the current reality. He had to give it to the man that he hadn’t done too badly.

The biggest problem James could determine was the fact that most of these people were all slimy politicians and bureaucrats who spent more energy trying to rip off the systems in place and feather their own nests than helping the downtrodden.

The rich were still trying to get richer at the expense of everyone else.

After four hours, the last man sat down.

They all fidgeted as they waited to see what James was going to do. Of the thirty-odd reports James had to suffer through, only five men stood out as working for the betterment of the community. He had to shake his head at that sad indictment of the calibre of the people Fiaz had chosen to run things when he was away.