Still, he needed a new phone. A couple of days later, when his second in command Cristian came to visit him, a phone drop was scheduled. With security tightened recently, it seems the most promising route was leaning in on this drone pilot called Philip Moreton who did some job for them in the past and tried to steal some of their money. Gabriel agreed with Cristian that if this Moreton decides to be uncooperative, Cristian should push him using his family, ideally his wife, because apparently he didn’t have any kids.
A few days later on the scheduled night for the operation, having been sufficiently threatened and his wife kidnapped, Philip Moreton drove from Portsmouth with his drone in the boot of his Audi. With shaking hands he fired up the drone, using his RC controller to navigate it over the prison walls. Well, after it went to shit and he was hastily driving away from the police, with the drone not even turned off back in his car, he frantically took a wrong turn on an unfamiliar intersection, and found himself in a dead end. At wits’ end, he jumped into the bushes and tried to keep quiet. After his inevitable capture by the police, and trying to avoid endangering his wife by mentioning his job and employer, he managed to slip up only once, after blurting something about looking for his Chiuaua which was kidnapped by the Romanian circus. He hoped that was enough to keep his wife alive and all her limbs intact.
Stuck without a phone, Gabriel Matei was now facing a different kind of problem. He was planning on negotiating with some Chinese group to fix up a money laundering deal that was required to budget one of his group’s political allies. Without his phone he would be unable to execute this negotiation live on a phone call, instead having to rely on Cristian acting as his proxy. Cristian was generally a dependent smart guy, but he didn’t have tact for shit, and inevitably the negotiations ended up a clusterfuck just like the phone operation.
Now Cristian had to deal with two problems - first he had to deal with Chinese asshole who gave him lip, and second, he had to find an alternative solution for their money laundering. The first one was easy, and Cristian just outsourced it to another Chinese guy they were working with, that would deal with this Wei asshole both on the legal front and if necessary using other means as well. The second was more complex, and he had to pull some strings with one of the group’s legitimate enterprises - a Russian phone company - to find the necessary source of money.
The solution was effective - find some sucker account that didn’t turn off roaming - and just inflate the charges. When they would complain, just give them a discounted price. The extra money they still paid will be used, and the discount and some “innovative” accounting will allow to funnel even more money into their little project. Their accountant, one Maxim Popov, suggested they target some non-profit, so a university was chosen - which was especially juicy as they had multiple such offending SIM cards that were attached to birds that flew across borders and accumulated multiple roaming charges. With that taken care off, all Maxim had to do was to funnel the money to its appointed target.
Apparently, their Russian masters decreed that some Iranian political group needed some cash, to run some black operation. Neither Cristian nor Maxim wanted to know the specifics, but a few weeks later Mujahedeen e-Khalq (“People’s Holy Warriors of Iran”) got what they wanted, and managed to impress an American politician that Cristian couldn’t care less about. They even impressed him enough to get him to sign an agreement with them, to try and take them off the USA terrorist list.
That politician’s name? Rudy Giuliani. And because of that agreement, he had a phone call with Rich Shapiro of NBC, which asked him some pointed questions which Giuliani answered quickly and eloquently. That call went well - and it was sufficient to put Shapiro in Giuliani’s phone contacts under “asshole” - which is doubly amusing - one because asshole starts with “a”, and two because a week later, when Giuliani didn’t notice a “butt-dial”, reason number one got the butt-dial target to be Shapiro.
To make a long story somewhat shorter - Giulani embarrassed himself and his president, which was enough to put Trump in a foul mood for his next phone call with some UK diplomat. Picking up the most recent subject that he read about in Fox news, Trump decided to berate the UK representative that they are going too easy on criminals, and specifically the Romanian mafia which were hurting “American interests”. This was even more frustrating to the Scottish diplomat - because even a broken, insanely tweeting clock may be right on just the right time, and they were going too soft on those Romanian shites. One phone call later, and Gabriel Mateil was sent to solitary confinement for hiding a mobile phone.
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