CRUDE INSTINCT
THE MAGNATE’S PLAY
Fraser Suites
11 pm
“They’re coming for us.”
Sameer’s voice cut across the virtual call, sharp and already rising. In the quiet office in Zurich, the air conditioning hummed with expensive indifference. Keller sat beside him, calm, silver haired, a folder open on the polished table.
On the other end of the encrypted link, in the nearly empty lobby of Fraser Suites, Obinna and George listened.
“Slow down,” Obinna said.
Sameer did not slow down.
“I fly from Zug this morning after Keller called me. Brother, I saw the papers. Someone is building a strong position. They want to take Oleo! This is a bloody nightmare. Yil’an el-shaghle! Look at what we are facing already. Delays, sabotage, and now this!”
Keller’s voice entered, measured, precise.
“Look, this just offers an opportunity to peel back layers and look behind the veil. Let’s forget the distractions for a moment.”
He turned the folder so the camera could see the first diagram. Interlocking boxes. Arrows. Percentages.
“This is the vehicle making the approach. On paper, we have a clean Luxembourg company which owns twelve percent of the proposed acquisition vehicle. A Dutch entity holds nine. This fund controls twenty two percent of the related debt facilities. As for this entity…”
He highlighted a box that showed no equity at all.
“…it controls the principal lender.”
He moved deeper, voice steady.
“The account belongs to a company. The company belongs to a trust. The trust is administered by a fiduciary. The fiduciary acts for a foundation. The foundation has no beneficial owner.”
Sameer made a sound of pure frustration.
“So who is actually trying to buy us?”
“That is the point,” Keller said. “Every shell, every fund, every intermediate company traces back to the same trust structure. No visible owner. Perfectly legal. Perfectly documented. And completely opaque.”
Obinna’s face remained still. He saw the magnate’s fingerprints all over the move.
“If we can find Apex or a subsidiary in the mix, then he is behind this.”
Keller gave the smallest nod.
“The pattern is consistent with interests aligned with him. The same quiet interest that has kept eyes on Oleo since the company began to matter.”
Sameer leaned closer to the camera, eyes wide.
“Okay, I see the problem, but I don’t see the solution.” His face creased deeper with worry. “What do we do eh, brother? They are forcing us into a tight corner. The asset is bleeding time and money, what about the banks? What do we tell them?”
Keller closed the folder with deliberate care.
“They are not trying to destroy the company. They are trying to make ownership expensive and exhausting. A premium offer will arrive. It will be framed as partnership, as rescue. Thirty percent, perhaps more. They will not need you to fail. They will only need you to become tired enough to accept their terms.”
Sameer turned fully toward the screen, toward Obinna.
“You need to do something brother, please,” he said, the impatience cracking into something closer to fear. “Before this gets worse. Before the banks and the politicians and these bastards mess things for us.”
For a moment the only sound was the low hum of the connection and the rain against the glass in Abuja. Then Obinna gave a single, measured nod that belied the conflict raging in his mind.
“I will.”
The call ended. The screen went dark. In Zurich, two men stared at their reflections before shaking hands and going their separate ways.
In the quiet lobby of Fraser Suites, Obinna sat with his employee and friend, confronting the realization that the real battle had never been for the oil in the ground. It was for the names controlling the money above it.
Obinna leaned back in the deep leather chair, still dressed in what he had worn to work that day. The sleeves of his crisp white shirt were rolled to his forearms, his dark trousers still sharply pressed. His blue silk tie hung loosened against his collar, the only concession to the late hour.
His expression remained composed, almost detached, but his thoughts had already narrowed to the question of what came next. He considered the names, the alliances, the money, and the few moves still available to him.
There was no panic in his calculation. Only patience. Somewhere beneath the polished surface of the operation was a weakness, and if he could find it, he would know exactly where to press.
******************************
Igbokoda,
Ondo State
1am the next day
The village slept in the humid, salt heavy stillness of a Niger Delta night. At the site of the broken asset, the air hung thick with the sharp, chemical bite of leaking crude oil.
Under a thin, waning moon, the oil gleamed like liquid obsidian, pooling in the shallows and spreading outward in slow, iridescent ribbons that caught every faint gleam of light.
The shadows surrounding the asset seemed to leap and stretch, forming shapes as though the darkness itself had birthed them. Lean, silent figures, their skin glistening with sweat and river mud, slipped into the perimeter without making a sound.
Some carried cutlasses that caught the moonlight in brief, wicked flashes, while others moved empty handed, eyes scanning the perimeter.
At the edge of the clearing stood the four sentinels of the night. Two NSCDC officers leaned against sandbags, rifles cradled loosely, a navy officer stood rigid near the pipeline valve, binoculars still raised, while an army officer stayed farther back, his silhouette sharp against the distant silver of the water.
One of the thieves stepped forward, his thin face carved by years of sun and a hard life, a small calabash cradled in his palms like a sacred relic. He knelt. From the calabash he drew powders the color of dried blood and cold ash, scattering them in deliberate, widening arcs across the damp ground.
The fine dust rose in faint spirals, catching the moonlight like ghostly pollen. Then his voice rose, low and rhythmic, each word carrying the ancient cadence of a spell into the night.
Ìròsùn méjì, jẹ́ kí àwọn ọmọ ogun wọ̀nyí sùn.
Akò-odò, mú oorun wá sí orí wọn.
Àsùn dà ràgbàdà, kí wọn má mọ̀ ọjọ́.
Ata, ta àìsùn jáde.
Àlùbọ́sà, lé àìsùn lọ.
Iyọ̀, yọ̀ àìsùn kúrò lójú wọn.
Sùn, sùn, sùn…
Orí wọn di òkúta, ojú wọn di òkè.
Kí wọn má ji títí di àárọ̀.
The words hung in the air, dense and final. One by one, the guards began to fall. The first NSCDC man swayed, his rifle slipping from nerveless fingers to thud softly against the wet earth. His knees buckled. He folded forward as though the strings holding him upright had been cut, his face pressing into the sandbags. Within moments, his breathing deepened, his body utterly slack.
His companion followed a heartbeat later, head lolling, mouth open, body folding sideways in a slow, almost graceful descent..
The navy officer’s binoculars dropped from his hands with a muted clatter. His spine lost its military rigidity, his shoulders rounding as he sank to his knees before collapsing fully prone, his cheek against the cool metal of the pipeline.
Last came the army officer. He stood staring out toward the dark water for a long moment, as if listening to some distant call, before his legs simply gave way. He settled onto the ground with the quiet surrender of a tree felled in a deep forest, one arm flung out, fingers twitching once before going still.
The thieves moved past the four sleeping forms with fluid caution, their bare feet dipping into the oil slicked earth, leaving only the faintest impressions that the night would soon erase.
No one glanced back at the fallen sentinels, the charms had done their work. They now belonged to a deeper world of dreams from which no ordinary sound could summon them.
Two of the men dropped to their knees beside the leak while others melted outward into the mangroves. These lookouts crouched low, eyes and ears tuned to every distant sound.
From a hidden cache they produced lengths of flexible hose, dark as the night itself, a short length of pipe, a rubber gasket and a hand cranked pump whose metal parts had been wrapped in cloth to mute their complaint. Working with practiced economy, they fitted the hose to the broken joint.
Crude flowed at once, sliding down the tube in a steady, viscous stream. The pump continued its muffled rhythm, a soft, wet pulse that matched the distant heartbeat of the tide.
In the deeper channel, a daughter vessel waited, low and dark, its hull painted the same dull black as the surrounding water. Moored among the tangled roots, it rode the gentle swell with the patience of a predator.
One by one the men carried the filled jerry cans and plastic drums across the short stretch of mud, their bodies bent under the weight.
The black liquid poured into the waiting tanks with a muted gurgle, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the night’s own soft chorus of frogs and insects.
The lookouts remained motionless, their silhouettes dissolving into the greater darkness, scanning the silvered waterways and the black ribbon of the pipeline that stretched inland toward the sleeping world of the oblivious.
When the last container had been secured and the hose withdrawn, the men moved with renewed urgency yet never with haste. The vessel’s engine, muted, throttled low and coughed once, before settling into a throaty whisper. Lines were cast off.
The boat eased away from the bank, slipping between the mangrove fingers. Behind them the oil continued its slow, indifferent bleeding and the four guards slept on undisturbed.
***************************
THE ALCHEMIST
Maitama
11:30 am
Zainab’s café was busy enough to feel alive but quiet enough to disappear into. There were only a few patrons, two women bent over cups of coffee near the front window, a man in a linen shirt reading something on his tablet, and a young couple sharing a plate of pastries without saying much to each other. The smell of freshly ground coffee mingled with butter, toasted bread and the faint sweetness of cinnamon. Somewhere behind the counter, crockery knocked softly against crockery.
Rachel had chosen a secluded table toward the back, partly screened from the rest of the room by a tall indoor plant.
It had been almost five days of polished marble, filtered air and discreet room service that felt less like protection and more like incarceration dressed in expensive linen.
After breakfast, she had taken a lukewarm shower, thrown on a pair of jeans and a blue silk blouse and against Obinna’s instructions, summoned an Uber.
Her laptop was open in front of her, but the document on the screen had remained untouched for almost twenty minutes.
She was thinking about a chessboard.
Specifically, about a pawn. She could still see Obinna opposite her, fingers moving with deliberate calm across the pieces, and the way he had spoken of the man he removed from his company immediately after their game. The one he had let the enemy capture.
I placed him on leave.
She had not asked enough questions that night. Now she wished she had. Her gaze settled on the closed document. There was something else she could examine.
The gift.
Obinna had sent it before any of this began. The delivery man had signed in at her office security post. There would be a name, a telephone number, perhaps a company. Ordinary traces that people left without thinking. She had spent years reading such traces. She did not need Obinna’s resources. She had her own.
The thought brought another, sharper one. Perhaps this was why he had insisted on putting her in Fraser Suites. Not only because he cared. She had been inside his home. She had seen him unguarded. She knew the shape of his private world. If someone wanted to reach him, she was an obvious point of entry. In his calculations she was not Rachel. She was a position. A piece to be moved at will.
Rachel closed the laptop. She decided to call Joseph later. He was the security officer who always greeted her by name, who had once helped her carry a box of files when the lift was broken. Friendly. Discreet enough.
She would find the man who delivered the gift. Perhaps he held the answer to why the Prado had been following her.
*****************************
Fraser Suites
7 pm
Rachel returned just after dusk, carrying the day’s fatigue like a second skin. The elevator opened onto the hushed corridor. She walked toward her suite with the peculiar reluctance she had begun to associate with the place, the sense that the rooms waited for her with a patience that was not entirely benign.
All afternoon at the café she had tried to convince herself that she had reclaimed some measure of control. Now, it all felt like a lie.
She slid the key card into the lock, thinking of a shower and the long, uninterrupted silence of the evening. She pushed the door open. Then stopped. Steam drifted from the half-open bathroom door. The shower was running.
For a moment she thought someone had entered the wrong suite. Then she saw the clothes laid neatly across the bed: black, loose fitting slacks and a white T shirt. Her heart delivered one hard, decisive beat.
“Obinna?”
The water stopped. She stood in the middle of the room, still gripping her bag, when the bathroom door opened. He stepped out completely unselfconscious, water still tracking the long lines of his body. Rachel froze, immobilized by a sudden, involuntary rush of memory.
The weight of him, the heat, the nights when neither of them had been interested in restraint, the dangerous ease with which they had once crossed every boundary every boundary of propriety.
For one suspended second she could not move. Then she turned sharply away.
“Sorry.”
“It is okay, Rachel.” His voice was dry, almost mild. “You have seen me naked before.”
Rachel stood still, her eyes tightly shut against the image of his body trying to foist itself upon her mind. She heard the quiet rustle of cloth. By the time she turned, he was dressed and fastening his watch.
“Where did you go?”
“To a friend’s cafe. I needed a break from this place.”
He said nothing, concentrating only on his watch. She watched the precise movement of his hands, thinking about her discovery at the cafe earlier that morning. Resentment arrived, bitter and acrid.
“Obinna?”
He looked up at her, eyebrows quirked in silent question.
“Today, I thought about all of this,” she said, her hands lifting briefly as though encompassing the room before falling back to her sides. She drew in a difficult breath, held it for a moment, then let it go, along with the words she had rehearsed. “I am here because of what I am to you.”
His fingers stilled on the watch strap.
“Because I make you vulnerable.”
He remained silent.
“You are not going to deny it?”
“No.” He slipped his hands into his pockets. “You are correct.”
The simplicity of the answer struck harder than any denial. She gave a short, humourless laugh.
“That’s it?”
“What else would you like me to say?”
“Something human, maybe.” Rachel stared at him, growing angrier by the second. “How are you so mechanical and cold?“ She stopped, swallowed. “When you brought me here, I thought for a moment that maybe it was for another reason.”
He held her gaze. “You thought it was something more.”
It was not a question. There was no tenderness in it, and no cruelty either, only observation, cool and exact. Somehow that was what broke something open in her.
“I am not one of your chess pieces, Obinna,” she said, voice low and unsteady. “I am a person. I have feelings.”
Something softened across his face, but it was only for an instant before it was carefully withdrawn.
“I know, Rachel.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
The quietness of the response infuriated her more than anger ever could. She looked away.
“Fine. I think it’s best we stay in different rooms. I don’t want to be here with you tonight.”
He nodded once. “I will leave.”
“I can go somewhere else.”
“No. I will get another suite.”
He picked up his phone from the bedside table. There was no drama in the movement, no attempt to prolong the argument, no plea for her to reconsider. That hurt most of all. He walked to the door, paused for half a breath on the threshold, and left.
The door closed with a soft, final click.
Rachel stood motionless in the silence that followed. For several seconds she simply stared at the place where he had been. Then the strength went out of her. She sat slowly on the edge of the bed, hands falling open in her lap.
The room was exactly as it had been when she entered, except that his presence had been erased. The faint warmth of the shower still hung in the air. Somewhere in the bathroom, a final drop of water fell into the sink with a sound small and precise that seemed to echo through the emptiness he had left behind.
***************************
Asokoro
8pm
The Inspector General sat alone in the gazebo at the rear of his Abuja residence, beneath the slow turning ceiling fan that stirred the warm evening air without cooling it. Beyond the tiled terrace, the garden stretched into darkness, its carefully trimmed hedges dissolving into shadow beneath the palms.
A glass of whisky rested untouched on the small table beside him. His phone sat next to it, silent for now. Tbe second phone, the one that did not exist on any official inventory, held loosely in his hand.
It vibrated. He answered without looking at the screen.
“I am listening.”
The voice that came through was distorted slightly by the poor connection. Behind it he could hear the deep, monotonous throb of a marine engine and the slap of water against steel.
“Sir, we have finished pumping for Captain Nikos.”
The Inspector General’s eyes narrowed.
“Where are you?”
“We are back inside Ondo waters now. We came in from offshore. We are now holding several nautical miles off the coast.”
The Inspector General leaned forward.
“Give me your position.”
The man paused before answering, then described their location in the clipped language of someone accustomed to working from charts rather than landmarks, their bearing from the coastline, their approximate distance offshore, the nearby shoal waters and the shipping lanes they had crossed on their return.
The Inspector General listened without interrupting.
“And the vessel?”
“She’s standing off, sir. The other vessel has gone.”
“I see.”
The Inspector General looked toward the darkness.
“We almost entered trouble, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because of the navy sir. They were on patrol.”
His expression hardened.
“Okay.”
“Yes, sir. They saw the vessel and started coming towards us. We had to go deep offshore, but we are now back inside the coast.”
The Inspector General was silent for a moment.
“How much is remaining?”
“About five thousand metric tonnes.”
Five thousand tonnes of crude. At current prices, tens of millions of dollars sitting in tanks with nowhere to go. The earlier transfer had already moved quietly into accounts in Dubai and Geneva, enough to finish the house in Asokoro, settle the children’s overseas fees for the next decade, and still leave a surplus large enough to buy silence where it was needed. This remainder was simply excess risk.
He looked at the whisky on the table.
“And Captain Nikos couldn’t take it all?”
“No, sir. He told us before coming that his vessel is only thirty thousand tonnes, sir.”
The Inspector General’s gaze drifted toward the garden.
“So there is no other buyer.”
“No, sir.”
The words settled into the warm night.
He considered the situation. Five thousand tonnes was too valuable to abandon, but value meant nothing if there was nowhere legitimate or convenient to put it. Every additional hour offshore invited another patrol, another radio query, another pair of eyes that might notice what they were not supposed to notice.
“Okay then empty it.”
The man on the phone went quiet.
“Sir?”
“Empty the remaining crude.”
There was a hesitation.
“Into the water, sir?”
The Inspector General’s face remained impassive.
“Yes, pour it inside the water.”
Another silence.
“Okay, sir.”
He ended the call.
For a while he sat motionless.
He could almost see it, the vessel lying beyond the coast, hull rising and falling in the dark swell; the men watching the lights of the shoreline; the crude that had been worth millions becoming a spreading black stain on the water.
Wasteful. Yet necessary.
His fingers tapped slowly against the arm of the chair. He had been thinking about the money. That was the dangerous part. Not the crude itself.
The money.
How easy it had been. The asset compromised. The oil flowed. His men took it. A Greek captain waited offshore. No committee. No ministry signature. No formal approval. A few calls. A little information. And wealth moved from beneath the Nigerian earth into his hands.
He took a slow drink.
For years he had watched men above him grow rich from the country’s resources while he remained one of the men who made their wealth possible. He had told himself proximity to power was power enough.
Now he understood he had been thinking too small. The Igbokoda asset was still there. The crude was still beneath it. If one compromised facility could produce this kind of return, there was no reason it should be the last.
He would need to be careful. Different men. Different routes. Different explanations.But the sabotage could continue. The thought did not horrify him.
It excited him.
The Inspector General leaned back beneath the slowly turning fan, a faint smile appearing at the corner of his mouth. For the first time he felt the full weight of what he had discovered.
He did not merely have access to power.
He had found a way to monetize it.
**************************
Transcorp
Maitama,
10 pm
The suite was on the twelfth floor. An expensive ode to luxury and lavishness. Edafe indulged in his many appetites.
A beautiful escort rode him, her bone straight hair procured from a desperate Asian woman, swinging like black satin around her shoulders. She moaned and trilled with the practiced abandon of an adult movie star.
“Yes…uh…uh. Yes baby.”
Edafe’s eyes stayed shut as she moved above him, knees planted wide on the hotel sheets, spine arched, large breasts lifting and falling in heavy, pendulous arcs with every downward thrust. The wet, rhythmic slap of skin filled the room. Her breath came in short, theatrical gasps; her hands braced against his chest as though she meant to drive him through the mattress.
For a while Edafe let the spectacle consume him. The heat, the friction, the mindless animal rhythm. Then she changed the angle, grinding in slow, circular motions that scraped rather than soothed.
The chafing began almost at once, a raw, insistent burn on his groin and along the insides of his thighs that pulled him out of the moment as cleanly as a slap.
He stared past her shoulder at the ceiling. The pleasure thinned, then vanished. In its place rose the memory of Obinna’s office three days earlier, the hard set of his friend’s mouth, the cold precision of the words liability.
They had not spoken since. No more tails in the rear view mirror, no more silent calls, yet the sense of being watched had only sharpened. It was not merely that he was Obinna’s banker.
As executive director of one of the country’s largest commercial banks he could open ledgers most men would never see, follow the quiet migration of money across borders and shell companies. That knowledge made him dangerous. And dangerous men, he now understood, lived inside crosshairs whether they chose to or not.
“Enough,” he said.
The escort stilled, surprised, then recovered. She climbed off him and gathered her clothes without protest.. He paid her and she left with a soft click of the door.
Edafe sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, the air conditioning raising gooseflesh across his damp skin.
He reached for the laptop on the nightstand. Habit, or perhaps the last residual itch of adrenaline, drove him to the encrypted folder he had begun compiling after the sabotage at Gbokoda. Banking trails, SWIFT messages, correspondence pulled from channels he was not supposed to access. He scrolled, then stopped.
There it was, buried inside a cascade of routine ministerial disbursements, a series of transfers so carefully layered they almost looked legitimate. Almost. The final destination accounts were the same ones that had funded the men who hit the wellhead. And the originating shell, thin as rice paper, traced back through two offshore cut-outs to a single beneficial owner whose name, once revealed, would redraw every map of the conspiracy.
Edafe closed the laptop with deliberate care. For a long minute he simply sat, feeling the shape of the discovery settle inside him like a stone. Then he picked up the clean phone Ofer had given him and typed.
Look at the name I am sending. Higher than we thought. Direct. Don’t tell Obinna yet
He sent it before second thoughts could intervene. The balcony doors slid open. Night air, still carrying the day’s heat, wrapped around him. Edafe rested both hands on the warm concrete rail and admitted, quietly, what he had been circling for days.
Obinna had been right. The orgies, the chemicals, the endless pursuit of sensation, they were no longer recreation. They were exposure. A man who could follow money the way other men followed blood trails had no business living with his defenses down.
It was time to sober up. Time to stop.
Behind him, inside the suite, his phone vibrated once against the nightstand, short, sharp, insistent. The screen lit the darkened room with a pale, urgent glow.
© Umari Ayim.
2026