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Pike’s Pyramid
Michael Tatlow
First Published 2014 by Classic Author and Publishing Services Pty Ltd.
This edition published 2018 by Woodslane Press
Copyright © 2014 Michael Tatlow
All rights reserved. No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
Editor: Ormé Harris
Designer / typesetter: Working Type Studio (www.workingtype.com.au)
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
Conversion by Winking Billy
National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication entry Author:
Tatlow, Michael, author.
Title: Pike’s pyramid : a fight against a global marketing network and crime czars finding al Qaida / Michael Tatlow.
ISBN: 978-0-9925901-1-6 (eBook)
Dewey Number: A823.4
To Fran, and my daughter and son, Kelly and Nick; all stars.
Labour to keep alive in your breast
that celestial fire called conscience.
Etiquette in the Australasian Colonies.
People’s Publishing Company, Melbourne, 1885.
About the Author
Difficult circumstances in the wake of his father’s death caused Michael Tatlow to leave school aged fifteen in his native Tasmania, Australia. He earned a living trapping rabbits, snaring kangaroos, and fishing for shark in the Southern Ocean. He was also the state’s surf swimming champion. In rough seas at different beaches Michael saved alone four people from drowning.
Aged eighteen he became an Australian newspaper reporter, then a journalist correspondent in Britain, the United States, Canada, Vietnam and much of Europe. A year as a feature writer for Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph followed.
Aged twenty, a busted and infected spine cost him a year in hospital, during which time Michael twice received the last rites from a priest. Fully recovered, he became the Sunday Telegraph’s News Editor and Acting Editor, then the Chief of Staff and Pictorial Editor of the city’s Daily Telegraph.
Back home in Tasmania in the 1970s, Michael was head of ABC television news and, rated as an historian, he began writing books. It was then that he became a leading network marketer whose sales trips included months in the Czech Republic.
He lives in Hobart and has a son and daughter, and six grandchildren.
* * *
Michael is the author of the books Bloodhouse (with Darcy Dugan), A Walk in Old Sydney, A Tour of Old Tasmania, A Walk in Old Launceston, A Walk in Old Hobart.
Author’s note
This tale and the characters and organisations depicted are fiction. Any resemblance of fictional between fictional Argo and a real network marketing organisation is coincidental. However, the related locations of the story are real. The story’s acts of terrorism in America and Europe actually took place. Tatlow’s Beach, a murder scene at Stanley, Tasmania, is also real; named after my ancestors.
In 2006 I self published and distributed a virtual draft of this book, with a limited plot, to test its popularity and get readers’ feedback. I limited the distribution to my home state of Tasmania. All the 2000 printed copies sold in three weeks. I told people still seeking the book to await a much enhanced Pike’s Pyramid, with more drama, per Jo Jo Publishing.
This rewritten book is the first of my series of four crime thrillers that travels to many parts of the world and features hero and unique crime buster and family man Blarney Pike, and his skilled friends in a remote but extraordinary town in Tasmania.
Acknowledgements
Many people who generously told me about their experiences to make this book a reality cannot be named. They have my enduring gratitude. I particularly thank Colin S (formerly of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), John MacKean, police Inspector Lee Renshaw, barristers Ken Read and Christopher Gunson, Helen Prochazka and Patti Lucas.
CREDIT: The song Who Wants to be a Millionaire? by Cole Porter. Alfred Publishing Co. Inc. USA.
CHAPTER 1
‘A triangle of treachery is polluting our network,’ Jack Sussoms, nearly seventy, growled like a gorilla with a sore throat. ‘There’s Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, controlled by the greedy crooks in my United States, godammit. We’re gonna bust their balls, Blarney.’
From across the small table in the saloon bar of the Norvoski Hotel in Prague, Blarney Pike was fascinated by his buddy from Lafayette, New Jersey. Sussoms had done some checking on the two Australians soon after Blarney and his bride Alexandra arrived in Prague six weeks ago. He knew about Blarney’s impressive boxing career. He was excited that his colleague from the land down under was a journalist with connections in newspapers and television in the US and Britain. An intimacy had flowered.
Pike sipped at his glass of beer. ‘I want to know all about this, Jack,’ he said. ‘If you’re right, people will want to silence you.’ He playfully pointed an index finger, like a pistol, at Jack’s belly as the old man took another gulp of bourbon.
Jack laughed. ‘Those cock sucker crooks are polluters, like piss in fine whiskey,’ he drawled. ‘Let ’em try. I’ve got a 32 mill revolver upstairs. Bought it cheap here in Prague. I keep it under a newspaper, on the table beside the bed. When the evidence is ready, I’m gonna go tell our master, Abe Harbek.’ If fellow American Harbek’s legendary team of heavies failed to fix the rot, Jack said, some stirring in the media by Pike would spur them to prune it. Bad publicity was the number one evil for Harbeck, the revered owner of Argo.
The dangled promise of serious money and Alex’s fair command of the Czech language, picked up at home from her Czech migrant parents, had lured the Pikes like honey bees to Argo’s assault on the Czechs.
With two hundred others from twenty countries, they had helped launch there the Czech branch of the world’s biggest network marketer. Czechs had been recruited to set up their
