2014 – Valley of Zarifa - Daoud’s arrival
2001 - Oasis of Zarifa - Lifelong
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – The office
2014 – Valley of Zarifa - Entrance
2001 - Oasis of Zarifa – The oath of loyalty
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – The excursion
2001 - Oasis of Zarifa – An unfamiliar situation
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – View into the past
2014 - Oasis of Zarifa – The decision
2001 - Oasis of Zarifa – A new start
2001 - Oasis of Zarifa – Breakaway into a new life
2001 – Valley of Zarifa – The assignation
2014 – Valley of Zarifa - Sensations
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Victory over the pride
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – One riddle solved another one looms
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Weapon training
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Return and Farewell
2014 – Valley of Zarifa - Blackmail
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Question upon Question
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Effective white lie
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Preparations for a relief operation
2014 – Valley of Zarifa – Icy farewell
Preamble
All rights remain with the author.
Dear reader,
My intention is to draw you into a story full of tension. I am aiming to capture your imagination by the world of Rayan. For that reason all names, persons and also most of the places are pure fiction. Any similarities to real persons or historic events are coincidental and were on no account done intentionally.
I really hope that Rayan will bring you the same amount of entertainment that he brought to me whilst writing the story. May you find his life as thrilling and fascinating as I do.
Thanks to my husband who succeeded in convincing me to publish the book. Also I would like to thank Hannah, Tina and Geoff who did a great job helping me with the English translation.
Indira Jackson
2014 – Flight from Munich to Dubai – Killing time
Rayan strolled along the aisle of the plane. He was bored. It was already the fourth time that he had gone back and forth – fortunately he had already survived two-thirds of the flight time. He just hated regular flights!
His jet suffered some technical defect in Munich, which would have taken too long to repair for him to wait and so he booked a first-class-flight at short notice. The eight first class seats of Lufthansa’s A330-300 gave you the uppermost amount of luxury, which one could find on a regular flight, yet it was a totally different world to fly with your own private jet.
One could almost get the same amount of relaxation out of the comfortable reclining seats of the Airbus as within his Learjet. However, the presence of that many people in the narrow space of the cabin was enough to test his patience.
This feeling was intensified when thinking about the 48 Business-Class travellers. Whereas for the 161 passengers that had to "struggle along“ and squeeze themselves in the regular class, he almost felt sorry for them.
He had just reached the end of the aisle of the plane again, when the captain asked everybody aboard to fasten their seatbelts. Turbulence!
Rayan was on the way to get back to his own seat at the very front when a petite blonde, deeply engrossed in reading a magazine, caught his attention.
It seemed to be just one of the typical tabloids, but that was not what fascinated him - it was more the content of the article that was striking: it was a report about him - another one. He had stopped caring about these reports a long time ago and the majority of newspapers were very much aware that his lawyer had the means to silence them. For most of them the subsequent legal wranglings that would arise were not worth it and, therefore, the interest of the media in him had dropped significantly. Only from time to time a smaller article would appear about him. When checking out more details, Rayan realised that the lady had made specific efforts to collect all different kinds of information from the press about him.
As the seat beside her was empty, he just could not resist the challenge – he smiled mischievously to himself. This was going to be fun and on top of this, it would help him to kill some of the remaining flight time!
"Excuse me, would you mind if I take this seat next to you for a couple of minutes? You know, the turbulence …,“ he asked in perfect German with only a slight accent, thanks to his German grandmother.
The young woman was too distracted sorting out information from the different articles, to react immediately, so he had to repeat the question. Only then did she look at him, a little confused.
“Sure. Go ahead. No problem“, she said with slight hesitation. You could read on her face that in spite of her polite words it actually was a problem, as she did not want to be interrupted. Nevertheless that did not bother Rayan at all – he realized in that moment that she had beautiful green-blue eyes, which reminded him of the colour of the forests of Germany.
Therefore he sat down and fastened the seatbelt like they had been asked to do.
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