Too Good a Deal..
Jose thought he had found the deal of a lifetime when an old village mate surfaced out of nowhere, hunting for him like they shared a binding pact. When the call came through to his hand cell, the pleasantries quickly gave way to heavy business: his villagemate had struck gold — a full kilogram of it — up north in Turkana.
Years of harsh prospecting had weathered the man, making him look a decade older. He had endured the unforgiving northern climate, chasing rumors and leads that stretched into an impossible maze. But this time, he claimed, he hit the jackpot. Because he was an outsider to the city, he needed Jose — a street-smart city dweller with connections — to help him find a buyer.
Elated by the news, Jose didn’t rely on mere words. He hired a jeweller’s assistant to verify the stash, and the assistant returned with incredible reports: it was the purest bar he had ever laid eyes on outside of a high-end jewelry shop.
Before Jose could even tap into his network, the villagemate called back with a pivot. He had already found a monied buyer, a well-to-do Indian investor, but wanted Jose to stay in on the action. The backstory shifted slightly — the gold supposedly came from Sudan, accompanied by its original Sudanese owner — and Jose was asked to fund and arrange a taxi from Eldoret to Nairobi for the journey.
The trip down was plagued by theatrical delays. There were breakdowns in Nakuru and endless run-ins with traffic police. By the time the weary crew rolled into Nairobi, it was six o’clock in the evening, five hours behind schedule. Jose met them and led the group to a restaurant along Koinange Street for a breather and some lunch while they waited for the buyer to materialize. Three hours and a flurry of frantic phone calls later, the buyer was finally reported nearby.
The group stepped out into the dark shadows of the street to rendezvous near a parked car. Pushed forward as the “city boss” and supposed owner of the cargo, Jose finally got his hands on the parcel. In the dim light, he reached blindly into a black plastic bag. The bar felt solid enough, though an oily substance inside irritated his skin. The sellers casually explained it was sulphuric acid, used for preservation or purification. Interestingly, when the buyer appeared and inspected it, he beamed, remarking it was the finest quality he had seen.
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Plans were set to finalize the transaction the following day. Jose drove home, but the friction started immediately on Mombasa Road. The seller’s gang bombarded him with frantic calls, complaining they had been abandoned on the streets with a prized treasure and no place to sleep. They demanded twenty thousand shillings for a hotel, threatening to cut him out of the deal if he refused. He negotiated them down to five thousand, but right as he pulled over to open his M-Pesa app, his instincts flared. He rescinded the offer, telling them to handle their own accommodations — surely men trading in gold could afford a room.
The next morning, the instructions were specific: bring a large bag to hold the cash, as the ten-million-shilling payout would be in hard cash. Jose grabbed a bulky old laptop bag and headed back to the rendezvous.
Then, the script flipped wildly. The sellers called to announce they had found an even better offer and would abandon him unless Jose immediately wired 1.5 million shillings in cash. As fate would have it, exactly 1.5 million in foreign currency was sitting right in his office desk drawer, newly approved for an upcoming work trip to Japan on Monday. He urged them to stall. But neither the original sellers nor the buyer showed up at the restaurant. The Indian buyer, meanwhile, blamed the delay on banking hours — it was Saturday, after all.
When the buyer finally arrived at the venue, he carried a light, aluminum cashbox with a handle and a key. He turned the lock and cracked the lid just enough for Jose to catch a glimpse of neat stacks of dollars. They sat sipping coffee and waiting, the buyer growing visibly irritated by the sellers’ tardiness, while the sellers simultaneously heaped pressure on Jose to wire the cash.
Caught in a vicious vice grip between two warring sides, Jose hit a breaking point. A quiet, cold certainty washed over him: he was walking away.
He left his empty laptop bag sitting squarely on the chair. Pretending to take an urgent work call, he excused himself toward the washrooms, rounded a hidden corner, and slipped through a back door into the Nairobi air. He switched his phone to flight mode, climbed into his car, and drove straight home without looking back.
He would later learn the brutal truth: the entire operation was a meticulously staged theater. The gold was a worthless fake, and the impatient “buyer” was merely another actor in the syndicate. He had walked right up to the edge of a financial abyss and, at the very last second, managed to dodge a bullet.
