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    Within days of Fayed's returning from his trip, he appeared in another C1A memo, which reported he was dating de Mohrenschildt's 20-year-old daughter, Alexandra Gibson, who had come to visit her father and stepmother without her husband.  'She does not trust him and believes may regret association,' said the memo, written by an anonymous agent or informant, interpreting the relationship as only beautiful married woman attracted to available wealthy handsome male'.  The memo writer noted that the bodyguard Gaillard never left his side and that Fayed was 'very quiet, anxious, watchful, intelligent...  drank cognac straight moderately...  Mohamed (with his bodyguard) was irritated with Alex for lateness.'
    The memo went on to comment, as well, that de Mohrenschildt's 'association with Mohamed seems professionally necessary but dangerous'.  Why it was dangerous, the memo didn't specify.  But it quoted one senior Haitian official as saying about Fayed, 'He win not, repeat not, last.'  This the CIA source had got absolutely right.  Things in Haiti did begin to sour for Fayed.

    The first problem came with the oil.  Hopes had been raised by the simple fact that Valentine Petroleum had invested heavily in the search.  They were buttressed by a bottle of a black, tarry liquid that Fayed had been told had seeped from the ground in the countryside outside Port-au-Prince.  Not only did Haiti have oil, it seemed, but one barely had to dig for it.  This encouraged Fayed to fly in three British oil experts - G.D. Hobson, Michael Hubbard, and Dr H. Fosset - to look at the feasibility of pumping and refining the country's evident oil reserves.  Le Nouvelliste heralded their arrival as the dawn of a prosperous new era for Haiti.  Meanwhile, the black liquid was sent to a lab to be analysed.
    With Gaillard as their guide the experts drove out to the site of the reported seepage.  Fosset later recalled in a signed statement that Gaillard was carsick on the journey and that every 10 miles or so they were stopped by 'natives in rags but carrying machine guns' - Tontons Macoutes.  Things soon got worse.  The seeping 'oil' turned out to be low-grade molasses, the residue at the bottom of a bonfire pit on an old French sugar plantation.  That wasn't all.  Hobson, Hubbard and Fosset determined that a full seismic survey would take seven years and cost $250 minion - meanwhile, the country's consumption of about 2,000 barrels of oil a day meant that building a refinery for imported crude would be ridiculously cost-inefficient.

    When all this bad news was delivered to Fayed, he didn't shoot the messenger, but he didn't pay him, either.  According to the DTI investigation, the scientists had written off their fee of about £2,000 as a bad debt until years later, when Fosset discovered Mohamed Fayed's Park Lane address in London and had a writ served demanding payment.  Fayed paid in instalments, Fosset told Tiny Rowland's people, and exclusively with grubby five-pound notes.
    By late 1964, influential elements of Haitian society were plotting Fayed's fall.  First among the enemies of Fayed were those who stood to lose the most from the favours bestowed upon the sheikh by Duvalier: the shipping agents.  The announcement that Fayed was now the only legitimate shipping agent in Haiti had, understandably, thrown panic in their ranks.  'We said, "This can't happen, we have to do something," ' recalls Jacques Thébaud, at the time a young man just breaking into the arcane world of shipping.  But such comments were only made to each other.  'We Haitians couldn't fight against Duvalier or Fayed.' 
    Slowly, however, there developed a plan by which they would get the various shipping lines that served Haiti to fight their battle.  The lines themselves were allied in conferences which set a standard price that they all had to live by.  A few independent shipping lines outside of the conferences operated, but their support could be counted on as well.  After all, the agents figured, it was in everybody's interest.  'The conferences were strong and Fayed wanted to be the agent of all the cartel as well as all the outsiders,' Thébaud says.  'It was impossible - how could you have a single agent for all the lines when the lines were in competition...  It was not a Haitian problem - it was an international problem.' 
    The shipping agents also understood that the best means to get one's way was often to dangle a carrot while brandishing a stick.  The stick in this instance was a threatened boycott or Haiti by the shipping lines if Fayed was made the country's exclusive agent.  'They went to the minister [Hervé Boyer] and said this was impossible.  They said they would rather skip Port-an-Prince than agree to such conditions,' says shipping agent Ronald Marsden.  The carrot was the idea of a voluntary tax that would be used for port equipment and repairs.  'The government or Haiti at the time had no aid, no credit, no money,' says Thébaud, now retired and the unofficial port historian.  'We told the government that we could make it money, good money, whereas Fayed would just vanish and take everything with him.  We offered to create a special tax on each tonne of merchandise and we would call that tax the Port Improvement Charge.'  Among themselves, however, the agents called it the Fayed Tax.  Under the deal, the money was to go into account 104-32-405 at the First National City Bank of New York: when there was enough, it would be used to buy a dredger to clear the bottom of the harbour. 
    Pressure was slowly, diplomatically brought to bear on Duvalier and his cabinet in December.  By the time an emergency meeting of the shipping conferences was announced for early January 1965, the shipping agents were confident that they could successfully force Duvalier to dump Fayed.  But it never came to that.  By the time they gathered, Fayed was gone. 
    It was practice in Haiti that when Papa Doc needed cash he would call up someone he thought had not shown enough gratitude for his abundant generosity and demand a substantial payment.  In December 1964 it was apparently Fayed's turn.  He was tapped for about $30,000, according to DTI witnesses.  $5 million according to Fayed's submissions to the inquiry.  When the request came, Fayed did a brave and foolish thing: he refused to pay, or at least he demurred.

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