‘What sort of collateral?’
Sophie smiled and tapped her nose. There were many good things about the company of attractive women, but talking business with them was not one.
Frank tried again. ‘Have you informed the investors?’
‘Why do you think I called you?’
His heart dipped. Was that how she saw him? Just a minor investor in the business? Someone she could use to communicate with the others? Then she smiled, and he remembered that he was special. Of course he would help her. Plan C.
‘I’ll happily inform the other investors,’ he said. ‘But first, I think I need to understand the fundamentals of this business. Can I meet the UK team?’
‘I’ll set it up for you. When are you free?’
‘For you, Sophie’ – he tried to look sincere – ‘any time.’
‘Thank you, Frank.’ Sophie leaned forward and laid a small hand on his. A surprisingly cold hand. ‘It helps a great deal to be able to rely on someone so much more experienced.’ Her amethyst eyes flashed with gratitude.
Good to be appreciated for a change. If Graham Dekkers and Zagrovyl didn’t get their act together soon, they might just discover that Frank Good had accepted a better offer.
Durham, England
The Durham University Oriental Museum huddled beside the river, shrouded in mist. Ernest walked briskly from the train station, nodding briefly at the road repair crew manoeuvring their white van into position. With his trainers, jeans and college scarf, he could easily be taken for a student. A memorably beautiful student – medium height with long red hair, freckled skin and startling hazel eyes – precisely why he tied his hair back and hid his slim, muscular body under a shapeless anorak. He pulled up the hood to complete his disguise.
A pair of rowing skiffs raced up the river, the female crews exchanging good-humoured jibes as they jockeyed for pole position. A group of young men followed their progress along the river footpath, striped scarves flying as they ran.
He waited until the students were out of earshot before checking the equipment. The Knightsgate footbridge, a concrete monstrosity, provided the perfect pivot. High above the gorge of the river Wear, it linked the castle and cathedral hill to the eastern town. Last night he’d closed it for maintenance and gone over the side.
The same workmen who’d assisted him then opened the van and began to unload the equipment. In tan riggers’ boots, black donkey jackets with orange fluorescent strips and yellow hard hats, they almost looked the part. Although anyone observing closely would have noticed their furtive glances across the river as they set out the cones and barricaded off the work area with incongruous delicacy.
Ernest ignored them, turning his back to focus on his pre-performance stretches. Only when he heard a jackhammer pounding to mask the screaming of the core drill did he begin to run.
The street lamps flickered into life as he crossed the Elvet Bridge and sprinted up the footpath, ears pricked for any shouts of warning or hint of alarm. It took him ten seconds to check the work, in which time he had stripped to his skintight, flesh-coloured leotard. He threw the workmen his clothes and gave a blue, latex-glove-covered thumbs up. The workmen were already speeding away in their van as he made his dive.
The hole in the museum wall was exactly one metre off the ground at its lowest point and roughly fifty centimetres in diameter. A thick wall, so he took a run at it, using his forward momentum to propel himself head first into the exhibition area without touching the sides. Once inside, he moved fast. His hands touched the floor fifty centimetres beyond the hole, and his feet carried over, flipping him into a crab, springing up on his toes and then cartwheeling into a handstand. Upside down, he surveyed the room.
The order was very specific: two jade statues. Each statue was about twenty centimetres high: a man, flanked by a boy and a deer, held a persimmon; a woman in flowing white robes strummed a horizontal harp.
His gymnastic routine had been perfected in an empty basement, with steel wires taking the place of the invisible laser beams inside the museum. The night-time security was simple: a broken beam triggered an external alarm causing steel bars to descend, with less than three minutes before the police arrived. This was to be avoided for as long as possible. The internal alarms were different, impossible to avoid, but the delay before an internal alarm escalated to an external one – an algorithm added after the police became tired of responding every time a cleaner dusted a case, or a member of the public leaned too heavily against the glass – gave him more than enough time.
He stood on tiptoes in front of the case of interest and removed the jemmy from his belt. Deep breaths. This was the moment. Now or never. One, two. He levered the glass case from its base and grabbed the statues as the alarm began to trill. He wrapped each figurine in expanding fibres and slid each one up a sleeve. Left, right. The internal alarm bells were ringing like the clappers. Not long before the external alarm would kick in.
He made his escape, one backflip, one cartwheel, three forward flips, more difficult now with the precious objects rubbing against his forearms, and went backwards through the hole, his arms crossed over his body, protecting the haul above all else.
A second set of clothes – chinos, tailored wool coat, leather gloves and beanie – lay exactly where he had left them, in a bag high up on the west bank, right beside the improvised swing. He dressed quickly, grabbed the swing bar and launched himself across the river, landing on the opposite bank before the external alarm pierced the night.
The swing was easily disassembled. He flipped the catch and pulled the fine steel wire, swing bar first, back through the eyelet he had drilled under the footbridge. The wire spooled onto the bank and he kicked it into the river Wear.
Ernest sauntered back up New Elvet, observing the police cars screaming out of Durham police station towards the museum, and headed back to the train station.
Mission accomplished.
Wilton Centre, Teesside
The Wilton Centre put Frank in mind of a poem from school.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Replace Ozymandias with ICI and you had a fair picture of the hubris that drove the architects to design such an ambitious fortress, interlocking buildings of tiered red brick arranged around an artificial lake in manicured gardens beside an industrial complex. Now the dregs of the Teesside chemical industry wheezed and gasped with dying, foetid breath.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
Frank parked as close to the administration building as he could get, leaving plenty of other disabled parking spaces free. He held his breath as he hurried up the steps. Once the home of cutting-edge research, the Wilton Centre was now almost abandoned, just a few labs and offices for deluded tech start-ups. The dilapidated, half-empty sprawl presented a painful reminder of how the government had wasted his hard-earned taxes, haemorrhaging money in a futile attempt to cradle invention, to nurture innovation, to create jobs in an industry that was terminally ill, if not already dead.
Since Krixo had moved operations to China, the UK research centre was no more than a toilet-sized lab with a broom cupboard for an office. A handful of employees remained on the books, presumably a condition of the grants, and one of them came to meet Frank. A man in a white coat who introduced himself as Dr Nadim, chief chemist, and led Frank to a Wilton International meeting room.
‘So.’ White Coat spread his hands. ‘Sophie told me you are looking for information on rare earths. Before I start, what do you already know?’
Frank yawned. ‘I know they are rare.’
‘Wrong.’ The geek beamed with triumph. ‘They are, in fact, abundant.’ He clicked a remote control and the projection of his computer screen lit up one wall. A table with letters and numbers, a few of the squares towards the bottom highlighted in bright colours. ‘The rare earths are a series of seventeen metal elements with very special properties, relatively abund
ant in the earth’s crust, but only ever found in very low concentrations in rocks. That makes them difficult and expensive to recover.’
Frank’s ears pricked up. Expensive: that was a word he understood. Difficult was just whining, engineer excuses, meaning they hadn’t tried hard enough. But expensive meant valuable.
‘How expensive?’
Nadim tapped on his computer and a graph appeared on the screen, an x–y plot with a vertiginous slope.
‘That’s the price of dysprosium. In 2003 it cost less than thirty dollars for one kilogram of metal. This year it reached three thousand dollars.’
Impressive. Frank had pushed through many steep price rises in his time, made the tough choices and hard decisions that his colleagues were too cowardly to contemplate. To achieve such increases for a product that you just dug out of the ground, someone obviously knew their stuff.
‘Who controls the price?’
‘China.’
Of course. Clever bastards.
‘Are there alternatives?’
‘People have trialled samarium – cobalt. And—’
‘Do they work?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Which is it?’ Frank snarled.
‘Different performance at high temperature. More expensive.’
Frank pointed to the price graph. ‘Why has it stopped rising?’ Had the peak passed, were prices falling or was it just a false summit?
‘There are rumours of a huge new deposit of xenotime on the China–India border. With much higher levels of dysprosium. Our intelligence suggests that the Chinese are deliberately keeping it secret. Allowing the West to spend billions of dollars of research money trying to find alternatives, other combinations. When the time comes, they will flood the market with cheap magnets and cripple their competitors.’
Impressive business acumen. He had to hand it to them.
‘Xenotime?’
‘A source of yttrium and the heavy lanthanide metals: dysprosium, ytterbium, erbium and gadolinium. Can be radioactive . . .’
Frank shivered.
‘Due to uranium and thorium impurities. Chemically it is yttrium orthophosphate, with traces of arsenic, silicon and calcium, but some of the yttrium is displaced by dysprosium and—’
‘And all this is important for,’ he couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice, ‘green energy?’
‘Lanthanum and cerium are important for rechargeable batteries, dysprosium and neodymium for wind turbines, and for solar panels you need . . .’
Frank stared out of the window at the grey sky. A light rain was falling. Straight down. Not a breath of wind. He looked up at the spotlights in the ceiling, listened to the whir of the projector fan.
‘If the future depends on green energy,’ he said, ‘then we’d better get used to darkness.’
Christmas, Gothenburg, Sweden
The sanatorium lay hidden in the forest, hunkered down between slabs of granite, the sloping roof slanting towards the beach, wooden slats protecting the windows from the west wind gusting across the North Sea from Scotland. Water that looked deceptively inviting, grey-green and clear, sparkling in the frosty winter light.
A sliding door swooshed open as Jaq approached, closing behind her as she entered a square wood-clad vestibule. A video camera blinked at her from a corner.
‘Jaq Silver for Camilla Hatton,’ she said.
She’d opted to deliver some of her Christmas gifts in person. Chinese silk pyjamas for Cecile and Lily, handed over before Gregor and his other ex-wife arrived in Paris to ‘help’ with their grandchild. She took the grizzling baby for a long walk while Cecile caught up on some sleep, earning a grateful hug from her tearful stepdaughter. Lily was out of danger now, but still failing to thrive.
On Christmas Eve, she took the train from Paris to Aalborg on the northern tip of Denmark, and a quiet hotel she’d booked, for two nights’ reading and sleeping before taking the Boxing Day ferry to Gothenburg.
It wasn’t as if Christmas meant anything to her.
The first Christmas she remembered, really remembered, was in Angola. Her father was away, her mother present in body, absent in mind, leaving Jaq and her brother, Sam, free to roam: the year of the crocodile.
She’d never forget that first encounter: the smell of oleander as she toddled down the bank to investigate the strange reptile with the mesmerising eye, the violent jackknife reaction of the predator as her brother pelted it with sticks and stones, the pain of Sam’s fingers on her upper arm, squeezing the soft flesh, dragging her away from the opening jaws, lifting her up and running, saving her life, the roar of his anger afterwards.
Until then, Sam had always been so quiet, so gentle, she took his kindness for granted. Almost four years older, he was the closest thing she had to a parent most of the time – what with her father away with the troops and her mother away with the fairies. Which was why his yelling scared her so. He’d often chided, inveigled, implored, but never screamed like that, never turned on her in such fury. She nursed her bruised arm and cried, not because of the near-death experience, but because he called her a silly little girl.
It was the last time anyone called her a silly little girl.
Later, when the nightmares started, it was Sam who knew what to do.
Where did Sam get the green marble? So unlike the other glass spheres, the ones that came from Europe in an orange string bag: plain, clear glass with little swirls of colour, full of tiny bubbles and other imperfections. This marble was larger, a perfect, smooth sphere, an oval black slit surrounded by a starburst of light in dark green glass.
Exactly like the eye of a crocodile.
He must have traded with the local boys. She never found out what he gave in exchange, but it must have been something precious. On Christmas Eve, when she woke screaming and couldn’t get back to sleep, he put it on her bedside table, under the night light. The crocodile was very sorry for frightening her, he said. It had left a Christmas present to make amends, a magic gift that would keep her safe, but only if she kept away from all the other crocodiles, and hippos and snakes, otherwise one of them might try to snatch the magic back. He kissed her, wished her a Merry Christmas and called her his brave little sister.
The nightmares stopped.
He never realised what she was really afraid of. Not the crocodile. Her biggest fear was that her brother had stopped loving her. She was afraid of losing Sam.
And ever since he’d gone, Christmas was not the same.
In the sanatorium near Gothenburg, the flashing red dot on the camera turned green as a wooden wall slid to one side.
Jaq passed through the opening and found herself in a large airy room, a pine-clad trapezium facing away from the sea. Not a soul in sight, only moss-green cushions on rustic wooden furniture. Slanting light came through a smoked-glass ceiling, which flared up and out towards high windows, the clear glass opening into a grove of trees, making it hard to see where the building ended and the forest began.
The vertical lines of pine panelling narrowed as a side door opened. The scent of rose water reached her before the greeting.
‘Jaq.’ The deep voice carried across the room, full of warmth. ‘So good of you to come.’
Camilla emerged from a side door. She moved confidently across the room. Her thick white hair had been cut short again, expertly styled. The prison pallor had vanished, the sharp edges of forced confinement replaced with the softer curves of freedom. The additional weight suited her.
They embraced.
‘How are you?’ Jaq asked.
Camilla had been working undercover, tracking the movement of illegal chemical weapons, before The Spider caught her. She spent many months imprisoned in the basement of his Crimean villa before Jaq found and rescued her.
‘Better, much better.’
Camilla indicated a circle of mushroom-shaped seats, and they sat facing each other across a table cut from a tree trunk.
‘I brought you something.’ Jaq re
ached into her bag and pulled out a decorated tin of biscuits from a shop in Yarm.
‘Forgive me, I’m such a poor host.’ Camilla took the tin and inspected the brightly coloured enamel, embossed with idealised pictures of squirrels and hazelnuts. ‘Would you care for some tea to go with these?’
‘I’m fine—’ Jaq began.
‘So polite. You’ve been in England too long.’ Camilla smiled. ‘It’s no trouble.’ She pushed herself from the chair and walked over to a rustic sideboard, opening a wooden door to reveal a kettle and ceramic mugs. She filled the kettle and set it to boil.
Jaq looked around. ‘Where are the staff?’
‘They come only when needed – isolation is part of the cure.’ Camilla held up a tray of coloured paper packets and plastic sachets. ‘Darjeeling, Earl Grey, green tea, oolong, camomile, peppermint, liquorice, ginger . . .?’
‘Any coffee?’
‘Only instant.’
Jaq joined her by the sideboard and inspected the tray. Decaffeinated. Worse than useless, but she shook two sachets of excuse-for-coffee into a mug while Camilla tore open a turquoise packet of camomile tea.
‘Allow me.’
Jaq poured the boiling water onto Camilla’s teabag, watching the straw-yellow colour deepen as the apigenin, dimethulene and bisabolol were released. She filled her own mug, watching the brown granules dissolve. Chemical Engineering 101 right here on the bench, unit operations in action, extraction, diffusion, filtration, solution, agitation.
They took their drinks back to the tree trunk table.
Camilla spoke first. ‘Physically, I’m fully recovered. I can leave here whenever I want.’ She paused. ‘But I’m not quite ready.’
‘Do you want to . . .’ Jaq searched for elegant, elliptical words, and found none, ‘to talk about it?’
‘No.’ Camilla grimaced and shook her head. ‘Not yet.’
They sat in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts, just the sigh of trees in the sea breeze. The sounds of the outside world were relayed into the room through some clever acoustic conduction; the noises matched the movement of the canopy, yet the room was too warm, the air too still for the room to be open to the outside. It felt like floating through the forest in a bubble, full immersion yet completely safe.
The Chemical Reaction Page 18