The Chemical Reaction

by Fiona Erskine

  And a secret code.

  Lutetium, one of the rare earths, had the symbol Lu and atomic number 71.

  71-71.

  Lulu.

  Jaq stared at the numbers she had written down:

  71-71

  53-61-76-52-75

  20-7-73-44-16-90-68

  7-8-15-8-3-58

  9-53-60-74-47-7

  59-8-52-43-54-3-7

  And all became clear.

  Museu de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal

  It wasn’t just the colour of his skin that made Eusébio stand out, but his size. Six foot six with broad shoulders and the muscle tone of a serious athlete, he found it difficult to blend into the background.

  Not that he made much effort to hide. With multicoloured dreadlocks and multiple piercings, billowing African robes over tight white jeans and pointed snakeskin shoes, he turned heads wherever he went.

  As a professional footballer, he’d once embraced the nightlife of Lisbon. Dinner in the Bairro Alto where the best bacalhau – dried salt cod – could be found, then down to the river and one bar after another, winding up at Frágil or Alcântara-Mar, bypassing the long queues, waved inside without charge. When the lights went down, and the volume of the music ratcheted up, Eusébio was the first on the dance floor. He left the club with a different girl every night.

  Plenty of people recognised him from his days playing for Benfica, a brief and unhappy promotion after a stellar season with the juniors. A knee injury sent him to the bench before he’d scored a single goal, and then a complication with a botched ACL reconstruction ended his professional football career before he was twenty.

  He tried to give something back by coaching kids in the barricas, but his heart wasn’t in football any more. All that naivety, single-minded ambition, the selfish longing for glory. It was too painful to see his teenage mistakes perpetuated by others.

  Even when he’d earned stupid money he’d always felt like a slum kid, a good-for-nothing thief born and raised on the wrong side of the tracks, in the shanty town beside the airport motorway, a kid who’d never amount to much.

  A brief flirtation with his mother’s evangelical church led him into the arms of Ana dos Anjos and a new start. Manual work by day and back to school at night. He tried to make up for all the lost years of football and sex. The training to become a physiotherapist was tougher and more expensive than he’d budgeted for, and he was glad when the other jobs came along.

  The first was dancing in clubs. Initially it involved clothes, but he enjoyed the reaction when it got so hot he was forced to remove his shirt. He’d never seen a strip show, and worried that he might need lessons, but at the audition they said he was a natural.

  The second was linked to Ana’s job.

  The Museu de Arte Antiga, where Ana had a cleaning job, overlooked the busy Alcântara dock. From the elegant garden you could look out over the river Tagus, the beaches of Caparica just visible beyond the grain silos of Porto Brandão and Trafaria. Inside, the museum was deserted most days. A few tourists came to see the fifteenth-century triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, or the Japanese screens, but few spent time in the Chinese collection.

  Security was sleepy. Poorly paid, lifelong state employees had little incentive to tackle a determined thief. Even so, Eusébio was not prepared to risk anything during the day.

  Ana swung him a job with the gardening contractor. If he was lousy at pruning and weeding, they forgave him for his strength and willingness to do the worst jobs, repointing the stone steps, hauling soil and bags of manure. He flirted with Ana dos Anjos and gained unfettered access out of hours to both the museum and her voluptuous body. A vigorous act of worship among the virgins and icons.

  The order was clear, the shopping list specific. Three animal statues, a jug and a set of cups. All carved from jade. The dark green water buffalo looked soft and curvy, but he knew it would be cool and hard to the touch. The little elephant was highly stylised, covered in secondary carvings. The white horse was more realistic, caught in motion, frozen in time. Even he could see they were fine objects, magnificent but also fragile. The trick would be not only to remove them from their glass cases, but to do so without damaging them. And without getting caught.

  The replicas were Ana’s idea. They’d been fucking in the seventeenth-century portrait room, the leather benches just the right height for more adventurous positioning, and few things are more stimulating than getting butt naked under the gaze of Puritans in dark robes and white ruffs. It was a say-you’re-sorry shag. Ana had accused him of using her. The funny thing was, she was much happier after he really had used her, though he supposed she’d used him too. As they lay entwined on the padded bench, she mentioned the warehouse in Odivelas, a place they stored the extra stuff, the objects that there was no space to show. It didn’t get cleaned as often, but she’d been asked to go for two days next week.

  They went together to find stuff that looked similar. Some of it was so good, he was almost tempted to pinch it instead, but the word on the street was that the buyer wouldn’t pay unless he got exactly what was ordered. Ana’s plan was much better than a smash and grab. The alarm system was old and prone to false alerts whenever it rained. It might take days, weeks, months or even years before anyone noticed the discrepancies. The seventeenth-century Qing dynasty jade horse in the museum was to be replaced by an eighteenth-century Tang donkey from the warehouse, which had in turn been replaced by an ornament sourced in Ikea. Similar substitutions were chosen for the elephant and water buffalo, jug and cups.

  On the night of the job, Ana kicked a pail of water over the main junction box. As the alarms shrieked in every gallery, Eusébio lifted the heavy glass case. In less than three minutes he had removed the objects of interest, replaced them with the alternatives, repositioned the glass and escaped into the garden. He hid the precious things in a wheelbarrow, under a layer of hay and mulch, and locked himself in the garden tool shed while Ana rushed to meet the private security and Lisbon’s finest policemen, apologising profusely as she showed them the cause of the false alarm. The security guards made a cursory inspection of the grounds and museum, but as none of them was an expert in Qing dynasty jade, they left quite unaware of the theft.

  Eusébio waited until after midnight to retrieve his haul before catching the night train from Alcântara-Mar to Cascais.

  One night with Ana, then off on tour to China.

  Darlington, England

  The golf course, on the north bank of the river Tees just south of Darlington, could only be accessed through the five-star hotel where the president of Zagrovyl global operations had taken a suite.

  Frank and Graham shook hands in reception. Gone were the dark suits: both wore the businessman’s weekend uniform of light-coloured slacks and polo shirts. Graham’s V-necked jumper with its multicoloured diamond pattern was significantly louder than Frank’s muted monochrome, but both sported the same logo of finest Scottish cashmere.

  A caddy was assigned to Graham, but Frank chose to carry his own clubs as they strolled out into the winter sunshine towards the first tee.

  ‘Heads or tails?’ Graham produced a gold Krugerrand and waited for Frank to call.

  ‘Tails,’ he said.

  The coin spun in the air, catching the sunlight, and landed heads up on the back of Graham’s broad, freckled hand.

  ‘My lucky day!’ He smiled and pocketed the coin in his pale yellow trousers.

  Graham selected a blunt-nosed driver from the cylindrical bag and made a few practice sweeps. Swish. Swish. The scent of torn grass filled the air, hints of camomile and mint. He grunted and stepped forward to the tee. A tall man, his Dutch heritage showing in his fair hair and pale skin, he had a smooth, elegant swing.

  Thwack.

  Frank put a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the sun, following the dimpled white sphere as it flew into the sky, described a graceful arc, cleared the fairway and plopped onto the edge of the distant green.

&n
bsp; ‘Well played, sir.’ The caddy got his congratulations in first.

  ‘Nice shot,’ Frank added.

  Graham smiled. ‘Come on then, let’s see what you’re made of.’

  Frank selected a snub-nosed driver. As he prepared to take the shot, a helicopter banked overhead, blades whirring as it prepared to land on the hotel roof. The scar on Frank’s left leg began to throb and a tremor ran up through his body and down his arms. The shaft slipped through shaking hands and he let the club fall, wiping clammy palms on his beige trousers.

  Buying time, Frank swapped the wooden-headed driver for a hybrid club. Graham was watching him closely now, not yet impatient, but curious, assessing his reaction to the helicopter, his decision to change woods.

  Frank fluffed the strike and the ball skittered sideways into the rough.

  ‘Bad luck.’ Graham set off after his own ball, the caddy trotting behind.

  Nothing to do with luck. Frank had no memory of the helicopter crash – there was a black hole where his memory should be – but he did remember what led up to it. A crippling, paralysing fear overcame him whenever he thought about his narrow escape. He could never speak about it. No one else knew his part in the events leading up to it. No one except Jaqueline Silver.

  It took Frank a chip and two more drives to reach the green where an imbalanced putter caused him to overshoot the target on an easy putt.

  ‘Not your day today, Frank?’

  Forcing a smile, suppressing his rising irritation at Graham’s concern, he finally dropped the ball into the first hole. Seventeen more to go, and his future was still on the line.

  The caddy maintained a respectful distance behind them as they strolled round the lake.

  The second and third holes were a mess, but by the fourth he had recovered his equilibrium and on the fifth he managed par while Graham had to start again when his ball missed the island green and plopped into the lake.

  Frank put a spin on the ball at the sixth hole. He watched with satisfaction as it curved round the dog leg, avoiding the bunkers, and dropped neatly onto the green. An easy putt and two under par.

  Graham sank his shot. ‘Looks as if you were just out of practice, Frank.’

  ‘A little rusty, yes.’

  ‘Back on form now, though.’

  Frank basked in the warmth of approbation.

  ‘Good, I like competition.’

  The real conversation started at the ninth hole.

  ‘So, Frank, which part of the Zagrovyl business interests you most?’

  ‘The Green Energy Division.’

  Graham lowered his club without taking the shot. ‘You surprise me.’ He cast Frank a sideways look. ‘It’s the smallest and worst-performing division in the company.’

  ‘I like a challenge.’ Basic chemicals, the core of Zagrovyl operations, might be essential to modern life, but it was a low-margin cyclical business. Not the sort that excited investors. The share price had risen since Graham became president of Zagrovyl global operations and started making radical changes. Frank had done his homework. He took his shot. ‘Zagrovyl’s future is green.’ And that was where the ball landed. Perfect.

  ‘A nice slogan, but what does it mean in practice?’

  Careful. The slogan was Graham’s. Best not to offend with what he really thought. Frank waited as Graham played. The ball landed close to his.

  ‘What does it mean to you, Graham?’

  Graham led on up the fairway.

  ‘Our world is at crisis point,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on living the way we live, doing the things we do. Unless we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, limit the amount of carbon dioxide we produce, there will be a catastrophe.’ They reached the green and he waited as Frank sank his shot. ‘Temperatures are hotting up and the deserts are expanding. Glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising. Weather patterns are changing. Our cities will soon be inundated, and we’ll be forced to move inland.’ Graham selected a putter. Plunk. The ball missed the hole, sat on the lip. ‘We’ll run out of arable land to grow food. The Gulf Stream will change course and Europe will enter a new ice age. We need a gestalt shift, a mindset change, a leap of faith.’ Graham sank his ball with a tap. ‘You trained as an economist, right?’

  Frank had wanted to study music, but his father had insisted he do hard science or something more likely to provide him with gainful employment. Economics was a miserable compromise. ‘Yes.’ He collected Graham’s ball from the hole and handed it to him.

  ‘People act selfishly, they consume unnecessarily, growth comes at the expense of sustainability. How do we change that?’

  ‘Rare earth metals can change that.’

  Graham started walking. Frank hefted his clubs and hurried after him.

  At the next hole, Graham made a powerful swing, sending the ball into the bunker just short of the green. ‘Damn!’

  ‘Bad luck.’ Thump! Frank’s shot soared over both bunker and green, landing on the rough just beyond. Not as good as a hole in one, but nicely placed for another shot on par.

  He followed Graham to the bunker and drew perpendicular lines in the sand. ‘Time.’ He pointed to the horizontal axis. ‘And money.’ The vertical axis. ‘Here’s the price of rare earths from China.’ He drew a line that sloped steeply upwards from left to right. ‘Prices have risen a hundredfold in the last twelve months, and the rate of rise shows no sign of slowing down.’ Not quite true; he was gambling on the peak having already passed. ‘The Green Energy Division relies on stuff that comes from China. Neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, cerium and europium prices have increased to stupid levels.’ He paused to let Graham chip his ball onto the green. ‘We can’t be held to ransom, slaves to a monopoly. Someone needs to sort out the supply chain.’

  Graham stopped to look at him, then walked on.

  With a birdie at the eighteenth, Frank edged ahead. A twist of irritation played across Graham’s mouth. A misjudgement? Should he have fluffed the shot and let his boss win?

  They turned to face one another.

  ‘Well played, sir.’ Graham extended a hand. ‘So, you think you can fix this rare earth supply mess?’

  ‘I’m confident of it.’

  ‘Hmmm. There’s one condition.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Do you have children, Frank?’

  ‘Yes.’ Not that he ever saw them.

  ‘I became a grandfather last year. That beautiful child has changed my life. Thinking about what sort of world she will grow up in. How the decisions we make today will affect her tomorrow. What sort of men she will meet as she grows up.’

  Frank’s heart missed a beat.

  ‘Harassment claims are nasty things. One person’s word against another. Whatever the true facts of the case, it never ends well.’ Graham handed his putter to the caddy and waved him away. ‘Society has changed, Frank, and you need to change with it. You’re a red-blooded male, but you are not an animal. Women at work expect and deserve to be treated with respect. You don’t need to like it, you just need to act like you believe it.’

  Frank clamped his teeth together to stop the riposte bubbling up from inside.

  ‘The easiest thing is to offer a whacking great financial settlement to make this mess of yours go away. But, against my better judgement, I’m willing to fight it, to restore your reputation.’

  Frank bowed his head to hide the anger flashing from his eyes. Between gritted teeth he managed a soft reply. ‘Thank you, Graham.’

  ‘I need a man in China. A lateral thinker, someone who can operate outside normal boundaries. Someone who knows when the ends justify the means. I think you might be that man. Are you with me, Frank?’

  ‘I’m with you, Graham.’

  ‘I’ll give you a year to sort out the rare earth supply chain.’

  If anyone could do it, Frank Good could.

  ‘If you succeed, you’ll replace the VP of the Green Energy Division.’

  Vice president. Frank felt his chest swell.


  ‘I’m putting my own reputation on the line here, Frank. Don’t let me down.’

  ‘You can rely on me, Graham.’

  ‘You have a month to put your affairs in order before you relocate to Shanghai.’

  Escape from moribund Teesside to new Eastern promise.

  ‘Now, what do you say to a G&T at the nineteenth to seal the deal?’

  PART VII

  JANUARY

  Brae, Shetland, Scotland

  The wind howled across Yell Sound and into Sullom Voe. The small plane from Aberdeen, buffeted by the gale, made two attempts to land at Scatsta airport before being diverted to Sumburgh, fifty miles to the south.

  Jaq made it as far as her lodgings in Brae before taking the decision.

  Dan’s phone was dead, his LinkedIn profile deleted. It was as if he’d never existed.

  Except for the coded message.

  She’d sat with her student in his Shanghai apartment as he begged her for help, and she’d misunderstood and ignored him. She’d seen only what she wanted to see, abandoned him in his moment of need.

  She’d taken the easy decision, just like before.

  You’ve done what you can, others will care for him now.

  They lied. But this time, she had a chance to put it right.

  The call to Norse Energy didn’t go well. She had to leave but couldn’t tell them why or for how long. She certainly couldn’t tell anyone where she was going, which made the call from Vikram even worse – bridges well and truly burnt. And then she was trapped. The flights leaving the island were booked up for days, so Jaq took a bus to Lerwick and caught the overnight ferry to Aberdeen. From there she took a train to London and booked the earliest available flight to Shanghai.

  The only seat left on the plane was near the back. As she turned right instead of left, she glanced longingly at the front of the cabin. How smug she’d been last time she flew to China, sitting up there in business class, sipping champagne. Spoilt for life.