Cyanide Games: A Peter Tanner Thriller

by Richard Beasley

  ‘I knew if I ever stayed at a hotel like this, I’d feel this way,’ she said.

  ‘What way is that?’

  ‘That it’s exquisite, but for the guests.’

  ‘You feel superior?’

  She gave him a look that hovered between quizzical and suspicious. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  He shrugged. ‘The world is full of disagreements between groups of people who feel superior to one another for different reasons.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Prosecutors and defence counsel, for a start.’

  ‘I don’t feel superior.’

  ‘You don’t feel superior to mining executives? Or their lawyers?’

  She looked towards the sea. ‘Superior is the wrong word.’

  ‘Morally purer?’

  She turned and looked at him again, a vague smile on her face. ‘You don’t?’

  He smiled. ‘I’m a criminal defence lawyer,’ he said. ‘I feel superior to everyone.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Very.’

  Buca Vincenzo was located at the end of a small laneway off Corso Umberto, the main pedestrian trail of the old town. It had a large terrace with views of the Med and of Etna.

  The restaurant was full, but a young woman approached them at a brisk pace, smiling brightly. The smile dissolved when she saw Lisa. Tanner knew then that he was looking at Gabriella Campbell. She had short, dark hair, and her skin was tanned to burnt butter.

  ‘Hi Gaby,’ Lisa said. ‘You look well.’

  A long moment passed before Gabriella Campbell spoke. ‘I’ve told you, I can’t help you.’

  ‘Can you show us our table?’ Tanner said.

  Campbell kept looking at Lisa for another moment, before turning her attention to him.

  ‘Our table,’ he repeated. ‘My name’s Tanner. I have a reservation.’

  She didn’t bother checking, just turned and walked off. She showed them to the terrace, which was lit only by strings of fairy lights and candles on the tables. She stopped at one by the edge, and then held back a chair for Lisa.

  ‘Marco will be your waiter,’ she said.

  ‘We’d rather you were,’ Tanner said.

  ‘I’m not a waitress.’

  ‘Did they make you sign a document?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘We can take a look at it for you, if you like?’

  ‘I’ve had a lawyer look at it.’

  ‘Here, or in Sydney?’

  ‘Would that matter?’

  ‘Was it Joe Cheung?’

  ‘I have to get back to the front.’

  ‘We only want to discuss your report with you.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You discussed it with Joe. We have a copy, Gaby.’

  Although she was looking at him, it seemed like she was looking beyond him, back to some memory. ‘Then you don’t need me.’

  ‘If Citadel has done something illegal, what they’ve had you sign to keep you quiet is worthless.’

  Her smile was bitter. ‘Do you think they’ll see it that way?’

  ‘They don’t have to know. All we’re asking is for you to talk privately to us.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. ‘I – I just –’

  ‘We’ll be back tomorrow night if you say no.’

  ‘We’re fully booked.’

  ‘You’ll find a reservation in my name again.’

  She shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t make threats to locals in Sicily.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re calling the carabinieri, or the mafia?’

  ‘My cousins are more frightening than both.’

  ‘Then let’s fly them home and introduce them to the Citadel lawyers.’

  For the first time, she looked at him without hostility in her eyes. ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Timeo.’

  ‘Slumming it, then?’

  ‘I’m helping to organise a legal conference next year. I’m scouting for venues.’

  ‘One hour.’

  ‘Meet us for lunch.’

  A man approached the table, and started talking at Campbell in frantic Italian.

  ‘Anything else I can do for you before I get fired?’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘What’s your favourite local wine?’

  37

  Gabriella Campbell met them in the foyer of their hotel just after one the following day, and they took a table on the terrace overlooking the sea.

  ‘I meant what I said last night,’ Lisa said as they sat down. ‘You look well.’

  ‘I put on weight when I first got here,’ she said, looking at the plate of antipasti Tanner had arranged for lunch. ‘There are no single course meals at my aunt’s house.’

  ‘Is that where you live?’

  She shook her head. ‘I have my own flat now.’

  ‘It’s your uncle’s restaurant?’

  ‘My mother’s oldest brother.’

  ‘You’ve adopted his name?’

  She looked towards the horizon. ‘I wanted to leave Gaby Campbell behind for a while.’

  ‘Is running a restaurant in your blood?’

  ‘I don’t run it.’

  ‘Why are you here then, Gaby?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘I’d rather hear it from you.’

  She picked up her glass of water and took a sip. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘It’s not hard to find someone who’s not hiding.’

  ‘Nothing will stop that gold mine,’ she said, looking at Lisa.

  ‘We can try.’

  ‘I tried,’ she said. ‘Now I’m here.’

  ‘Most people would like it here,’ Tanner said.

  She glared at him before responding. ‘I’m a hydrogeologist. I didn’t study to be a maître d’ in a tourist town.’

  He nodded. ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘You’re not here to discuss my plans.’

  ‘That depends on what they are.’

  She sighed. ‘What do you want to know about my report?’

  ‘We know less about hydrogeology than you do.’

  ‘So I should start at the beginning?’

  ‘Please.’

  She looked over Tanner’s left shoulder, towards the volcano. ‘Four or five hundred million years ago,’ she said, ‘there were a lot of those in what’s now western New South Wales.’

  ‘That is starting at the beginning.’

  ‘The volcanic activity separated metals into zones in the earth’s crust. They’re now in handy seams for miners. Near Bageeyn River, there are seams of copper and gold.’

  ‘Lots, I understand.’

  ‘There’s a couple of mines near Orange that have been operational for about twenty years. Citadel’s exploration area is much further to the south-west. It’s a bigger area, and a bigger resource.’

  ‘And because of that they need more water?’

  She nodded. ‘They’re seeking approval for three mines. Two underground, one open-cut. They want to dig up fifty million tonnes of ore a year. From that, they say, they’ll get one and a half million ounces of gold, and maybe a hundred thousand tonnes of copper. And they want to do that for forty years.’

  ‘Tell us about the river,’ Tanner said.

  ‘The simple version or the complex one?’

  ‘We’re lawyers.’

  ‘I need to draw something.’

  Tanner opened his satchel and gave her a pad and a pen. She lifted her sunglasses, and sat them on top of her head.

  She drew three circles at the top of a page. ‘These are the mines,’ she said. ‘What I’m drawing is a basic ore processing facility.’ Lisa and Tanner nodded, and she went on: ‘First, the ore is crushed.’ She drew lines from the circles, down to a square which she marked grinding plant. She drew an arrow to another box, which she marked flotation plant.

  ‘That’s where the water becomes involved?’


  She nodded. ‘Think of it as a giant washing machine. You mix the crushed ore in the water, then add chemicals. The metals attach to the chemicals, float up in bubbles, and you scoop off the copper and gold.’ She drew two more arrows, this time from the flotation plant to two more circles. In one circle she wrote copper-gold and in the other she wrote tailings dam. ‘The minerals end up here,’ she said, ‘and the tailings water and chemical residue ends up in the dam.’

  ‘Your report has the mine using a lot more water than Citadel says it’ll need.’

  ‘Everyone agrees the mines won’t be viable without a lot of water,’ she said. ‘Where I disagree with Citadel is about how much water they’ll need, and so how much they’ll have to take from the river, and what the consequences of that will be. I also think the impacts on the surrounding aquifers will be greater than what they estimate.’

  ‘Start with the amount of water they’ll need.’

  She picked up her glass, then shook her head. ‘This is one of the things they went crazy at me about.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The amount of water they say they’ll need for fifty million tonnes of ore per year is a big underestimate,’ she said, ‘but they were right when they said that isn’t my area of expertise.’

  ‘You’re talking about the amount of water they’ve got to add to the flotation plant?’

  ‘Citadel says it’s the most efficient user of water in the world. It’s complicated, and you’re going to need to talk to other experts, but they say the way they crush the ore and the precise mixture of chemicals they use to separate the metals is somehow so advanced that they’ll need less water than other miners would for the same amount of ore-to-metal ratio.’

  ‘You don’t believe that?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not what I believe, it’s what they wouldn’t tell me – they wouldn’t back that claim up with scientific proof. Separating metals from ore using water and chemicals isn’t my area of expertise, I admit that. I know what it takes for other mines, though. I pressed them about it, and they wouldn’t support their assertions – and that’s all they are – with anything that made me comfortable about what they’re claiming. They just kept saying, “This is the amount of water we need to run the mines, you have to accept that, and base your report on it.” I kept saying these three mines are bigger than other similar mines around the world, so how are you saying you won’t need more water? They wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘This is something you spoke to Joe about?’ Tanner said.

  Campbell leant forwards in her chair. ‘I’d met him before. He helped me with an expert report for court on a challenge to a coal mine. He made sure the report was warts and all about water impacts. My job is to assess as best I can the water loss caused by mining to rivers and aquifers. To do that I need to have some certainty as to how much water is going to be used in the process. I didn’t get that. I got assertions, and a brush off.’

  ‘Then there’s the “other sources of water” issue,’ Lisa said.

  Campbell nodded. ‘Citadel says it will get its water from several sources. Most will come from the river. To compensate, they have to buy licences from other river systems, and then not use that water, but that hardly helps the Bageeyn. They say they’re eventually going to build some pipelines to various towns in the region, and use recycled effluent, and also some recycled water from the tailings dam.’

  ‘And you didn’t accept everything you were told about that?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I spoke to some other people about what I was being asked to assume.’

  ‘Who?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t breach confidence. I asked general questions, without saying specifically why. This is a huge project – I wanted to get things right, not just say what suited Citadel. Rainfall overestimate and evaporation underestimate were two things I queried them on. This region is getting drier. And the evaporation rates from the tailings dam didn’t seem right either.’

  ‘Not right, or not truthful?’

  ‘Does it matter? The result is the same – not enough water.’

  ‘It’d matter to a judge,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Even if I accepted everything they said about water, I still think the impacts will be greater than they say they’ll be, and catastrophic for the river if they’re underestimating water use.’

  ‘And the impacts on the aquifers?’ Tanner said. ‘The fifty versus five-hundred-year issue?’

  ‘Whenever there’s underground mining, you get subsidence,’ she said. ‘The earth above the longwalls drops. That causes depressurisation of the aquifers. The ones the farmers are using for their water from their bores.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘The subsidence causes pressure loss. It creates cracks under the earth and the water level drops.’

  ‘So you can’t get water from bores anymore?’

  ‘You have to drill deeper,’ she said. ‘And the risk is that water that can be used by agriculture gets mixed with saline water that can’t be. And then no one can use it.’

  ‘And Citadel and the government’s expert say this is a life of mine-plus-fifty-years problem, during which they’ll truck in any water a farmer needs, and you say it’s a five-hundred-year problem?’

  Campbell sat back in her chair, a wry smile on her face. ‘Any hydro who says they know how long it’ll take for the aquifer pressure to return to its pre-mining state after Citadel leaves is lying. Their estimate is way too optimistic. Three hundred years? Maybe. Five hundred? More likely. Longer than that? Just as likely. And don’t tell me Citadel is going to be trucking water to farmers and fruit growers in five hundred years. They and their profits will be long gone.’

  ‘And the loss of pressure affects the river too?’

  ‘Sure,’ Campbell said. ‘There’s the water coming out of the river directly, but depressurising the water underneath affects base flow as well.’

  ‘So all up, this mine will kill the river?’

  ‘You need riparian experts and ecologists to make that final call, but yeah, based on the amount of water it will lose, a mine of this size will eventually kill it. That river will become intermittent, and then ephemeral or worse. At about the time they’re packing their bags to leave when the gold’s gone.’

  ‘You spoke to other experts?’ Tanner asked.

  Campbell nodded slowly. ‘If you want to prevent an approval for this mine, your action group will need other experts to tell you precisely what impact the loss of water will have on the ecosystems the river supports.’

  ‘Who did you speak to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All we want to do is –’

  ‘I’m not dragging anyone else into this,’ she said firmly. ‘You can get your own experts. Just ask them how much water this river can lose without the plant life dying and the wildlife being forced away.’

  ‘What about monitoring what happens to the river as the mining progresses? Won’t Citadel have to do that?’ Lisa asked.

  Campbell laughed a little. ‘Trust me. Things will look fine at first, or they’ll say the river will recover when the mine closes. Then later they’ll say, “Oops, sorry about that.”’

  ‘Can I ask a stupid question?’ Tanner said.

  She almost smiled. ‘I can’t stop you.’

  ‘This river,’ he said, ‘is it worth saving?’

  Gabriella Campbell looked at him like she was considering slapping him. ‘That really is a stupid question.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s the kind a lawyer might ask.’

  ‘You mean is a gold mine more important than a river?’

  ‘It comes down to money in the end, Gaby,’ he said.

  ‘So I should answer your question thinking only about dollars?’

  He shrugged. ‘To a lot of people, that’s all there is.’

  ‘The people of Citadel?’

  ‘We know their answer.’

  ‘I’m not
an economist. I don’t know how to put a dollar value on a river.’

  Tanner leant towards her. ‘One day I may have to tell a court why this river is worth saving,’ he said. ‘I don’t know the answer to that. You may think I should, but I don’t. Why is it more important than all that gold?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘The Bageeyn isn’t the Colorado, or the Snowy. It doesn’t drive a turbine.’ She shook her head. ‘Big boats can’t sail down it – it’s not a transport artery. You can’t value it that way.’

  ‘Then how?’

  She took a breath and sighed. ‘It’s not just a river. It’s part of the Murrumbidgee catchment of the Murray–Darling basin. There are wetlands up and down its length. I don’t know – I’d need an exercise book to write out the plants and animals that form part of its ecosystem. It’s their home – if that matters to you. My father goes fishing in it. He doesn’t call me when he catches something, though. He calls me when he sees a platypus.’ She paused and looked at him. ‘It’s nature. How do you quantify that?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s an economist who can.’

  ‘A river is a gift, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s been there long before us. It’s not ours or Citadel’s to kill. Its custodians are half-a-dozen Aboriginal clans. Can an economist put a price on that?’

  ‘They’d try.’

  ‘If you need something tangible to do with the economy,’ she said, ‘speak to the local landowners who use the waters.’

  ‘If this mine is approved,’ Tanner said, ‘the action group plans to challenge the decision. I’d like to be able to call you in our case.’

  ‘There are other people you can use.’

  ‘I want to prove they buried your report.’

  ‘Just give it to the judge.’

  ‘We stole it, Gaby. That’ll be hard to explain.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can help you with that.’

  ‘You can say there’s been a cover-up.’

  ‘I signed a document agreeing to shut up,’ she said flatly. ‘I took money from them to avoid being dismissed.’

  ‘That won’t protect them in court,’ Tanner said.