For a fleeting instant, he opened himself up to emotions absent from his life for so long he barely recognized them. As quickly as they appeared, he suppressed them with extreme prejudice. There was no room for such things in his world right now. He let go of her hand and turned away, staring at the wall.
“I can’t get involved with anyone right now,” he said.
Carrie put a hand on his shoulder. “Richard…” she said, an edge in her voice. He turned slowly to face her.
“We’re damaged goods,” she said. “We’re both carrying around baggage that we’ll never really be able to throw away.”
He avoided her eyes.
“You made a promise,” she continued, “but the person you made it to is gone. We’re still alive; we’ve got to move beyond what happened in the past or our lives won’t be worth living.”
He scowled at her. “So you’re saying I should just forget about Danny?”
“I’m saying you’ve still got a life, Danny or no Danny, promise or no promise.”
He turned away again, his gut churning with confusion and fear. Finally, he said, “I’ve got some thinking to do.”
He staggered over to the farthest bed, flopped down and closed his eyes.
“Fine…” she said icily. She made up her own bed, switched off the light and fell asleep alone.
In the morning when he awoke, Richard turned to check Carrie’s bed – she wasn’t there. He panicked, remembering the night before. A wave of fear rippled through his body at the thought that she might have been angry enough to leave forever. He rushed down to the main entrance, past the guard and down the front steps, to check the bike rack. Her bike was still there. He breathed a huge sigh of relief.
But then where? He thought.
He checked the cafeteria. In a far corner, cradling a cup in her hands and gazing out the window – was Carrie. The golden rays of the morning sun coloured her upturned face. She finally noticed him – her expression was non-committal.
“Thank God you’re still here,” he said as he approached. “I was afraid you were upset about last night…”
He sat down across from her.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have rushed you.”
“I know I’ve been obsessed,” he said. He looked into her eyes and took her hand. “Just now - when I thought you might be gone, I pictured going back to the life I had before, and I realized how empty and meaningless it had become. It wasn’t a life. It was an existence. Maybe if I can get through this…”
She finally smiled.
“Why don’t you just grab a cup of tea and join me?” she said.
Richard did as she suggested, came back and sat next to her, feeling the warmth of her body touching his.
It was a working day, and the College was in session as they made their way toward the faculty office block. The halls were brightly festooned with streamers, banners, and both official and hand-drawn posters celebrating ‘Innovation Day’. Carrie glanced up at the decorations and shook her head. They made a right turn and headed down a hallway dotted with office doors.
“So who is this guy you want to talk to?” she said.
“An instructor.”
“An instructor? For what subject – Criminology?”
“No, the man I want to talk to teaches History.”
Swallow the Tracker
Swallow’s head throbbed painfully as he staggered to his feet about twenty minutes after Danny’s attack. His vision was blurred, and there was a constant loud ringing in his ears. He leaned on a nearby tree for support as he gathered his wits and considered what to do next. One thing was certain – the boy would pay! His ex-prisoner probably thought there would be no way for Swallow to find him. But he was wrong – he was so wrong!
Swallow smiled remembering his boyhood in Jordan many years before, his father taking him along as he went to care for his flocks of sheep. Swallow became an expert in tracking lost animals through the hot, dusty hills where they were apt to stray.
Though he was often ridiculed for his slow wit and clumsiness, not only by others in his village but even by his own family, all acknowledged that Swallow’s ability in tracking was second to none. Every trampled clump of grass, every broken branch, every footprint, was a signpost leading him to his quarry.
After several minutes his vision began to clear and he was able to stand and maintain his balance. He set off, easily picking up Danny’s trail as it ran to the south. He stumbled through the woods, cursing at every root and tree stump in his path, clenching and un-clenching his fists.
“They all think I’m stupid” he raged to himself out loud. “They don’t know. They don’t know what I have done in my life. Do they think I’ve been lying under a tree drinking wine for my whole life? The brat will be sorry when I find him. He will wish he had treated me with some respect!”
He continued to mutter to himself as he painstakingly retraced Danny’s trail. A broken branch here, a crushed patch of grass there – all had a story to tell. The going was slow as he was forced to stop and investigate each telltale sign, but within a few hours he had found the rock outcropping where Danny had first tried to cut his bonds, and smiled as he studied the rope shards the boy had left behind.
Sometime later, he stood on the hill where Danny had desperately scanned to see if he was being followed, and traced Danny’s footsteps back down. He found the discarded rope that had once tied Danny’s hands, and stuffed it into his pack with a self-satisfied grin. He knew Danny was tired and couldn’t keep up a rapid pace for long. But the boy had taken his gun and his hands were now free. He would have to be careful.
A History Lesson
“We’re going to see a man named Amir Gupta,” said Richard, as he and Carrie passed through the bustling offices of the Faculty Block. “I’ve only met him once or twice. He’s a bit eccentric but he’s a brilliant man. He’s got a reputation for an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of this area. I don’t know why I didn’t think to talk to him before. I was too stressed out about Danny, I guess.”
They arrived at Gupta’s office. The door was open. Richard tapped on the frame and poked his head inside.
“Richard,” said Gupta, looking up from some paperwork. He had the unkempt, distant expression that seemed to be the hallmark of many academics. His curly mop-like hair stood straight out from his head, and his wispy beard left a number of bare patches. “Good to see you.”
Gupta’s office left little doubt about his personal passion. There were countless models, paintings, photographs, even a mobile rotating beneath one of the office lights.
All with the same theme: Trains - from the ancient coal-burning variety to the latest ultra-fuel-efficient designs. Richard glanced up at a giant photograph hanging on the wall behind Gupta’s head and shuddered - it was a picture of the Food Train.
Gupta’s desk was littered with statues and models of trains of every size and style. Conspicuous on his desk was an item that made his lofty status at the College crystal clear.
Gupta had his own computer.
He rose from his chair. He and Richard shook hands, and Richard introduced Carrie.
“Have a seat,” said Gupta sweeping his hand over two chairs facing his desk.
“So…you said you have some questions for me,” he said, sitting down himself and leaning back in his chair. He lifted a large model train that partially blocked his view, and realized there was no other place on the desk to put it. Finally he set it on the floor. “You mentioned that your brother is missing,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He left behind a journal,” said Richard, “and I’m trying to make sense of some of the entries. I’m hoping they’ll provide clues about what happened to him. They indicate he’s been traveling to Surrey. Whatever he found there seems to have some connection with the past. There’s references to the old Sky-Train line, references to companies with offices in Surrey – not a place you’re likely to find many active busine
sses nowadays. I’m guessing that he’s talking about things left over from a time when Surrey was still economically viable.”
“And you’re hoping I might be able to fill in some of the blanks,” said Gupta.
“That’s right,” said Richard. “One of the entries refers to some kind of company – one that probably doesn’t exist anymore.”
“What’s the name?”
“Wild Rose Energy Ltd.”
“Is that the oil company?”
“You’ve heard of it? I really don’t know – all I have is the name.”
“Yes, of course I’ve heard of Wild Rose Energy – but it’s got nothing to do with Surrey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wild Rose Energy was an Alberta company heavily involved in the development of the Oil Sands. That was before any of us were born. It was one of the most important resource players in the last days of abundant oil.”
“So is that what this is all about?” said Richard. “Resource Collapse?”
“Could be. Wild Rose was founded by a character named Billy McAllister.” Gupta leaned forward, warming to his subject. “McAllister had a reputation for being crude and abrasive, but he also had a talent for scooping up what others thought were worthless properties at rock-bottom prices and transforming them into wildly successful ventures.”
“So what’s the connection with Resource Collapse?” said Richard.
“McAllister later went on to found another organization you’ve probably heard of – ‘Can-Cartel’.”
Richard’s eyes opened wide.
“What balls, eh,” said Gupta, “actually calling your company a Cartel. It’s like daring the government to do something about it. But by that time even the government was having a hard time controlling McAllister. Give me a minute and I’ll show you something.”
Gupta turned to his computer, typed for a few seconds, studied the monitor and, after clearing several train models that were in the way, finally rotated it, pointing at an entry.
“This article describes the formation of Can-Cartel,” said Gupta. Richard and Carrie read,
...some of the biggest players in the Alberta Oil business, led by eccentric oil billionaire Billy McAllister, inked a deal yesterday giving birth to a new entity to rival the old OPEC Cartel of the late twentieth century.
The new conglomerate, christened ‘Can-Cartel’, will control a whopping 67% of the Alberta Oil Sands – one of the last remaining significant oil deposits on the planet since the collapse of the Middle Eastern oil fields.
At a press conference this morning, McAllister, who has been named chair of the new organization, issued a statement. An excerpt appears below:
‘Given the current crisis of dwindling reserves, the oil industry is under increasing pressure to produce at rates that are not sustainable in the long term. My colleagues and I have joined to present a united front against that pressure, to preserve a resource that is becoming more scarce every day.’
Noble-sounding words, but what is the truth behind them? Are McAllister and his cronies restricting production for the good of humanity, as they’re trying to imply? Or is their story simply a ruthless, cynical pretext for driving up prices and extorting massive profits from an oil-starved world?
“The choking-off of oil production coincided with a devastating decline in the industrialized economies of the world,” said Gupta, his eyes partly closed as if he was giving a lecture, “and McAllister took a lot of the blame.”
He ran another search, sifted through the results, and again rotated the screen.
“This is from a few years later,” he said.
Richard and Carrie read,
William Avery McAllister – a man who will surely go down in history as one of the most rapacious, megalomaniacal figures of 21st century business – and that’s saying something.
His Can-Cartel conglomerate, purged of meaningful opposition, maintains a stranglehold on the Oil Sands, releasing crude at a trickle and driving fuel prices stratospheric, while business grinds to a halt, humanity freezes and starves, and chaos erupts around the globe.
Not even the threat of the Americans to march an army north and seize the remaining supply has convinced McAllister, or the Canadian Government he appears to control, to open the taps any wider.
Though the American threats are mostly hot air (aside from being bogged down in a prolonged war with the Chinese, where would they get the fuel for their tanks and troop carriers?), they underscore the crisis now threatening the world.
Let’s face it – there are no alternatives to oil. All the blather about ethanol, hydrogen, wind and solar power is just so much nonsense. Without oil, the world economy will collapse. Of that there is no longer any doubt. The only question is, how devastating will that collapse be?
“This McAllister sounds like a real piece of work,” said Richard. “So we owe a lot of our current problems to him?”
“Some…” said Gupta, “but only some. People believed that the reserves controlled by Can-Cartel could bridge the transition to alternate forms of energy, and that the company chose not to release them simply out of greed.
“The company’s true motives have never been established, but ironically, Can-Cartel probably did humanity a favour by denying them the oil they were so greedy for. Developed nations were forced to confront the ‘C’ word – ‘Conservation’, in the deadly serious manner required, and they were better able to make the transition to a post-oil economy.”
Gupta picked up a tiny model train and turned it in his fingers as he spoke. “But nobody saw it that way back then. Governments around the world pressured the Canadians to investigate Can-Cartel’s books, looking for an excuse to nail McAllister. It turned out they didn’t have to look very hard. The auditors found scores of accounting irregularities and fraud on a massive scale. Billions of dollars of company funds had mysteriously disappeared.
“It was the scandal of the century. It was in all the papers for more than a year. There was even talk of a secret bunker and a fuel reservoir McAllister had supposedly built to hold the world for ransom when the anticipated Armageddon arrived. It was just after they came up with an additive that extended the shelf-life of gasoline almost indefinitely, so in theory the cache could still be usable today.
“The rumours were discounted as the ravings of conspiracy freaks and paranoids, but they resurfaced periodically, and their persistence gave them credibility.”
“Wow!” said Richard. “So what finally happened to McAllister?”
“Well, it’s not pretty,” answered Gupta setting down the model. “He was indicted for fraud and racketeering, convicted, and packed off to jail, and Can-Cartel was forcibly broken into a half-dozen pieces. What remained was still one of the most powerful business entities on the planet, but gone were the days when it could tell world governments what to do.
“In the end, McAllister died in prison. I think his heart gave out on him. He never did say what happened to all the money, though it’s assumed that one or more of his cronies at Can-Cartel ended up with it, with or without his blessing.”
“And the fuel cache?”
“Rumours have continued to circulate about a secret cache, but if anybody knows anything, they’ve never talked, and they’re not likely to now – anyone with firsthand knowledge has been dead for at least thirty years. Treasure hunters have poured over most of the province of Alberta, without success. So, the mystery remains – we may never know the answer.”
“How big was this cache supposed to be?” asked Richard.
“Assuming there ever was a cache, it’s hard to imagine it being very large. How could McAllister have built something of any size without attracting major attention?”
“Danny’s journal has a picture of what looks like a Wild Rose in it,” said Richard. “I found a building in Surrey with the same picture. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I can’t imagine what your brother could have found that would relate to W
ild Rose. As I said, Wild Rose Energy was an Alberta company. Maybe the picture refers to something else.”
“Another journal entry that recurs is the word ‘Eldorado’ – can you think of any relationship between the word Eldorado and Wild Rose Energy or McAllister or Can-Cartel?”
“No – sorry…I don’t think I’ve ever come across that word in any context that relates to what we’ve been discussing.”
“What about an unusual spelling of ‘Wild Rose Energy’. Have you ever come across any literature where the ‘i’ in ‘Wild Rose’ is replaced by an asterisk – like this?” Richard grabbed a scrap of paper and reproduced the ‘W*ld Rose Energy’ entry he’d found in Danny’s journal.
“I’m afraid not. It means nothing to me.”
“Well, thanks, Amir” said Richard, rising and shaking Gupta’s hand. “You’ve been incredibly helpful.”
They returned to the respite room, and Richard started organizing his pack.
“You don’t want to do any more research?” Carrie said.
“I don’t think so,” Richard said. He thought about it and sat down at the little table. Carrie sat across from him.
“There’s one entry in the journal that’s sort of away from all the others,” he said. “It’s nothing I could research. Danny says something like ‘F says C can get transportation’. F and C are obviously people. Fred, Frank, Chuck, Clarence…”
“It sounds like Danny went to this ‘C’ looking to rent a vehicle.”
“One of his friends from school said that Danny called what he was doing in Surrey ‘prospecting’.”
“Prospecting? Like for gold or jewels or something?”
“I don’t know. Prospecting in Surrey? Is it possible that people left valuables in their houses that he found lying around…”
“If people left anything behind it would have disappeared a long time ago. Surrey may be uncivilized, but there’s still lots of people there. Those abandoned houses would have been looted a thousand times by now. Anyway, whatever he found doesn’t sound like jewelry or gold. It must be something he can’t move himself. Maybe it’s too big, or too obvious. So he needs some way to transport it. He goes to this ‘C’ person, who’s probably some underworld type. That would be the only way Danny could get his hands on a car or truck.”
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