Run, Girl, Run: A Thriller

by Alex C. Franklin

  They had upset the seating arrangements, and I was forced to shift from my usual place.

  They came armed with reports, and slides, and maps, and historical test results. Final findings on the recent spill were still to be prepared, Stanko said, but preliminary indications showed that there had been no environmental impact and no danger to the community or to employees.

  It was the company’s press release ad nauseam, I thought.

  Then Stanko coughed and said, “Mr Chairman, at this juncture, I have an important update to provide.”

  He remained quiet until the chairman stopped reading from the laptop that was before him and Victor Rigby set aside a thick folder he’d been thumbing through. With the eyes of all three panelists now focused on him, Stanko resumed.

  “Syron Lake Resources had previously sought to hand back its tailings management license in the coming years,” he said. “But, today, I would like to make it absolutely clear that the company is officially withdrawing its request to hand back its license.”

  The hall erupted in gasps and whispers.

  The chairman banged his gavel. “Order. Order.”

  My jaw dropped.

  Had I heard right? They were not trying to pass the burden of this mining waste site and the cleanup operation onto the government?

  Had we really just got the victory that Osgood had suggested we would have had to fight tooth and nail for?

  Stanko continued: “Given the unfortunate and unforeseen developments due to adverse weather, as a responsible corporate citizen dedicated to protecting the health and safety of the community and to protecting the environment, we are committed to holding on to our waste management license indefinitely. We will continue to take full responsibility for this former mining property.”

  He took up another thirty minutes congratulating himself and Syron Lake Resources on the civic-mindedness of the altered request.

  “Thank you, Mr Stanko,” the chairman said after the lawyer closed his presentation. “There are a couple of things I’d like go over with you.”

  The chairman, whose nameplate indicated he was called Benoit Dromel, had appeared unfazed throughout Stanko’s presentation. Now, he wore a stern expression, like that of a principal facing down a truant in his office.

  “You’ve presented us with reports on your past performance, and projections for this cleanup, and for the long term,” Dromel said. “But we’ve heard little about how you plan to address the concerns in this community that your company’s waste management practices may be so deficient as to pose a possible threat to the environment and to this community’s well-being.”

  Even from looking at his back, I could tell that Stanko bristled at the question. He threw back his shoulders and sat up.

  “Well, Mr Chairman, I think you should keep in mind that you’ve had people come up here making unfounded accusations about Syron Lake Resources.

  “For instance, there was the insinuation that the unfortunate spill of three weeks ago would kill fish in Syron Lake. But the fact is, there’s no way that spill could have had that effect, because if you look at page five of the 1998 report I’ve submitted, you’ll see that Syron Lake was historically used as a tailings containment area and no live fish have been recorded in Syron Lake for the last thirty years.”

  “That’s hardly something to boast about, Mr Stanko,” Dromel said.

  “It’s not a boast,” Stanko boomed. “It’s a fact, plain and simple. And I raise it simply to highlight the point that uninformed members of the public may come before this panel to make appeals based on nothing but emotions and conjecture. However, it’s the duty of the CNRA as an evidence-based decision-maker to ignore such baseless utterings and concern itself only with the concrete facts before it.”

  “That may be so, Mr Stanko. But, even if this panel does find that the evidence you’ve provided is persuasive, you may want to consider that you might have a public relations problem that needs addressing.”

  “Thank you, Mr Chairman. I’ll see that your advice is passed on to the relevant department in the company.” Stanko looked around at his colleagues and snorted.

  The chairman continued on, picking at the Syron Lake Resources presentation. Members of company’s team went digging into their binders to pull out answers to his long and detailed questions.

  By the time half an hour had passed, Goran Stanko’s voice had lost all the buoyancy that had been present when he had made his announcement. At one point, his sigh was audible over the speakers. I imagined that he was startled by that as much I had been when it had happened to me.

  “Just a couple more points, Mr Stanko, and I’ll turn things over to my colleagues, if they have any further questions,” Dromel said. “We heard mention of ‘regulatory capture’ earlier today. We’ll not go into whether such a notion is relevant to this Authority. But as a regulatory body, the CNRA must be mindful of public perception, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Stanko?”

  “Of course.” The lawyer shifted in his seat. “Justice must be seen to be done, and all of that.”

  “Precisely. So, I find that I must come back to the question that was raised earlier about the level of competence your company displayed prior to the recent incident.

  “The CNRA has a responsibility, Mr Stanko, to assure the community that acceding to a company’s request isn’t taking some kind of shortcut that could jeopardize the community’s interests, even if that request involves the company paying all costs for a cleanup and continued maintenance at its waste management site. If a company….”

  I scribbled feverishly, as I had been doing all afternoon. The notes were for the written reply I would have to submit to the CNRA to complete my participation in the hearing. They might be also useful for the class action lawsuit, I thought.

  But my mind was floating in a mist of euphoria and confusion. I had come with my pebble and sling shot, only to discover Goliath waving a white flag.

  Victory had come easily. Too easily, perhaps. Should I rejoice, or be wary? Was there some kind of trick behind Syron Lake Resources’ decision to hold on to that toxic dump for all eternity?

  And then there was the panel chairman.

  Silently, I cheered all of his questions. Here was one government official who understood, who seemed to be on our side as the affected community. And particularly on my side. He was jabbing Goran Stanko with arguments from my presentation.

  Able to relax now that my speech-making was behind me, I found myself paying attention to the chairman each time I lifted my eyes from my notes.

  I had not noticed before what an intelligent face his was.

  And at first, I had found the shaved head somewhat disconcerting. Now, the self-assurance that it hinted at, along with his firm, yet urbane manner, added up to a magnetism emanating from that middle seat on the panel — a magnetism which I made no effort to resist.

  Chapter 43

  His Russian business partners were late, and Daniel Greene hated waiting.

  He sat in a booth at the far end of the Huxton pub with his back to the trendy Londoners. He was stoked for this meeting. He had taken a hit of pure white dust before leaving his flat and he would not be drinking this night.

  He had much to tell about Syron Lake.

  He tapped his fingers on the table and looked across at Nadia, his personal assistant, bookkeeper, cook, sometimes bedmate, and procurer of all his pleasures, whether in powder form or of the feminine kind. At least she amused him while he waited, rattling on about inconsequential matters and stroking her long, brown hair which fell on an almost flat chest that was plainly visible under a fitted, bra-less top.

  He liked their arrangement. No promise of permanenc
e; no demand for exclusiveness. She was loyal and reliable. There was none of those unworkable romantic expectations that poisoned relationships and destroyed the families that were built on them.

  No, he arranged his affairs so he would not be sucked into anything like that insane, three-decades-long ride through Hell he had witnessed his mother endure with the man known to the world as his father.

  Isaac Greene was not his father. The man had said so himself, a long time ago, when the family still lived on Fifth Avenue in New York. Even as Nadia spoke, Greene’s mind replayed the memory as vividly as it had done countless times over the years.

  He was nine, at the time. His mother and Isaac Greene were in their bedroom, arguing as usual; they didn’t know he was listening at the door.

  “I can’t continue like this,” his mother had said through sobs. “You’re abroad all the time now, we never see each other, and God knows who you’ve been with….”

  “How dare you?” the gruff male voice had said. “I am out there busting my tail to build this business so you can enjoy living in style, and this is the thanks I get?”

  “What’s the use of all of this if you’re never around for me or your son?”

  “Don’t get me started on that, Carmela. I looked into that. There’s never been anyone in my family with a cleft lip.”

  “What are you trying to imply?”

  “Ten years ago, I was almost full-time on the road, criss-crossing Africa, remember? I was back only a handful of days that year. You were still working at Braun Jewellers, remember? Well, I looked into it, Carmela. And guess whose great-grandfather had a cleft lip?”

  “That’s totally out of line, Isaac. You know Daniel’s condition is not necessarily genetic. It could have been caused by all the stress I was under with you being away all the time.”

  “Don’t try to give me that. I know you and Alfred Braun had eyes for each other. That imp you gave birth to is his, not mine.”

  The slap came first. Then came the crashing sounds, and the muffled cries.

  Little Daniel flung open the door; next to a broken lamp, Isaac Greene was entangled on the floor with his mother, each of them grabbing the other by the throat.

  Later that night, when his mother had tucked him in bed, she had asked about what he’d heard. He lied and said he had been in the bathroom and had come running to their bedroom only after he’d heard the crash of the lamp. The incident was never brought up again.

  But the fights never stopped. Decades later, Isaac Greene and his co-founders had done extremely well with Magrelma Mines, extracting wealth from the bowels of three continents. The man no longer needed to work hard; still, he was never long in the same place with his wife. What was different was that her competition had become young enough to be her daughters, and she had become almost completely worn down.

  It couldn’t go on like that indefinitely. Nor could Daniel Greene wait indefinitely in the shadow of a man who pledged to die with his jackboots on.

  It was the only such business Daniel Greene had personally taken care of. Isaac Greene was home alone at the family’s Grosvenor Square flat. Daniel had used his mother’s keys to sneak in by the back door, away from the prying eyes of neighbors or their servants. He saw the surprise in Isaac’s eyes, and the relief when Isaac heard Daniel’s reconciliatory words and plea for fatherly advice concerning some business matter.

  They had never really got along over the years, but, now, as two mature adults, they could have a long heart-to-heart over a few drinks, Daniel had said. The old man had several glasses of Scotch; Daniel matched him, except much of his drinks disappeared into a wide-mouthed flask when Isaac wasn’t looking.

  Daniel needed as much lucidity as he could hold on to in order to complete his task.

  After some time, he had excused himself to go to the bathroom. Isaac’s medicine cabinet was a veritable cache of lethal weapons. The oxymorphone prescribed for Isaac Greene’s chronic back problems would do the job.

  Crushed and stirred into the next drink, which Daniel, with all humility and kindness, offered to pour, it brought a permanent end to the pain — for all three members of the family.

  Nadia, of course, had backed up his story that he had been with her the whole night.

  The autopsy concluded that Isaac Greene’s demise was one of a growing number accidental deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs, the consumption of alcohol serving to double the effects of the medication to a lethal level.

  That was almost two years ago.

  Daniel Greene looked at Nadia’s small, simple face in the amber glow of the dim lights at the Huxton pub. She smiled at him and toyed with the diamond-encrusted bracelet he had given her for her birthday, the week before. Yes, this was the better way to arrange things, Greene thought. No complications.

  “They’re here.” Nadia gazed beyond his shoulder, then slinked away to another table.

  Two smartly dressed men in their late thirties took the seats opposite Greene.

  “You’re late; I don’t do late,” Greene said.

  “Accept our apologies,” Boris Nazarov, the more muscular of the two, said in a thick Russian accent. “Dr Laschenko, here, thought he saw someone staking out his apartment. We had to take evasive measures.”

  “Listen, if his problems are going to get in the way of my business, then maybe he shouldn’t be involved in this.”

  Anton Laschenko, Greene had been told, was a hunted man.

  When he had been a PhD candidate at the St Petersburg State Mining Institute in the mid-nineties, he and a fellow student supplemented their meagre scholarship funds by writing dissertations for older, mid-career candidates who didn’t care to open a book, but lusted for the framed bits of paper in order to catapult up the ranks.

  When his colleague had fallen ill, Laschenko had to take over the job for one particular individual whose thesis was on an area of economics which Laschenko knew nothing about. He copied large sections of an old American textbook, and cobbled together bits of obscure research papers. All three men got their degrees. Laschenko became an academic with the Institute and his friend went on to work in the privatized mining sector. The mid-career official rose high, very, very high, Greene had been told.

  Four years ago, Laschenko’s friend had called out of the blue; he had sounded scared and had wanted to know whether it was true that the dissertation for the official had been plagiarized; strange-looking men had been asking about it, he’d said. A few days later, the friend was shot dead. When he heard that Russian secret service agents had been to the Institute asking for him, Laschenko lost no time in fleeing the country.

  “This won’t be a problem,” Nazarov said as he stared at Greene. “Laschenko knows how to live on the run. Besides, the Syron Lake project can’t go anywhere without him.”

  Greene knew Nazarov was right.

  Laschenko was the man holding the files.

  The academic, Greene had been told, had come across the files in a vault in the basement of the St Petersburg State Mining Institute, which was more than two-centuries-old. The Institute’s Museum had close to a quarter of a million exhibits collected from more than eighty countries around the world. The vault had not been opened for almost half a century, Nazarov had said, and the files had probably not been seen since they had been mysteriously deposited there.

  Partly in English but mostly in Hungarian, the documents revealed the betrayal and greed that had accompanied the very birth of Syron Lake Resources.

  Greene knew the company had been established by four Eastern European immigrants to Canada — a Hungarian engineer and three Polish backers. What Nazarov and Laschenko revealed was that the company had been plagued with in-fighting and i
ntrigue even before the first samples had been bored.

  The engineer, disgruntled at what was to be his share, falsified reports that went to his partners, and hid certain drilling samples. He secreted away the true findings about the Syron Lake stake to a contact in Hungary, where he had hoped to get his own backers and buy out his partners, Greene had been told.

  The engineer never got to carry out his plan. Greene knew that the Hungarian went down in a plane crash shortly after the mine opened.

  Somehow, after the engineer’s death, the secret files and samples that he’d sent to Europe made their way into the vast collection of the Institute’s mining Museum, Nazarov had said.

  Now the documents were in Laschenko’s possession; they were all the academic had taken with him when he had fled Russia.

  They held the secret of the Syron Lake mine’s true potential — potential that Greene suspected Mahler had refused to acknowledge because he instinctively knew that the rejuvenated mine’s stratospheric earnings would cause Greene to supplant Mahler in importance at Magrelma.

  The biggest irony was that when operations shut down in the nineties, as far as Greene could make out, the waste from the Syron Lake Resources uranium mine had been dumped in the tailings pond somewhere in the region where any new operation would need to be centered.

  Greene did not speak Hungarian. Nadia, who was half-Hungarian, had been with him the afternoon Nazarov and Laschenko had shown him the files. She had said that what the men had said corresponded with the few pages she had been allowed to read.

  But Greene wasn’t born yesterday. He had demanded that the papers in the file be verified by an expert.

  After much wrangling, the Russians had agreed to hand the stolen documents over for authentication — but to one man alone who could be trusted, an early Russian émigré who’d had a long and distinguished career as an Imperial College London mining history professor. Greene knew of the man, had heard of his recent retirement. He had not flinched at the hefty fee for the retired professor’s confidential services.