His initial choice was Peru but the more he learnt about the place the less it attracted. Peru had good value, for sure, also offering a range of climates. But the reputation of Peruvians for tardiness bothered him. If Oleg was hyper-punctual, Andrei was reasonably punctual. To Oleg being five minutes late was a capital sin. Andrei could tolerate being up to half an hour late. Yet everything indicated Peruvians did not mind arriving two or even three hours late, always believing they were on time. Russians would be flat-out drunk long before any Peruvian guests made their first appearance. No, Peru was not for him.
Costa Rica had its charms, except it was semi-tropical. Andrei felt in his bones he was still Russian. Without cold he would suffer. Cold was part of the Russian psyche. It explained how La Rodina had beaten Hitler and Napoleon. He needed more variation than available in the tropics.
A friend had suggested Cyprus as an option. The good news was it lay within the EU and was where many Russians resided. It was not far from home and had snow on the Troodos Mountains in winter. But being inside the EU brought the drawback of easy extradition should any past sins catch up with him. Russia had no extradition law for its citizens. This was part of the constitution. Returning to La Rodina would have been his first choice, but this wasn't sensible with his record and was at odds with his Estonian 'grey' identity card with open access around Europe.
To choose a long-term home was complicated. Andrei did not fancy Africa. Australia or New Zealand were suitably remote, but he would find it hard to obtain the right residence papers, unless one of them had a 'no questions asked in return for a minimum investment' policy. They were worth further work and the South Island really did have cold and glaciers.
Norway? Along with the delights of Helga and Freja it offered both warmth and cold. It was civilised, except for its membership of NATO, links to the EU and dreary righteousness. Plus drink – even life – was expensive. The weekend with Helga and Freja cost him more than living for a month in Tallinn or two months in Narva. Scratch Norway.
Canada? Why hadn't he considered this before? It had cold but boredom was an issue. He'd often heard how nice Canadians were, providing you did not wish to talk about anything serious for too long. It did have an 'invest here, live here' policy. Would he receive enough from Oleg to buy a business decent enough to provide the income and anonymity to enjoy retirement? Mexico? The opposite to Canada and lawless to an infinite degree.
He clicked a news page on his browser. The Italians were having a hard time. Three people in intensive care and almost 200 in hospital. That was Naples. Everything happened there. They'd even had a cholera outbreak in the early seventies from eating shellfish from Naples Bay when the place was thoroughly polluted with human sewage. Rubbish accumulated in the sea, just like Rio in the twenty-first century. He shuddered.
Cleanliness was habitual for Andrei. Not to the excesses of Oleg who made him laugh with his frank distaste for the messy outcome of sex. That was Oleg. Prim. Andrei wished Oleg to return as a schoolmistress spinster in his next life so that he, or she, would dwell on the deprivations from the practices and consequences of pleasure. A vengeful mirth shook him.
Yet he had to decide soon where to re-establish himself. Preparation took time if he was to disappear on minimal notice, though his escape methodology was in place. From Tallinn he would board an anonymous bus to Riga. From Riga he would fly charter to a tourist hub like Mallorca or Málaga. There he would buy a ticket to Istanbul and carry on to Armenia or Azerbaijan. Another bus, from Yerevan or Baku to Tbilisi, accompanied by a final change of passport, and the penultimate flight would be to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. From either of these Andrei could go wherever he chose, with the tiniest chance of anyone tracking him. In effect he would be a pearl in his own oyster. The key involved leaving minimal footprints throughout.
He had helped others, for a fee, do a simplified version of the same. These arrangements proved his process worked. It was his turn and he wasn't telling Oleg. One day they would have a dinner to celebrate the final money transfers. The next morning Andrei would vanish. Three days later, reconstituted as an open, honest tax-paying citizen in another land under another name, he could relax. He couldn't wait. Roll on that day. But he must decide where in advance in order to be able to exit at a moment's notice.
Wednesday: Madrid
Ana reached home early. Inma was already in Yuste, pleading she needed to prepare for Lili's arrival. Before going she sought Ana's legally-trained opinion about whether an infestation deliberately caused was a natural event or not. As this wasn't easy to answer, Ana offered to go back to her original university law texts to search for anything relevant.
The legal issue intrigued her. In her judgement the crux pivoted around the simple fact that an olive became infected through penetration of its skin by the egg of a natural pest, namely the olive fruit fly. Nobody could oblige a fruit fly to infect a specific olive. Worse still, to find out for certain if an olive was infected, you had to cut the olive open. But cutting one open ruined the integrity in which the egg was to gestate. In this case the potential to sustain the growing olive fruit fly was destroyed. No growing platform, no fly. No flies, no infestation. Or was she missing an angle? Her brain worked on the problem in background mode.
Next was her call with Kjersti. It would be good to chat to her. Ana hadn't enjoyed such a good conversation for months. Not since with Davide when he was closeted here with her. Hmm, not such an encouraging analogy after all.
Did Ana know Kjersti well enough to invite her to Madrid? It was an idea, though it would work better if she could scrounge up a couple of decent men. This seemed doubtful. The reasonable-to-good ones were married; the others weren't worth the power of their credit cards. Why was it always this way?
Would Kjersti think worse of her? From her comments about that man in the 50K run she was open to 'entertainment'. At least Ana could offer Kjersti her spare room and Inma might even dangle Yuste as a prospect. She poured wine and started Skype. At nine she tapped in Kjersti's landline number, receiving no answer. Five minutes later she tried again, and ten minutes after that. Still nothing. By now she was tense with annoyance.
She left it a further half-hour. She would try one more time before giving up and leave it to Kjersti, except this time she answered.
"Ana?"
"Yes. I tried when you said."
"My fault. Are you calling from the Internet? You show up as an anonymous number. I don't answer those – too many people selling. I should've suggested you ping me first. My fault."
Ana's posture softened as her irritation faded. She couldn't blame Kjersti; she did likewise. It was the curse and benefit of seeing the numbers calling you.
"No problem. What can I do for you? Your tone suggests you want more than a friendly chat?"
"I've a confession to make."
"A confession?"
"You spoke about your work on the plane. You were polite. You didn't press me for what I do."
Ana agreed. She had noticed and had been too polite to demand an answer.
"I'm a freelance investigative journalist, when I'm not writing about extreme running, which is my hobby."
"And?"
"Before I tell you more, you talked a little about your interest in olives and olive oil. How much do you know?"
"Not much six months ago, but now I know quite a lot. I know that much olive oil sold in Spanish supermarkets as the best Extra Virgin Olive Oil is nothing of the sort. It's stuff you wouldn't want to enter your body."
"I was right. My intuition said you might be able to help. In Norway we don't have olive trees or olive oil. I'm utterly ignorant and need to learn fast."
"Why?"
"For a story."
"About?"
"Have you seen what's happening in Italy? Hundreds of people poisoned?"
"Yes, but that's Naples. Isn't it the biggest rubbish dump in Europe?"
"True. But I'm commissioned to investigate a rumour that the poisoning d
erives from contaminated olive oil."
"Really? Are you sure?"
"Not yet. My trouble is I don't know enough to ask the right questions or even where to ask them. Meeting you on the Tallinn planes was fortuitous. To be blunt, I want to pick your brains."
"You know Spain had cooking-oil poisoning in the early eighties?"
"I didn't. What happened?"
"That's an interesting story in itself. As many as a thousand died and tens of thousands were horribly ill."
"You are kidding ... aren't you?"
"No. Officially all was attributed to cooking oil padded out with rapeseed oil. They named it Toxic Oil Syndrome."
"Italy sounds suspiciously like this all over again."
"Look it up. You may also find a very different theory, namely that it wasn't poisoned cooking oil at all, but organo-phosphate poisoning from poorly-washed fruit or vegetables, probably tomatoes."
"O-Ps. Ugly, ugly chemicals. I wrote a story on them once. You mean there was a cover up?"
"Nobody seems to be sure. It happened just after Tejero's attempted coup in the Cortes. The government was twitchy about its credibility."
Ana reflected during a pause. Her mother knew a family ruined by whatever was the cause. They always denied buying cheap cooking oil, insisting they had only used natural olive oil from their cousins' farm near Badajoz. Nevertheless, they'd signed a document agreeing they'd bought cheap cooking oil in order to receive paltry compensation.
Kjersti broke into Ana's reflections with, "Do you know anyone in the olive oil business?"
Ana laughed loud. The coincidence delighted. She explained about Olivos Ramos y Tremblay, without referring to her insurance interests. Doing a Kjersti on Kjersti?
"Ana, you're a journalist's dream. May I invite myself to Madrid? Can you introduce me?"
"I was already thinking of inviting you. Yes, so long as you don't compromise me, if you get me? Now that I know you're a journalist."
"I promise. Great! When can I come?"
"This weekend?"
"Wow! You move fast. I'm not sure I can get organised that quick."
"If it helps, you can stay in my spare room. It's a little pokey but functional, with a sofa-bed."
Ana remembered Davide was one of its last occupants. . She frowned.
"Let me find out about flights."
"Just ping me. If I'm not working when you land, I'll pick you up at Barajas."
"That'd be great. By the way, I've put up photos from the Kuressaare run on Facebook. Most are press pictures but a couple I took along the way. Have a look. Or we can look together when I reach Madrid."
Thursday: Úbeda
María was enjoying the time of her life. The assembly of her Raspberry Pi toaster was the most design fun since university. How could she have been so dumb to forget the challenges of engineering for so long? It was time to test.
Setting down her water glass reminded her of half-full, half-empty choices. She had married Juan after Enrique sold the Córdoba house, which had been almost a home to her and her mother. Plus Enrique became unavailable when Lili moved into Úbeda.
Juan had turned out to be a screamer, a violent bastard when no one was around to see his brutality. In public he charmed like the friend everyone wanted. In private he was hell incarnate. Dislike grew to hatred. When María's doctor diagnosed a second cracked rib he referred her to a battered wives refuge.
In this she'd recovered and repaired. Living with her mother again she divorced Juan at the first opportunity. He'd ranted and raved, and ranted again – and was foolish enough to threaten her in open court. That error earned him two years in prison. Before starting his sentence he scarpered. The police suspected he had fled to South America. She, and they, were happy to leave it at that, providing he did not reappear. He had been out of her life for years now.
María had never stopped thinking of Enrique, even if with no expectation of success. This continued until that informal lunch when he confided how Lili had changed their sleeping arrangements. Clearly Enrique still regarded María as no more than his childhood friend. He'd confessed his fascination with, and attraction to, Ana.
María recollected muttering to herself, "Bad luck, Ana. You'll not get in my way."
She walked over to her machines, a combination of the mechanical and the digital. Her initial tests revealed decent accuracy when deciding which olives were infected. The camera scanners were zealous in spotting bad fruit. If anything, the results were too good, rejecting a high percentage of fruit that were unaffected.
This seemed to be the right way round. Enrique disagreed. He sought the fewest wrongly rejected fruit. At least the number of false negatives stayed low. Reasoning with Enrique was misery-inducing. María had to select her words in order to avoid raising his hackles about the wrong issues. The constant risk was she might remind him that he hankered for Ana, or even Lili. Her work was cut out.
Today's objective consisted of processing two batches of 1,000 olives each. Once her machines sorted them into infected or uninfected she and Enrique would slice open every one to verify the accuracy of the toaster and document what she hoped Enrique and others would accept as a statistically valid calculation of the failure rate.
But Enrique was behaving like he had as a boy. He insisted on expanding the test, by adding a third batch, again of 1,000 olives. These were to come from his precious Super High Density grove. He insisted on not providing advance notice, of which batch was which, before the toaster inspected the olives. With reluctance María acquiesced, though more to keep him sweet than believing his extension would achieve anything.
Enrique would load each batch of 1,000 in the olive-washing area situated behind a wall. She yelled when ready for the first lot. Twenty-five olives descended each one of the forty chutes. A gate opened, allowing one olive to roll past a camera eye and arrive in a holding pen with a gate and a trapdoor. Depending on what the Raspberry Pis in the toaster decided, the gate would open to release uninfected olives to roll gently into a red basket or the trapdoor to drop infected olives into a blue rejects container. It was the contents of the basket and container they would slice open.
Ten minutes later, after 1,000 olives had passed through, Enrique walked in. They drew up the red basket with the clean fruit and cut each one to inspect before laying out the results on one table. 300 olives later they found three fruit with a dead egg inside. Enrique ventured this was probably better than normal but he had no real idea. No one to his knowledge had ever tried performing a test as methodical as this.
They started on the rejected fruits. It was the same process though they placed the results on a separate table. Of the 700, 160 were clean – false positives. Enrique was horrified.
María lost her temper. She reminded him that this was small, less than 25 per cent of the 700.
He retorted, his own anger lacing his voice. 160 lost olives was more than half the number of those identified as clean or more than 50 per cent good fruit was in danger of being thrown away for nothing.
That shut her up.
She strode past him towards her laptop. Laboriously she spent two hours tweaking parameters in the software and reloading the boards in the toaster. When finished she marched up to Enrique.
"Okay. Batch two?"
He retreated behind the wall. A new set of olives descended. Another ten minutes passed. As all but one was clean, María suspected these must be from the Super High Density olives. Enrique reappeared. They repeated the cutting for the second time.
The relief on his face when reviewing the results was palpable. The only infected olive was the rejected one. For Enrique it was a double confirmation. María's system worked and his Super High Density olives had escaped the flies.
From his reaction María thought the second was the more important of the two. She rejoiced for him, though felt a little put out that her contribution was unappreciated.
"Batch three?"
This would be the real test. Te
n minutes later they were slicing. An hour later, all were open. The false positives had dropped by 60 per cent, though the false negatives were up, but only to seven, less than 1 per cent. Her adjustments had worked.
Enrique was over the moon. He picked María up and swung her round, all the while exclaiming how clever she was. She was delighted, wishing he would explore further. At least he appreciated María for her toaster and its eyes.
Tamping her frustration down she reminded him to document the complete testing process, including photographing the sets as evidence. She recommended freezing the three batches, in case their figures or photos were questioned. Enrique, of course, had moved on.
"Can we enlarge the sorting mechanism, by a factor of ten? How soon?"
María was prepared. She agreed to start ordering and building, but only if he completed the documentation. His reluctance was pronounced. His interest was in returning to the intermediate mill to supervise the processing of the olives coming from the Super High Density trellises.
"Can't you handle the documentation while ordering more equipment?"
María groaned inwardly. When obsessed, Enrique reverted to the mono-focused child she had grown up with. Escape was impossible.
Chapter Fifteen
Autumn, the following weekend
Saturday: Úbeda
María permitted herself a break. Since Wednesday she'd worked frenetically to source Raspberry Pis, cameras, cables, chutes and more. She'd spent thousands of Euros. She was impressed. Shopping on the web was straightforward with a credit card. Backed by a business with good credit, it was even easier. Yesterday, overnight packages had arrived by the hour.
To overuse an over-exercised word in Úbeda, the fly in the ointment was her employer. He'd granted her a few days off to help in the anti-fly campaign. This morning he had called to growl that he'd reached his limit. Having done his bit for society he expected her back at work on Monday, Tuesday at the latest.
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