The Bonita Protocol

by P J Skinner

  Oblivious to her quandary, Rhett pushed his lunch around his plate making engine sounds. ‘Beep, beep, outa the way patacones, beef bus coming though.’

  She forced herself to eat, chewing on the tough meat with determination. Her mind whirred. Was it geologically possible? Maybe the granite had low grade gold in it. That would be a spectacular result and change the whole project.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Rhett.

  ‘Thinking about the project.’

  Rhett gesticulated at her with a piece of beef speared on the end of his fork.

  ‘I don’t believe you. She got to you. Admit it.’

  ‘Who? Amanda? No, I’m in work mode now. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.’

  ‘Talking of bridges, we should start up the hill now. Can you organise the mules again?’

  For once, although overcast, the skies did not open for their slog up the hill. They ate a chocolate bar at the half-way hut. Before leaving, Sam approached the owner and gave him a hammerstone and her old identity card wrapped in a piece of bright red paper secured with the same green piece of string with which Señor Muerte had tied the barrel seal he had given her.

  ‘Give this to my friend,’ she said.

  ‘You’re playing with fire,’ he said. ‘Next time, he’ll kill you.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She had left the seal and the other Inca tools in the safe keeping of Alfredo.

  ‘I guess we’re not going to explore the cave this time,’ he said.

  ‘No, but it’s been there for five or six hundred years so far. It can wait until we’re ready.’

  Sam looked him in the eye. ‘Are you going to be all right? I can’t bear to leave you alone.’

  ‘I’m a big boy. It’s my responsibility to stay sober and convince my wife that I still love her. Go to work, and find a mine instead of artefacts. Amanda was right, you’re really a shit geologist.’ His voice broke which rather ruined the joke and Sam hugged him close.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

  Selma came out to welcome them back to the mine.

  ‘You look well,’ she said to Sam. ‘Did you have fun on your break?’

  ‘The beach was heaven, thank you.’

  ‘Well, go on upstairs and get settled in. Dinner will be in about an hour.

  Sam couldn’t wait to get into her room and shut the door. When the lock wouldn’t work, she took the precaution of jamming the door shut with the crude wooden chair. She felt around underneath the mattress until her hand closed over the Ziplock bag she had left there. As far as she could tell, the bag had not been opened and the contents were in the same order in which she had placed them before leaving.

  She took out the sample sheet and placed it on the table under her window. Folding the fax sheet into several pages she used her penknife to cut along the creases to make it into smaller sheets. These she placed on the table side by side with the original sample page. The blank sample numbers stood out as she had outlined them with highlighter. She matched them with the numbers on the fax sheet.

  The blanks had gold in them. She couldn’t get her head around these results. The duplicates also had gold in them. This wasn’t suspicious in itself but the vein samples which should have been erratic due to the present of nuggety gold also had an almost uniform grade of gold in them. Something was wrong.

  There were ways of checking this. She still had pieces of the blank rock from the same outcrop of granite which could be analysed in a different laboratory. If they still showed gold content, the whole model for the deposit was turned on its head. Meanwhile she would have to continue as if everything was fine. If she deviated from the original plan, she might lose the chance to find out what was happening.

  She resolved to keep a duplicate of all her notes under her mattress and get a lock for her door. She could make up some excuse about outsiders trying to rob the gringa, which was not an inconceivable scenario. On her way up to camp, people had greeted her as ‘La Reina de Cerro Calvo’ or Miss Cerro Calvo. Some had even made obsequious gestures. Word had got around that the gringa was under the protection of Señor Muerte. But was he keeping her for himself?

  Chapter XIII

  When Sam asked for a lock on her room, Javier did not ask her why. He grunted and went to talk to the carpenter.

  ‘Are you afraid I’ll try and ravish you?’ said Rhett. ‘There’s no hope of that.’

  Sam ignored him. The issue of the gold-containing blanks had concerned her to the point where his barbed comments did not register.

  ‘See you later. I’m off to the core shed.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘If you must.’

  She could not figure him out. His attitude to her had switched one hundred and eighty degrees since the revelations about Alfredo, despite her denials. Was he more comfortable with her now he considered her a flawed being, or because he thought he was in with a chance? She discounted the latter, but the former had legs. Maybe he liked the company of people with a dark side because he recognised kindred spirits.

  It would be in her interest if he trusted her, but she viewed him as Amanda’s agent, and as such, a dangerous loose cannon. However, Amanda did trust him and that meant she could run a double bluff. She pulled some core boxes from the stacks and laid them out on the table.

  ‘Have you heard of QAQC,’ she said, spraying the core with water.

  ‘The only queuing I do is for the night club,’ said Rhett.

  Sam did not take the bait.

  ‘It’s a system of checks and balances to monitor the performance of the laboratory used for sample analysis. I noticed Bonita aren’t doing any.’

  ‘Is it compulsory for market reporting?’

  ‘No but it will be soon, and if you don’t do it now, it’s not the sort of thing you can replicate later.’

  ‘Will it save us money?’

  ‘It should do. If we are sure of the quality of our results, we can design drill programmes that will have less wasted holes.’

  ‘What’s involved?’

  ‘We need to put some blanks into our sample sequence.’

  ‘What’s a blank?’

  ‘A sample without any mineralization, gold.’

  ‘How do you know it doesn’t have any gold?

  ‘Visually on site and then you send the material to the lab to check that they are barren.’

  ‘How many samples would we need to check?’

  ‘Four or five. We collected some from the Cerro Calvo granite on a field trip.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan to me. I can take some with me to Calderon.’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘If we confirm that it’s barren, we don’t tell the laboratory when we include it with the samples?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a way of monitoring the laboratory.’

  ‘Only the lab?’

  Sam froze. A chill crept into her veins. She tried to remain relaxed but her heart was racing.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Doesn’t it monitor the sampling system as well?’

  She let out the breath she had been holding.

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  Galo Martin had almost finished the survey of the tunnels. Sam joined him in the upper reaches where he continued to work with Napoleon. The lad had blossomed under Galo’s tutelage despite his health deteriorating. His cheeks were hollow and the rasp of his breath filled the adit, echoing into the darkness. They stopped for a break and Sam sat down next to him on a rock.

  ‘Should you be working?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he wheezed. ‘I know I don’t have long left.’

  ‘But why did you do it in the first place? Didn’t you know it was dangerous to burn off the mercury? Did they force you?’

  ‘I did it for my family. With the extra money they pay you for accepting the death sentence, I bought my parents a house.’

  ‘But what about--’

  ‘I sent my sisters to school as well. E
veryone laughed at me. They said girls aren’t worth educating but this time, when I went on my break, I told them about you.’

  Sam couldn’t believe her ears. ‘About me?’

  ‘Your parents sent you to school, and to university. Did they waste their money? I want my daughters to be bosses too.’

  There was a long silence as Sam searched for something to say. When she tried to speak her voice caught in her throat.

  ‘No, and you haven’t either. They’ll be your memorial. But not for ages.’

  The lie choked her. Napoleon smiled but he did not reply.

  Sam could not face dinner that evening. Selma brought her a bowl of soup and she tried to eat it out of politeness. Napoleon’s sacrifice made everything else seem trivial. Am I imagining conspiracy theories where none exist? Perhaps it was because of jealousy. Amanda had waltzed in and stolen her best friend. Was she searching for reasons to make her look bad where none existed?

  She resolved to give Amanda the benefit of the doubt. After all, she had a mining background. The fact that they disliked each other should not prevent them find common ground. She would pretend to admit defeat on the Gloria front and work on getting Alfredo back in the game.

  Sam kept her nose to the grindstone and her opinions to herself for the next few days. Working with the geologists she prepared the next batch of samples for Calderon. Again, they added blanks and duplicates without marking them on the sample sheet. Sam added a duplicate list with the blanks marked on it to the Ziplock bag under her mattress. She placed a separate batch of plain granite pieces in a clearly marked sample bag for testing as blanks.

  ‘So, if the blanks are void of gold, we’ll start using them in the next batch of samples that we send to the lab?’ said Rhett.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sam.

  ‘But you’ll let us know which ones they are?’

  ‘Naturally. We’ll provide a second list with the blanks and duplicates highlighted on it.’

  Not this time. If there were no suspicious results from the second batch, Sam would be able to relax and get on with the project. No one ever needed to know about her system of checks and balances.

  The next morning, the radio crackled into life and Marina’s voice floated over the airwaves.

  ‘…come with Rhett…Amanda. Over’

  ‘Repeat please, over.’

  ‘Amanda wants you…Rhett. Over.’

  ‘She wants me to come back to Calderon with Rhett? Confirm. Over?’

  ‘Confirm. Over and out.’

  Sam slumped in her seat. What now? It was the last thing she wanted to do with work in the field reaching a crucial stage. It was not as if she could refuse. On the positive side, she could keep an eye on Alfredo’s progress. He had insisted on her staying in the house even though Gloria had moved out to stay with her father a couple of blocks away.

  ‘I won’t give credence to that disgusting insinuation,’ he had said. ‘You are my friend and I won’t treat you like a pariah. I don’t care what anyone thinks.’

  ‘What about Gloria?’

  He snorted and dismissed the idea with a wave of his hands.

  ‘She doesn’t believe it, not really. It was an excuse to leave me. The real reason is my drinking. Amanda gave her the trigger she needed to move out.’

  ‘Have you talked to Hernan Sanchez?’

  ‘Not yet. But I will. I want to apologise to him for everything I’ve put Gloria, and him, through in the last couple of years. He’d love to see you, by the way.’

  ‘I know. I’m nervous of his reaction.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. He doesn’t believe the rumour any more than Gloria does.’

  Rhett did not express surprise at the sudden change of plans. He pursed his lips.

  ‘I expect it’s because of the conference,’ he said. ‘She’ll want you to do a press release about the samples too.’

  ‘What conference?’

  ‘Oh, she’s doing the PDAC[1] conference in Canada, looking for new investment for Bonita Mining. She’ll need posters and presentations about the project for the booth we have there. Have you used PowerPoint before?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She had no idea what PowerPoint was but she had no intention of giving him the upper hand.

  ‘Great. We have Microsoft Office on the computer in the office but it’s all Greek to me.’

  It sounded more like geek to Sam but she didn’t say so. Marina held the position of computer guru in the office so she would be Sam’s first port of call in Calderon. However, there was one thing she could not do without and pretending would not fix it.

  ‘I’m going to need a draftsman. Can I bring Galo Martin with me?’

  ‘If you need him. I’m leaving tomorrow. Will all the samples be ready by then?’

  ‘They are ready now but we need to alert the mule driver if you want to leave sooner.’

  ‘Can you tell Marina to book Galo a ticket for tomorrow?’

  Sam tried to stop her shoulders from slumping. The thought of shouting into the receiver again did not appeal.

  ‘Sure, I’ll do that later, but I need to confirm with Galo that he can come with us.’

  ‘We pay him, don’t we?’

  To Sam’s relief Galo jumped at the chance to fly to Calderon. He suggested sending Napoleon home for another break so that they could re-enter the project together.

  ‘I’m worried about the lad. He hasn’t got long to live you know. I’ve seen this before. It will be quite sudden. He’s unlikely to suffer much.’

  ‘Better he spends some time at home then.’

  ‘I doubt he’ll be back to be honest.’

  ‘Christ, poor lad. It’s a tragedy.’

  ‘He’s a good surveyor too.’

  ‘Where will you stay in Calderon? Shall Marina get you a hotel?’

  ‘I can stay with my cousin. He’s got a printing business so maybe we could use him for the leaflets and presentations.’

  After Galo had left, Sam went up to her bedroom to pack. The door was not locked as she had not had time to return to it after breakfast and the radio messages. Closing the door, she reached under her mattress to remove the Ziplock bag but it had vanished. She pulled the mattress off the slats and looked through them onto the floor. Her sample lists had disappeared.

  Her stomach did a somersault in panic. Where on earth had the bag disappeared to? Who could have taken it, and why? The only answer to this question was Rhett. Had he been suspicious of her focus on the use of blanks? Was he about to rat her out to Amanda? It wasn’t much of a job but Sam always fought until there was nowhere else to go but out.

  She spent the next few hours waiting for the bomb to drop, but it never did. Rhett did not change his behaviour nor did she catch him watching her. It was true that he hardly left her side but he was involved with the bagging of the samples and delegating supervision of tasks to Javier and the geologists. It did not make any sense.

  The next morning, the mules arrived and were loaded up with the samples. Rhett and Sam said their good byes and followed them down the hill to Arboleda. There was no sign of Señor Muerte. Had he got her message? What if she had misjudged him?

  Landing in Calderon so soon after leaving disoriented Sam. Her guts churned as they rode together in the taxi to the office. Galo Martin joked and chatted, forcing her to translate for Rhett who tolerated the stream of consciousness with barely concealed impatience. Maybe Amanda would be civil with a new member of staff in the office. This hope was snuffed out the minute they arrived.

  ‘Ah, the adulterer returns,’ said Amanda. ‘You’re lucky we can’t find a replacement at short notice or you’d be out on your ear.’

  This was a hollow threat. As if any male geologist of my standing would take a job at the salary I accepted. Amanda loved to grandstand and Sam had ceased to take it personally.

  ‘You look nice,’ said Sam. ‘Is that Chanel?’

  Amanda purred like a cat and relaxed.

  ‘A
nd who is this?’ she said, noticing Galo who was standing almost at attention, his wax moustache quivering with emotion at meeting the boss.

  ‘This is Galo Martin. I told you about him. He’s doing our resource calculation. He’s also our draftsman so I brought him with me to help prepare the presentation.’

  Galo stepped forward and offered his hand which she barely touched. He made a bad attempt to disguise his disappointment. Sam put her hand on his arm and gave him an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Marina led Galo to a scruffy sofa where she left him sitting, a bewildered being in an alien environment.

  ‘Speaking of which, come into my office and I’ll explain what we need.’

  ‘Shall I bring Galo?’

  ‘Does he speak English?’

  Sam shook her head.

  ‘Well, only you then.’

  A loud, fake cough erupted from Rhett’s throat. Amanda looked irritated.

  ‘Okay. Rhett too. Marina, can we have some coffee please?’

  Rhett rolled his eyes at Sam. She stifled a giggle. Sometimes it was hard to ignore his droll behaviour. Keeping her eyes firmly on the floor, she followed her boss into her office.

  Chapter XIV

  Marina turned out to be an expert with PowerPoint and a competent teacher. After a few tries, Sam found it intuitive and simple to master. She set out to make a clear and concise presentation for Amanda to hand out to investors.

  ‘Not that it matters,’ she said to Alfredo. ‘With those low-cut tops she wears, I’d be surprised if anyone ever takes their eyes off her chest.’

  Alfredo chuckled.

  ‘We’re not all interested in Amanda’s boobs you know.’

  ‘That woman is a liability. You’ll never guess what I found in her bathroom.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. She hoards lingerie.’

  ‘No, it’s worse than that. I told you about her private toilet.’

  Alfredo nodded.

  ‘Well, I sneaked in there today because I was desperate and Marina was hogging ours.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘White powder on the counter.’

  Alfredo’s eyes were like saucers.