Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

The bodyguard felt affronted by Georgina’s attempt to tug the sleeve of his coat, so he pushed the rest of her grapefruit into her face. Khünbish, clambering over the balustrade, twisted Chun-li’s arm.

  “I had my blood tested, and urine! Guess what? Nothing! But the CCTV footage shows me going under like a truth-serum victim after you fed me that champagne! Who are you working for, witch?”

  “Channel Ninety-Nine! We have permission to film!” Chun-li squealed, drawing on deep resources of wu-wei now to still the urge to put three straight fingers into Khünbish’s carotid artery at high velocity.

  Georgina, stunned and splattered with grapefruit, saw Hyacinth Deng step to the edge of the melee, face to the natural light, and begin speaking into a stick microphone. Shit! Rupert Wong was filming the chaos and now Hyacinth was doing an on-location piece to camera explaining, presumably, how Western news crews cause mayhem.

  “Don’t give them the tape!” Brough shouted.

  Despite the hair-pulling and shouting, the camera and its adherents had made decent progress down the stairs, but now the cartel bodyguard grabbed Carstairs between the legs, causing him to shriek. And the Oakleys Kid, having sprinted up the stairs, wedged his shoulder into the melee and got a hand on the camera.

  “Stop!” Georgina shouted.

  There was immediate silence.

  “Give them the tape!”

  “Fuck off,” Brough said.

  “Jimmy, give them the tape!”

  There was so much menace in Georgina’s voice that Hyancinth Deng, who had stopped her piece to camera in mid-sentence, now used the balls of her feet and the tips of her high heels to shuffle silently away from her.

  “You, let go of this lady’s arm,” Georgina pointed to Khünbish.

  He did. The cartel bodyguard released his grasp on Carstairs’ balls without being asked. This, Brough thought, is what you pay for when you send your daughter to Cheltenham Ladies College.

  “Now give them the tape. We are very sorry,” she moved into staccato English-for-dummies, “that we have caused upset to the guests. We did not know that filming was forbidden. We are English journalists.”

  And she smiled like Margaret Thatcher.

  Carstairs flipped the door on the tape deck, slid the tape out with finger and thumb and slapped it into the gloved palm of the bodyguard. Brough noticed, in the silence, that all the mobsters had retreated into the dining rooms, whose mahogany doors stood shut.

  “Clear fucking cowardice,” Carstairs’ voice had gone blank and fatalistic.

  Only once had Brough ever seen Jimmy Carstairs give up a tape, and that was after they’d inadvertently filmed a Lebanese militia boss at a gay disco on the outskirts of Beirut. Then it had been the threat of a one-way ride to the olive groves that had clinched it. Anyway, they’d joked later, who cares if gays can join Hezbollah. Yallah Habibi!

  This felt different.

  ~ * ~

  9

  “Twyla’s given me the authority to terminate your contract if you do anything else,” Georgina announced.

  The three of them were pacing unsteadily on the slope of a sand dune. They had ditched Mr. Bo, together with Rupert and Hyacinth and driven out here, leaving Chun-li and the van in the next valley, out of sight:

  “All I was doing...” Brough began.

  “How did you know those men were part of this so-called Rare Earth cartel?”

  Brough made an insolent face. It dawned on him that Chun-li had probably known about the cartel’s meeting and steered the filming plans to put them near it. It dawned on Georgina a split second later.

  “Right, I will sack her on arrival in Beijing,” Georgina struggled to control her voice: “In fact I will sack her now.”

  “Can I be threatened with the sack as well?” Carstairs was sweating with the heat and anger, swigging water from a bottle.

  “Why, what have you done?” Georgina jeered.

  “Bought a Firestore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After you gave that tape up in Tang Lu, I decided to install a Firestore. It’s a little box that backs up the tape to hard disc: just clips to the back of the camera. Chun-li got it for me in Ordos. They’re quite common in professional TV outfits...”

  He lifted the camera to show the device. Georgina had assumed it was an extra battery.

  “So we’ve still got shots of their faces?” She looked pained.

  “Correct, d’you want to delete them now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to wipe the disc the same as you wiped that little flash card?”

  Brough, who’d been revelling in Georgina’s discomfort, exploded.

  “What?”

  “After you collapsed in a heap last night she wanted a look at your rushes from that Cancer Village place. Took them to her room; she came down ten minutes later, said the card wouldn’t read.”

  “What are you implying?” Georgina took a swig of her own water and pulled her sunglasses over her eyes.

  There was a sharp blast from the horn of the van, the other side of the dune.

  “It wouldn’t read on mine, either,” Carstairs went on. “So, waking up at four in the morning, as you do, I got my little loup out and my tweezers and scraped off the blob of nail varnish that had somehow got onto the contacts. Then it read.”

  There is a special level of despair journalists experience over lost pictures, akin to bereavement, and Brough began to feel it now.

  “It’s blank. Sorry. Formatted. Actually Georgina, with SD cards, they record the time and date of last formatting.”

  Brough grabbed his own hair and pulled it.

  “You knew about this and never said anything?”

  Carstairs shrugged, but Brough knew why. He’d seen cameramen take decks to pieces, re-thread hundreds of metres of tape by hand, ship special gadgets from LA to Jakarta by overnight courier using their own credit cards-even fake coronary thrombosis-rather than admit their pictures had been lost.

  There was more urgent honking from the van.

  “This is totally shit,” Brough shouted. “You have destroyed evidence - probably of a major global story. What’s the excuse - I was only obeying orders?”

  He tried to spin on his heel and march away but lurched across the sand instead. He needed to get out of the sun and think. If Chun-li had set up the entire encounter with these cartel sleazebags then she knew a lot more than he did.

  In fact you had to put it down as one cool piece of media manipulation. With shots of the cartel together, in a way, you could ditch the interview with Big Wu: put names to faces and you have a bigger story. They can’t bury the sintering plant in the desert like they hide the illegal mines, so you can always go back there and film it. The cancer rates will be documented somewhere. The pollution cloud in Tang Lu will still come rolling, bang on the dot of seven each night. You could reconstruct it all with some good research. What’s missing is the big picture: what’s the cartel trying to do? What’s General Motors got to do with it?

  Brough realised he had to put it down on paper now, draw lines and arrows between people and places. The story was clearing, like a pint of cloudy bitter, but taking time. Probably stop filming and get out of Inner Mongolia...

  He crested the lip of the dune. Below him was the van, with the driver for some reason wriggling in the sand with his hands tied behind his back and duct tape over his mouth. He could not see Chun-li. She was gone.

  ~ * ~

  10

  Chun-li wished she was not wearing a skirt because it was allowing the Oakleys Kid to put his hand up there, requiring her to kick him.

  They were in the back of an Audi Q4, identical to the one they’d totalled, with Khünbish driving. The Oakleys Kid had taken the Beretta out of her bag and was maintaining a wobbly aim with it, at her head. Her mouth was sealed with duct tape and her hands bound with it.

  She was sure Khünbish’s plan was to have her gang-raped and killed, because his conve
rsation had been revolving around these two subjects for the whole ten minutes they’d been bumping and swerving along the desert road:

  “Why didn’t you answer my text messages? I will take you out to the desert now and watch while camel herders make you choke! Then the sand will strip you to a skeleton. Huh? Wish you’d answered my text messages now?”

  Khünbish was sweating and his face was frozen into the perma-scowl of the betrayed lover, the man who’s lost his wages at poker, the sent-off footballer.

  He yanked the steering wheel and switched to four-wheel drive, pushing the Audi off the narrow service road and onto the sand: it seemed simultaneously to slow down and begin flying sideways-up towards the lip of the dune, tens of metres above them.

  At the top Khünbish revved the engine crazily and spun the car backwards, near vertically, over the hard edge of sand and onto the crest, where he made another sharp yank of the wheel to bring it to a standstill.

  “Oh no! Your foreign friends are coming after us!” Khünbish mimicked a woman’s voice. He had spotted the Ruifeng van bumping along the road a couple of miles away, like a small boat on a choppy sea. He revved the engine.

  “Wave goodbye!”

  They sped off into a long, looping curve down the hump of the next dune, the Audi’s chromework glinting in the afternoon shadows. Chun-li, whose kicking defence together with the pitch and whine of the 4x4 had driven the Oakleys Kid into a grim passivity, considered her options.

  Racking her brain, she could not find any obvious explanation for how she’d ended up here, at the edge of death. Her life seemed to divide into a short period of positive choices in her teens and a long period of wu-wei after that. She’d chosen to study genetic medicine; she couldn’t remember choosing to give it up. She had chosen to learn English and tai-chi, but she could not remember ever choosing to study the ancient game of wei-qi with General Guo, nor how it came to happen that she drifted into this weird, informal intelligence-gathering role. She had always meant to ask whether there was an insurance scheme or some kind of certificate she could present if she got into trouble, but she’d sensed Guo steering her away from the issue on all occasions.

  Swiftly computing the data, Chun-li explored the question: why, given so much contact with Western business delegations and journalist teams, had she never been in this kind of situation before.

  She let her eyes try to understand the curve of the dunes, her nose to find traces of the hot, clean desert on the air that was blasting from the a/c system.

  Maybe it was a western China thing? Maybe out here the rules are different and she’d just missed that? Maybe the spirits that protected her on the East Coast, the restless ancestors she’d sometimes glimpsed through the purple slant of a Powerpoint projector beam-maybe they just didn’t operate out here.

  But she’d seen something at the site of the car crash - and not the driver’s spirit leaving his body. Something else - just at the corner of her eye - slinking away from the propaganda boy’s Honda. So if there really are, as the saying goes, deities a few feet above our heads, they needed to get cracking and do something.

  “Why are you doing this?” she shouted, though the duct-tape made it sound like a series of squeals.

  Khünbish reached back and ripped the tape off her mouth.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why didn’t you answer my text messages?”

  In the 36 hours since waking from his Rohypnol coma he had sent her 108 text messages. Scrolling through them, she’d spotted a pattern. It was simply “Call me” for the first twenty, escalating to “Call me, need to speak” once he’d become fully reoriented and then, around cocktail hour last night, it had gone into a medley of threats, love haikus, cryptic quotations from Danzan Ravjaa, stopping around midnight, resuming around 3am, conking out at 4am, and resuming again over breakfast with the plaintive, two-character, “call me” plea.

  She’d been wondering how to deal with it, but the battle with Georgina and the search for Brough had been front-of-mind and she’d assumed her usual strategy, the action of non-action, would sort things out.

  “Why do you want to kill me? Don’t you realise there are witnesses? There are three Western journalists in that van! Think you’re immune to international criticism? They don’t care about your horses and your sex slaves. Don’t even care about the cartel. That filming was a total accident...”

  “Save your energy for screaming. You will need it soon enough. Those camel boys think it’s a red-letter day if they even get to have sex with a camel!”

  Khünbish had become melodramatic, harsh. He lit a cigarette and ignored her in a way that, if she’d seen any Chinese film noir, she would have read as calculated to convey menace. But Chun-li would only watch movies that depicted magic and large battle scenes.

  “What happens now GM’s gone bust?”

  “You know too much already!” Khünbish sneered. “You think I didn’t get that security camera footage lip-read? Yeah, the lip-reading expert nearly had to go and masturbate after watching you writhing around all over my little man!”

  “The CCP will never let control of Rare Earth pass to organised crime,” she shouted.

  “Ha! Rare Earth will be around longer than the CCP!”

  Khünbish for a moment replaced his frown with a genuine chuckle:

  “Anyway, nobody’s trying to take Rare Earth out of government control. It’s just a play. You understand what a play is?”

  She shrugged and gave him her goofy look through the rear-view mirror.

  “Here’s the play. Like I explained to you while under the influence of that truth serum - and let me tell you that I really do not care who you are working for, even if it’s Chinese State Security or the FSB, because you are going to disappear. Repeat, disappear. Like I involuntarily explained to you: the CCP strategy is to put the burn on the rest of the world by reducing Rare Earth production on environmental grounds. And by the way, check the share ownership status of various Western-located mining companies, when you reach the afterlife, on your supernatural Bloomberg terminal...”

  He paused so that he and the Oakleys Kid could both cackle at this.

  “... yeah check the shareholdings of the Canadian and Australian mining companies who own the other 5% of the market; but that’s a side play. The Chinese government’s going to screw the world’s balls to the floor with Rare Earth once the resource crunch gets going and good luck to them. But now GM is fucked it means that Li-Ion’s fucked, at least for a decade, so the cartel...”

  “You are not a member of this evil society?”

  “Ha, ha. You are gonna die anyway and we are gonna fuck you stupid. You should have answered my text messages!”

  Suddenly she knew what had happened; understood what disrupted the flow of compromise, appeasement, backscratching and acquiesence. It was Brough.

  Brough, she realised, was the first person she had ever met who gave a shit about the outcome of his actions. Why did he give a shit? She made up her mind to ask him if she ever laid eyes on him again.

  What would Brough do right now? Not wu-wei, for certain.

  “Khünbish,” she tried not to hate the name as she said it, “I think you’re an unfortunate man.”

  He stared out of the window like a teenager damaged by love.

  “You have good looks and appreciate High Art. Why do you need to be involved in this hoodlum lifestyle? Why don’t you go legit, like Michael Corleone in Godfather II, become some kind of horse connoisseur and live in Macao?”

  “Baby, you are annoying me.” He refused to meet her gaze in the rear-view mirror.

  “Maybe I could come to Macao with you and be your lover.” Part of Chun-li’s brain wanted her to go, cartoon style, “tee-hee-hee”, acknowledging the naïveté of this strategem, but another part just kept telling her to continue. She had never realised it before, but the opposite of wu-wei was hopeless, heroic, random action, with no prospect of success.

  “Like I sa
id, you should have answered my text messages.”

  “We could go through the whole Tao of Danzan Ravjaa. I found that stuff we did a little weird but I’ve been, you know, thinking about it. A lot.”

  She put her head back and opened her mouth, trying to do the kind of dirty smile she’d seen romantic actresses do.

  “Gimme that pistol!” Khünbish yanked the steering wheel and shoved the Audi into a low growl that made them churn the sand and slide as if surfing down the face of the dune.

  The Oakleys Kid, who’d been leering at her while she tried this two-bit seduction strategy, slowly transferred the Beretta into Khünbish’s outstretched hand.