Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  “He has re-entered the country from Taiwan and intends to speculate on the market for Rare Earth minerals with an illegal hoard of foreign cash, in order to fund his online child porn empire. If you don’t believe me,” Li’s voice cooled to a steely stacatto, “check the holdall.”

  ~ * ~

  13

  Brough burst into his hotel room, grabbed the TV zapper, marched straight to the bathroom, hit the shower tap with his knuckles and switched the television on, to a loud quiz show. Carstairs, in the next room, was frantically piling his kit into a holdall while Georgina, one door along, was doing the same but into a fake Vuitton Daimler bag.

  Chun-li, who never unpacked, stood at the door of Brough’s room, warbling nervously into her phone. They’d left the theme park minus Mr. Bo, Hyacinth and Rupert, leaving room in the van for Li Qi-han and his long-legged ladyfriend. These two had now collapsed, giggling, onto Brough’s bed and were having a nose-touching competition.

  “Mr. Bo is approaching the hotel and demanding an urgent meeting with our team. Superintendent Xiao still held by local police but allegations of Deputy Propaganda Chief Li not really standing up.” Chun-li summarised, one hand over the phone.

  “We need to get out of here in the next fifteen minutes,” Brough’s voice was stoked with adrenaline.

  “Five minutes,” Chun-li snapped.

  Long Tall Daisy slipped her shoes off and tiptoed into the bathroom, from which the scent of luxury bodywash soon floated.

  “I will not go on tape,” Li Qi-han began. “I will not hand over my recording of Xiao’s bribery attempt but I will allow you to make a copy. I will give an off-camera briefing in the presence of witnesses. Also documentary evidence.”

  “Can I not persuade you just to...”

  “Five minutes,” Li cut Brough’s sentence in half. “I hope your shorthand skills are good.”

  Carstairs and Georgina bustled into the room while Chun-li delivered their luggage to the bellboy, together with high-speed instructions and a handful of cash. The door slammed shut and Li Qi-han began to speak, Brough scribbling on a hotel envelope while Georgina tutted at him and paced around.

  “I am Li Qi-han, deputy propaganda secretary, Tang Lu Industrial Suburb, Ningxia Province. This briefing is strictly unattributable. The source may be described as a senior local official.”

  Brough nodded.

  “Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride is an unlisted private company formed from the assets of a previously state-owned battery factory. Official turnover is about 20 million US. Official output last year was 120,000 NiMH batteries - that’s N, small-I, M.H: rechargeable versions of the normal AA battery-plus maybe a million of the usual, alkaline ones you buy from a cigarette store. You will not find this out from any public source since all industrial production in Tang Lu is regarded as a state secret. However, the official figures are bullshit. In reality the plant produces almost no NiMH batteries...”

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “The issue is what happens to the raw materials it does not use.”

  “Does this really matter?” Georgina was only voicing what the others were thinking.

  “It matters,” said Li. “Do you remember the EV1?”

  “Who doesn’t!” said Carstairs, mystifying the others. Li pressed on;

  “After General Motors crushed all the EV1s - that’s their self-destructed electrical car based on NiMH technology - they sold the patent for the NiMH battery. And why not in your wonderful freemarket non-corrupt capitalist system? Why not sell it to an oil company that just sits on the patent and refuses to develop the electric car?”

  “Chevron took Toyota to court to stop them using these nickel batteries in an experimental version of the BAV4,” said Carstairs.

  “How do you know this?” Brough was irate.

  Carstairs shrugged: “Common knowledge in the East End of London, mate...”

  “Hold on,” Georgina frowned. “I am not liking the sound of the word Chevron. Is that the Chevron, the one that names its oil tankers after Condoleeza Rice and hires scientists who deny global warming and sues your fuckin’ pants off’ at the drop of a hat?”

  “Chevron is- a marginal issue,” Li Qi-han continued; “Everything I’m telling you is checkable fact.”

  “Mr. Bo has arrived at hotel reception,” Chun-li chipped in.

  “So Toyota can’t make these nickel batteries?” Brough’s eyes probed Li’s, but Li’s gaze was focused into the distance, as if following some invisible moth fluttering around the room.

  “Toyota?” Brough insisted.

  “So nobody can make a NiMH battery without paying Chevron a fee, until 2014. However, in the meantime Toyota does two things. It becomes the world’s biggest customer for Lanthanum - that’s a kind of Rare Earth you need to make NiMH - and the world’s dominant supplier - to everybody else - of NiMH batteries.

  “Except General Motors,” said Chun-li, stunning everybody except Carstairs. She continued:

  “General Motors ditches the patent for this kind of battery and instead decides to go for making a pure electrical car based on Lithium-Ion batteries. Not escaping from Rare Earth problem because Li-Ion electrical motors also need Rare Earth for magnets, but not Lanthanum element - a different element.”

  “Neodymium,” said Brough, surprising everybody.

  “Yes, but what does the Tang Lu plant do? Why is there so much pollution?” said Georgina.

  “The pollution is just incidental”, said Li. “It’s what all battery plants produce. Chlorine gas, all kinds of other stuff.” Li Qi-han leant forward like a conspirator:

  “What the Tang Lu plant does is underproduce on purpose. It processes the Lanthanum to battery grade but uses maybe a tenth of its order. The rest is sold on the black market.”

  “Who buys it?” Brough interjected.

  “One fifth of all Japanese-imported Lanthanum is black market. And that’s what they admit to. There is only one global source for Lanthanum,” said Li.

  “So this plant is a strategic piece of trade piracy organised by the Chinese government?” said Brough.

  Li’s face folded into an angry scowl.

  “No way! The Chinese government knows nothing about it. It’s just a play: a scam by corrupt local officials. D’you think I’d be telling you this if it was part of our national strategy?”

  “How can we prove it if...” But hammering on the door drowned out the end of Georgina’s question.

  “Urgently require interview with correspondent Brough!” shouted Mister Bo.

  “Ignore that guy,” Li sneered, standing up to kiss Long Tall Daisy, who’d breezed out of the shower wearing one of the hotel’s Ming-style bathrobes; “I can tell you for a fact he has come merely to offer you one hundred thousand US dollars in brand new fifties, and to threaten you with some bad Photoshop forgeries of a man with this guy’s face,” jerking his chin playfully at Brough, “getting ready to eat something really unhygienic out of the asshole of a naked lady.”

  The hammering persisted. Li produced a handwritten sheet of paper full of numbers and Chinese script.

  “All I can give you are serial numbers of the batches they sent out this week. And the names of the Imp-Ex companies they deal with: destinations, quantities and types. Seems to be routed via Lebanon and Venezuela but the destination is Japan. Nobody can get documents out of the plant but these were copied by a reliable informant.”

  “It’s not enough,” said Georgina. Everybody in the room knew Georgina was right. “For one thing it does nothing to connect the Tang Lu plant with the cartel.”

  “There is no connection,” said Li. “This is China. The cartel’s the cartel, the battery plant is the battery plant. Cartel operates in Inner Mongolia; battery plant operates in Ningxia. Cartel screws the battery plant the same as it screws the legit customers, by manipulating the spot price and taking massive leveraged speculative positions. The cartel’s production is supposed to go strictly into the Chinese market
- in fact, if it leaks out it screws with their position. Two completely separate scams. I thought you guys knew that?”

  The doleful look on their faces confirmed they did not.

  “Why are you helping us?” said Georgina. “What happened to trying to kill us?”

  “It’s the whales,” said Li, wistfully. “They’ve just got to be saved.” And he gave Daisy a weak, earnest smile, which she returned-with spiteful eyes and a sudden loquacity:

  “Those whale-killing little dwarfs with their bottle-thick spectacles, their war-crimes, their god-stealing activities and perverted manga cartoons make me sick. Their Rare Earth piracy efforts are aiding their crimes against humanity!”

  ~ * ~

  PART SIX

  “Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely

  indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside.”

  Lu Xun, 1922

  ~ * ~

  1

  As Brough slept, the 747 left a silver trail across the lacquered sky. Below, the city of Baotou snatched a brief, shift-worker’s sleep. Wide expressways, drawn pale and orange with a wet brush of streetlight, curved past vacant building lots.

  The Yellow River squirmed like a fevered patient in sodden bedsheets, making its escarpments jink and twist. On its banks, the relentless pumps and sluices of Baotou vomited up acids and dyes, untreated sewage, toxins, oestrogen, dead dogs: a cruel, industrial diarrhoea.

  In the heat and dark, an old woman hurried to the public toilet in a hutong yard behind a faceless building. Smoke the colour of dead leaves belched out of a factory chimney. A conveyor belt spat coal onto a heap the size of a town.

  Behind windows latched tight against the acid air, the Internet flickered into the bright blue faces of teenage netizens typing furious insults at the world: at CNN, at the Japanese, at the International Olympic Committee, Barack Obama and Uighur separatism; or mousing through multiplayer fantasies of death and mutilation; or slipping acronymic mischief onto bulletin boards-KB, come in your mouth; LJ, gang rape; ZF, government; ZW, masturbate.

  In a brothel dormitory the drunken owner hit the girls, pointlessly, through their duvets, with a leather belt. In a tin shack an exhausted peasant rolled up his bed, tied a torch to his head with string and staggered outside to root around in the soil for pak-choi.

  The air was not cooled by the river’s flow. It was baked by blast furnaces and hung heavy with the odour of coal and gasoline; the odour of 9.9% GDP growth.

  And thousands of pairs of eyes peered beyond grimy windowpanes into the moonless sky, looking for something better.

  ~ * ~

  2

  In Brough’s dream, the ghosts of Big and Frank “Lloyd” Wu appeared, right beside him in First Class. For one terrifying moment a wave of cold death passed down his spine: maybe he really was awake, and these were really ghosts? But then he remembered he had hit the gin and tonic hard just after takeoff and popped a Valium, so it was just a hallucination, and he chilled out.

  “You guys look well,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Frank joked. “Can’t believe how much better it feels to be rid of the whole white blood-cell issue.”

  “You feel a sudden lightness.” Big Wu’s jokes were always grim and deadpan.

  Brough was too embarrassed to ask why they were dead, but Frank saved him the trouble.

  “Think the cops had an order from higher up: make it all go away.”

  “That could have been my fault,” Brough said.

  “No mate,” Big Wu clapped an immaterial hand on his shoulder, “not your problem. Tell you the truth it’s a bit of a result. Me and him had, between us, a couple of years left, maximum. This way we go down as martyrs, not cancer victims, as long as somebody remembers to tell our story,”

  “That interview I did with you...the SD card...it’s lost...” Brough’s voice faltered.

  “Yeah we know!” Frank laughed the resigned laugh of the perpetually betrayed. There was a long silence.

  “Can you see into the future?” Brough said finally.

  “No. We only see what’s around us. We can zip about a bit though - we’re actually travelling at 600 kilometres an hour just to keep up with you. And the information flow on this side is much better than on yours.”

  “You planning to haunt me forever?”

  “No,” Frank said sternly: “We’ll be haunting some poor bugger in the State Security Police once we trace the chain of command.”

  “Are you in purgatory?

  “Nah,” said Big Wu; “What it is - here in China at any rate - is that it’s the unquiet spirits who have to float around for a bit, avenging themselves and causing mayhem. After 20 years or so you can try and pass to the underworld: some have to hang around a lot longer, depending on what happened to them, and what they did. All that spirit money and incense people burn to speed things up makes no difference. It’s all bollocks as far as we can make out - mind you, nobody tells you anything: there’s no induction course, no St. Peter with his trumpet - and no God, of course.”

  “Can you help me out with my story?”

  “Already did, didn’t we?” said Big Wu.

  “I mean,” Frank butted in, “what exactly is your story? Our story is about social justice. Rare Earth’s just a side issue. So, China has a monopoly on Rare Earth? It’s not our fault. We didn’t invent Rare Earth - we just sat and watched while the rest of the world decided to become dependent on the stuff.”

  “But the cartel. How high up does it go; how do I put names to faces?”

  “We can certainly do that. We were haunting those guys all the way through lunch.”

  “You were there?”

  “They don’t care whether your cameraman got their faces on tape. They’ve paid enough bribes, got too many officials paying peppercorn rents on penthouses, plus whole hard drives full of snapshots of Party leaders having illicit sex - nobody’s going to bust the cartel.”

  “I still need the names,” Brough insisted.

  Frank reeled off a list of names and descriptions. Brough, reasoning he was in a dream anyway, decided to memorise it all instead of struggling with pencil and paper.

  “Does the name Khünbish mean anything to you?”

  “Does Vladimir Putin have a personal trainer?” Frank chuckled.

  “Where does he fit in?”

  There was a metallic bong and the fasten-seatbelts sign went on, together with the cabin lights. Big and Frank vanished.

  Brough awoke-though the transition from dreaming to waking seemed suspiciously slight-gripped with a feeling of cold grief.

  ~ * ~

  3

  Allegro Harp had personalised his hotel room, eight floors up from Wangfujing Street, by replacing the shades on his bedside lamps with red, Chinese paper ones. He had created a shrine in his bathroom out of ornamental pebbles stolen from a fountain in the hotel lobby and scented candles purchased from the Wangfujing branch of Chanel. He had installed his MacBook, a pair of speakers and a connection box for the card readers and hard drives that cluttered his dressing table. He was now sitting in his gym shorts and a South Park T-shirt, hair nappy with sleeplessness, fingers flying over the Mac’s keyboard, sipping vodka and Red Bull.

  It was 11:45 Beijing time, 3:45 in London, and still last night in Times Square. There were six hours to go until deadline. They would finish Brough’s report by early evening and FTP the file to Shanghai to be played into the studio recording of Live At Nine.

  Brough was perched on the edge of Allegro’s bed, Georgina had commandeered the armchair to look over their shoulders, Chun-li sat crosslegged against the bed headboard. Carstairs, in his own room, slept.

  “Just a few more minutes,” Allegro was pulling and pushing blocks of video around in the timeline of FinalCutPro, trancelike, as he had been since they’d dumped the rushes on him three hours ago. He had a look on his face that seemed to blame the rest of the room’s occupants for existing.

  Allegro’s method was to do a “
rough assemble” of the pictures and make the reporter write the script to that. Other people did it different - some starting from script, others edging their way through, scene by scene, as in the days of tape. But it didn’t matter. If you used Allegro, and wanted to get three days’ work done in a single afternoon, you worked Allegro’s way.

  The land line rang. Allegro’s middle finger zapped out from the Mac and hit the speakerphone button. It was Twyla in Shanghai.