The Twain Maxim

by Clem Chambers

  He climbed out of bed. “Let’s go and eat,” he said, walking to the suite’s bathroom. He liked the Ritz. It was seven thirty.

  “Where?” She sighed.

  “Nobu?”

  “OK.” She picked up her mobile from the bedside table and dialled.

  Jim stepped into the shower. As he switched it on, he heard her shout, “Booked.” The three raw blisters on his side still looked nasty but they’d shrunk over the months to the size of a fingernail. He was still prone to weakness on that side and his head still spun once in a while, but it was no big deal. Feeling a little dodgy was no excuse to do nothing when someone’s life was at stake, he told himself.

  The next morning Tulip kissed him goodbye outside the Ritz. “I think you should change your mind,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll only be gone for a couple of days.” He gave her a final full-on kiss. She was like a ripe pear: fragrantly succulent. The porter was loading his case into the boot of the black Mercedes. He shifted the sat-phone box under his arm. “See you at the weekend,” he said, as he turned to step into the car.

  She waved without saying anything, as if her mind had just changed the subject and was tying off the loose ends.

  He gave a fiver to the porter who had held the door open for him and blew Tulip a kiss. The car moved off as she disappeared into the hotel.

  He turned his attention to the sat phone. The box had already been opened, and as he slipped out the polystyrene packaging, the charger and manual fell into his lap. He pulled open the white plastic padding and took the phone in its protective plastic bag. It was pretty much the same as a normal one except for its chunky aerial.

  As he was in the car he couldn’t test it. To use it he had to be outside in line of sight to the satellite with nothing in the way to stop the signal. It was just about feasible to get a signal indoors, but it meant standing by a window or on the top floor. He looked at the chunky antenna. Somehow the phone had to pump out a signal that could reach a spacecraft 22,000 miles above by sending out enough electromagnetic radiation to get there while not cooking the neurons in his brain.

  It was a sobering thought, but Jim had already moved on: he was taking the back off his regular phone to upload his contact list into the new one – no point having his new toy with him in the jungle if he couldn’t remember anyone’s number. He swapped the sat phone’s sim card with his own and started trying to follow the inscrutable manual.

  “Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. His contact list was in the phone’s memory. Amazingly, he had followed the instructions in the booklet and it had worked first time. That’s a miracle he thought. He went back to the booklet and discovered he could use his new phone as a modem for his computer, albeit a slow one, to grab email and even trade – although maybe his trading software wouldn’t operate at such a slow connection rate. He reassembled both phones. As he switched on his iPhone, it rang.

  It was Max Davas.

  “Thanks for getting back to me,” Jim said. “What have you got?”

  “It’s pretty sketchy,” said Max, “but your Mycock fellow’s some kind of low-level pump-and-dump specialist.”

  “Pump and dump,”

  “Stock promoter. He comes up with speculative mines, promotes them to the sky but they don’t go anywhere. He did a dotcom back in 2000 and he’s involved in a few ‘green-tech’ plays, but he mainly does small-resource stocks. All pretty shifty but nothing big, just eight-or nine-figure ventures, nothing in the billions. He’s under the radar – plenty of civil legal actions in his past but nothing criminal. It looks mainly like shady mining deals.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But there’s something strange about the mining claim. I’m not getting much guidance about it on the geological side. Normally there’d be plenty. On the political side there’s reams of information – the place is a full-scale horror show. Half of Africa’s been fighting over it in recent years for as many reasons as you can imagine. The Rwandan genocide spilled over into the region, and the Congolese civil war has only just ended. It’s been filled with soldiers mining various deposits for years. It’s an awful mess, and if that’s not bad enough, a volcanic eruption almost wiped out the capital city a few years ago. In fact, the lava ran over half of it.”

  “Blimey,” said Jim.

  “But you’ll be OK. It’s a lot quieter now than it has been. If you’d been able to wait a few days I could have arranged for some friends to escort you, but I think your colourful Mr Mycock should do a good enough job. Did you get all the right inoculations?”

  “Yesterday,” said Jim, touching his sore arm.

  “Look after your health,” said Max, “and if you need anything call me straight away.”

  “Sure,” said Jim. “Thanks.”

  “Are you flying into Cairo to refuel?”

  “Don’t know – I think the G5 can get the whole way and refuel there.”

  “Fly to Cairo, top up there, and again on the way back. It’s a pain, but you don’t want to end up halfway back running on the water they might put in your tank in the DRC.”

  23

  Although he hardly used it, the jet filled him with pride. Most of the things he’d achieved – his meteoric rise, the massive trading profits, saving the world – now seemed dreamlike and unreal. If someone had told him it had all been a fantasy and now he had to go back to his old life, he would have accepted it. Since he’d joined the bank – straight out of school – his entire life had seemed like a gigantic hallucination, his memories of the recent past the crazed visions of a maniac.

  Yet the Gulfstream was shining proof that everything he thought had happened really had, and that he actually was sitting on top of the world, the winner of a bizarre lottery.

  His ability to read a stock chart had catapulted him into a new universe in which none of the old rules applied. From the outside he might seem the richest, smartest guy around, but inside he felt as clueless as a toddler playing ball beside a motorway.

  Jim didn’t have to put anyone right about the route: they were going via Cairo. “Do you have any spare US dollars?” the captain asked. He’d been an RAF fighter pilot in the early nineties but had since flown commercial airliners, then private jets. His face looked as if it had baked in the sun for decades, but he had a wide mischievous smile. He was a consummate professional, flying the plane with the precision of a surgeon reshaping a film star’s nose.

  Jim opened the top compartment of a rucksack that was waiting for him by the small dining-table. He found nothing so he rummaged in the side pockets and pulled out an envelope with a thick bundle of US dollar bills. “How much do you need?”

  “A hundred dollars should do it. They’ll clear us in Goma and it’d be better if we included this paperwork with the other forms.”

  Jim stripped out a handful of notes and handed them over. He stuck the rest in his pocket. “OK, Ewan, let’s rock,” he said, sitting back.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He sighed, exasperated, then grinned. “It’s Jim.”

  He sat on the leather sofa that ran down the length of the right mid-section of the cabin. Stafford had packed the rucksack. He had no idea what was in it, but there was meant to be enough to last him a long time in the jungle. How Stafford would know about such things he couldn’t guess, and he was a little concerned that perhaps his butler actually didn’t have any idea. The blind might be leading the blind. Jim knew as much about jungle survival as he did deep-sea diving.

  There was an inventory in the top flap of the rucksack – a good place to start exploring the contents. The last page was a map of the packing. There was a list of clothes, all linen, $10,000 in cash, a tent, apparently in a flat pack down the right side of the rucksack, a jungle knife, small binoculars, mosquito net, all-weather blanket, fire-making equipment, sanitary wipes, rations for five days, lifesaver water-purification bottle, night-vision goggles, lures and a snare kit, a GPS, copious medical supplies, a survival guide, maps
, flashlight, pocket knife and sharpening stone, batteries, pocket tools, tape, vitamins, inflatable mattress … the list went on. He lifted the rucksack. It seemed too light for all this stuff. He folded the inventory and put it back into the top pocket.

  His computer and more clothes were in a flight case at the back of the cabin.

  The items in the rucksack were a little intimidating. Suddenly Tulip’s advice seemed a lot more sensible.

  The inside of the plane wasn’t so small that it was cramped, like the smaller jets, but it wasn’t a large space either. The Gulfstream was like a small flying hotel suite. Jim didn’t employ a steward: even though it wouldn’t have cost much in comparison with the machine itself, maintenance, two highly qualified pilots and fuel, but it seemed silly to Jim to pay someone to serve you a drink when you could pour it yourself. He could have asked Stafford to come, but Jim was appalled by the idea of travelling with a retinue. There was a platter of sandwiches in the forward galley area and that was enough for him. He had leased the plane for three years simply because he could and because he had practically nothing to spend his money on. He had given the bank’s wealth management group, who looked after his affairs, £20 million to take care of him if he needed it. The rest he could spend. If only he knew how to.

  When you had a certain amount of cash, you needed to develop vices to use it. Gambling and women could eat through fortunes, as could drugs, expensive toys and the wrong kind of friends. For Jim gambling was pointless: he could play the markets and win pretty much every time. Drugs scared the hell out of him, and he’d never hooked up with the wrong kind of friends – although Sebastian Fuch-Smith had demonstrated just how expensive even good friends could be.

  And now he had an expensive girl but even she wasn’t a threat to the ocean of cash he had just torn out of the global forex markets.

  Spending his money was a puzzle to be solved later.

  In his way, Kitson was a successful man. He had a good life and a fine healthy family. Everything had been great in his world until he’d fallen out of a helicopter. He’d been well set up for the rest of his life but had still lost everything.

  If Sebastian hadn’t got himself suckered into a stock punt on a ridiculous mine in a godforsaken country, this chain of events would have never kicked off. A few electrons flickering on his friend’s screen had fired a few greedy neurons in his brain and now Jim was flying across the globe at 80 per cent of the speed of sound to find a decomposing body in a jungle at the foot of a volcano that had nearly wiped out a city with a population of 200,000.

  Tulip was rising again in Jim’s estimation. He could turn the bloody plane around – but he knew he had to go through with it: it was the right thing to do.

  The smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese sandwiches were good. There was enough for about six people so he took some up to the captain and co-pilot, who were happy enough to see him. He looked out of the cockpit across the plane’s short nose at the vertiginous view to the sea below and found himself trying to remember the name of the Greek kid who had stuck feathers to himself with wax and fallen out of the sky when he flew too close to the sun. He’d had a tough break. He’d never understood why they had taught such a stupid story at school but now he understood what it meant. What a bunch of miserable fuckers the ancient Greeks were, he thought.

  He went back into the cabin and checked his jacket for stomach settlers. He’d remembered to bring some and he wondered if there were more in the medical kit.

  Even if there were, he wouldn’t be carrying enough to last him on this trip. Sitting down, he thought of how Jane would love this adventure, all kitted up for a leap into the unknown… He tried to make himself think of something else but the picture of her in the muddy bog kept flashing into his mind. Her smile grabbed his inner eye and held it.

  He missed her.

  24

  Goma airport was a large green tongue edged on two sides by the city, scarred by a battered black landing strip down the middle. It was truncated by a field of congealed lava.

  If Jim could have seen what the pilots saw he would have freaked out.

  The airstrip looked like some giant abused cricket wicket, long since abandoned and covered at one end with volcanic pumice. At the far end, near the lava flow, there were some planes, one parked like a stranded boat and apparently used as offices. Jim was still getting over the awesome sight of the Nyiragongo volcano and a glimpse of the airport would have been one view too many. Nyiragongo wasn’t some long-dormant mountain with a hole in the top: it was the sort of volcano Hollywood whipped up to destroy the world.

  Under dark clouds, heavy with rain, the massive caldera was spewing out white fog as if it were the devil’s own chimney. It was the most evil-looking thing he’d ever seen – like an enormous bomb about to detonate. The Barron property was somewhere to the north of it. Whatever the chart had told him about the future stock price he certainly didn’t feel like believing it now.

  Jim looked at the shanties that surrounded the airport as the captain put the plane down lightly. A dozen or more aircraft sat reassuringly to the right of the runway, and as they taxied along he saw the terminal ahead, a rudimentary but functional 1960s building.

  “We’re going to drop you off and turn her straight round, Jim,” said the captain, over the intercom. “If your party isn’t here to meet you I suggest you stay with us and we come back tomorrow.”

  There wasn’t any point in replying as he couldn’t talk to the cockpit, but he said, “I’ll be OK.”

  The plane pulled to a halt beside the terminal. The copilot opened the door and moved out on to the steps. Jim spotted a large European in a lurid Hawaiian shirt standing next to an official. The co-pilot greeted them and there was an exchange of papers. The man in the Hawaiian shirt seemed to be in charge and the official was all smiles and efficiency.

  Jim perked up and went to collect his bags.

  The co-pilot climbed back in. “All sorted,” he said.

  “Thanks, Dave,” said Jim.

  The co-pilot offered to help him with his stuff but Jim shook his head – only to regret it as he tried to negotiate the door with the two awkward bundles. The stifling heat struck him immediately and he tottered down the steps. The man in the Hawaiian shirt stepped up to him. “Let me have that,” he said, and relieved Jim of his flight case. “Mark Higgins,” he added.

  “Jim Evans – good to meet you.”

  “We’ve got to move it,” said Higgins. “The sun’ll be going down soon and I’m not a big fan of flying in the dark.” He pointed to the collection of planes, now two hundred metres away. “If we go immediately, we might get down before it’s pitch black. We’re only about thirty minutes away if we put our foot down.”

  “Sounds good,” said Jim. He shook the captain’s hand. “Thanks, Ewan, good trip back,” he said. He shook the copilot’s hand. “Cheers, Dave.” He shook the official’s hand for good measure. “See you later, guys. I’ll call you.” He turned to Higgins. “OK, Mark. Lead on.”

  Higgins was practically marching towards the planes. “That’s our Huey,” he said, pointing at the white liveried helicopter. He stowed Jim’s luggage in the back, and they got into the cockpit. Higgins gave Jim a headset, which he put on, then fired up the aircraft and was talking to Air-traffic Control as he did his in-flight checks. Clearance for takeoff came a few seconds later and then they were lifting off. On the ground Jim could see the door closing on the G5 and the stairs being dragged away. The Huey rose into the sky, away from the airport and over the shanties.

  Jim gazed at the lava field that covered the end of the runway and for miles around. It was a black inky scab that had come from the volcano. The helicopter wheeled and headed straight for it. “That’s fucking impressive,” said Jim into his mic.

  “Nyiragongo?”

  Jim laughed. “Yeah.”

  “It’s a big scary bastard. We’re on the other side of it, between it and the other big fucker, Nyamuragira. Basically, if y
ou think of the Nyamuragira volcano as the middle of the property, we have mineral rights in forty miles of the surrounding country. But you probably knew that already, seeing how much of the company you bought.”

  “Well…” Jim hesitated “…sure.”

  They were coming up on Nyiragongo fast and Higgins was taking them around the west side, away from the smoke cloud that was being pushed to the east by the prevailing wind. “That Gulfstream must have cost a pretty penny to charter down here,” Higgins remarked.

  “It’s mine,” said Jim, mesmerised by the smoking cone of the volcano, which they were passing.

  “Really?” said Higgins, clearly so surprised that Jim regretted opening his big mouth. “Very smart.”

  The light was failing fast as the sun fell quickly to the horizon. “I’d take you up to see the lava lake,” said Higgins, “but maybe another day. It’s basically about as high as this chopper will fly. Twelve thousand feet is about the limit for this thing, but it’s worth the view, if you like that kind of thing.”

  “Thanks,” said Jim, “if we have time.”

  Higgins nodded. “I think we’ll make it before dark, and that’s great. Daylight’s my friend.”

  Mine too, Jim thought.

  Higgins was flying with the determination of someone who knew exactly where he was going. They were heading for the left flank of the Nyamuragira volcano, speeding across more lava fields. “We’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

  Jim looked ahead but couldn’t see any significant structures to signify that the mine lay below.

  “Here we go,” said Higgins, as if some hidden display panel showed him their destination.

  Jim searched the ground in front: a mixture of forest and grassland speckled with trees and an occasional scrappy field. Then a collection of low buildings came into sight and a flat area just before the forested slopes of the volcano. It was a little bigger than a farm complex: three sets of buildings separated by rough space. The lights of the landing pad caught his eye, its large white H reassuring. The helicopter was throwing a spotlight beam on it.