Bloodland

by Alan Glynn

  Within about twenty seconds he has offered Jimmy two things – coffee and a job.

  When Jimmy doesn’t respond immediately to either offer, Daitch says, ‘OK, I can’t tell you much more about the coffee, it’s coffee, what do you want, but the job . . .’ He leans forward on the desk and clicks his tongue. ‘Or maybe, I don’t know, does the word job make you nervous? Would you prefer if I said commission?’

  Jimmy smiles and says, ‘No, no, coffee’s fine, thanks. An espresso. Please.’

  Daitch looks at him, waits, then says, ‘Oh, what are we, playing hardball here?’ He turns to Dorsey. ‘Ellen, help me out with this guy, Jesus.’

  ‘Shut up, Max,’ she says. ‘Do you have any idea what he’s been through in the last twenty-four hours?’

  Jimmy has barely been able to process this himself.

  ‘That interview he did was broadcast all over the world, it was the lead news story everywhere and it totally burned up the blogosphere, but people want more, some kind of a follow-up, so he spent most of yesterday fighting off offers from editors and booking agents and people like Liz Zambelli. Who by the way appears to have more or less kidnapped Tom Szymanski, because no one knows where he is. But anyway, there’s a lot of interest out there, a lot of competition, network producers are salivating, and yet this guy, as you call him, chooses to come here.’

  Daitch considers what she’s said, then nods. ‘OK. Fine. An espresso it is.’ He buzzes out to his assistant. Then he looks at Jimmy. ‘Great interview, I have to say. Really. It was. Every question, every answer, not an ounce of fat.’

  Jimmy nods back. ‘Thanks. We were under a certain amount of pressure.’

  ‘No shit. But Ellen here tells me that you’ve got more, a whole back story to go with this. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. What I’ve got, I think, is the story of how BRX got involved in this thing in the first place. I want to draw a direct line from that right up to yesterday. Right up to last night.’ He exhales and bobs his head from side to side, as though weighing it all up. ‘So, I don’t know, a ten-minute segment on a some news show . . .’

  ‘Couldn’t possibly do the story justice?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK, but you only think you’ve got it?’

  ‘Well, I know what happened, but I need to work on it. There are a lot of gaps to fill in. I need to go to London to check out some CCTV footage. I need to go back to Italy. Ideally, I should go to Congo.’ He pauses. ‘Actually, I have to go to Congo.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s murky stuff, and it goes pretty deep.’

  ‘Indeed. But you’ll need time. For travelling. And lots of money as well, presumably. For expenses.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Jimmy pauses again. ‘Look, I realise –’

  ‘No, no,’ Daitch interrupts, holding a hand up, ‘it’s fine. I get it. Time and money. That’s what you want. The two things we’ve notoriously run out of in this industry.’

  Jimmy exhales. ‘So I keep hearing.’

  Daitch stands up and moves out from behind his desk. He walks around to the front and then leans back against it. He folds his arms. ‘That’s the conventional wisdom these days, isn’t it? News has to be fast and cheap. It has to ride the clickstream to survive. So anything with the word “investigative” attached to it doesn’t have a prayer. Why? Because it’s expensive, it ties up resources, and more often than not it invites litigation.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s just the wrong model for the digital age.’ He leans forward. ‘Well, you know what? Screw that. Screw the conventional wisdom. When’s the last time anyone in this room paid attention to the conventional wisdom?’ He turns to Ellen Dorsey. ‘Am I right?’ Then back to Jimmy. ‘Look, my point is, Parallax is a national magazine, print edition comes out once a month, online edition we do what we can, and ad revenues are a constant struggle, a constant pain in the ass, but in the last couple of years you know what stories have made the most impact, where we’ve seen actual spikes in circulation? That’s right, longer, investigative pieces that we put time and resources into. Ask her. It’s pretty much what she does full time.’

  Dorsey nods in agreement. ‘He’s right. The technology demands concision, the news reduced to a tweet, but people actually want more, enough people want more.’

  Daitch stands up straight. ‘So, Jimmy, here’s the deal, if you have what you say you have, I’m prepared to let you run with it. We can at least talk terms and see where we stand, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jimmy says, ‘absolutely.’

  He looks behind him. An assistant is coming through the door with a tray of espressos.

  ‘Besides,’ Daitch continues, walking over and taking the tray from the assistant, ‘this isn’t just some tawdry story about John Rundle getting caught out in a lie that we’ll all have forgotten about in a week. With Clark now up on a murder charge, it’s a lot more serious than that. It’s game on.’ He holds the tray out to Jimmy. ‘I think we’re in for the long haul on this one, don’t you?’

  *

  Later on, after he parts ways with Ellen Dorsey – temporarily, they’re meeting for dinner at a place called Quaranta – Jimmy takes a cab downtown.

  He hasn’t been back to his hotel yet, not since he left it yesterday morning.

  He needs to shower and change.

  Last night he slept on Ellen’s couch.

  Slept.

  He didn’t sleep. He was too wound up.

  Too wired.

  Having been followed and harassed for most of the day, they had a difficult time at the end giving reporters and photographers the slip. As a reporter himself, Jimmy was, and remains, uncomfortable with this.

  But still, as the cab glides along Fifth Avenue now – the Flatiron just ahead – it all hits him again, the sheer scale of what has happened.

  And the fact that a little over an hour ago he accepted a job offer.

  Or, at any rate, a commission.

  For a series of articles.

  What he can’t help thinking is how pleased the old man would be. Jimmy sees him now, reaching up to a bookshelf, pulling down a paperback, studying the cover for a few seconds, as though re-acquainting himself with something, and then handing it over with the words, ‘Here, read this.’

  This being a primer, a window on a world, a form of code, an exhortation.

  One of many.

  The cab shoots across Fourteenth Street and Jimmy starts reaching for his wallet. He gets out at Eighth and makes his way over to Washington Square Park. It’s sunny and warm, with high blue skies. Was it only Monday that he sat here on a bench, facing uptown, trying to figure out what to do?

  Three days.

  It seems longer ago than that.

  He sits on another bench now.

  He still hasn’t figured out what to do, of course – not exactly. But he has a much clearer idea.

  Just as he has a much clearer idea what direction his story for Parallax should take. It’s been forming in his mind for some time, coming into focus.

  It’s a direct line all right, as he explained to Max Daitch, but one that goes far beyond the tawdry self-destruction of the Rundle brothers.

  It’s a different route.

  It’s the supply chain.

  The blood-soaked motherlode.

  Isn’t that what Susie Monaghan called it? In that last text she sent?

  Which reminds him.

  He takes out his phone, checks for messages – there are quite a few, with Maria at the top of the list.

  He looks up, and gazes out over the square.

  Where was he?

  The supply chain. He needs to follow it. He needs to see where it leads. He needs to find out where the thanaxite ends up, who’s using it and what for.

  Who has the most to gain.

  There are other leads, as well. That third name, for instance – the old guy Dave Conway mentioned, and more than once. Who’s he? What was his role in what happened?

  That’s definitely something
Jimmy ought to chase up.

  He holds out his phone, scrolls down for the number.

  But first, before he gets down to work, there’s an important call he has to make.

  *

  Vaughan feels it already, creeping up on him as he opens his eyes, the post-nap crankiness – but today he has to fight it, keep it at an acceptable level, because Meredith is due back this afternoon. She’s been in LA attending a premiere, and she’ll be all sunny and starstruck, full of stories about celebs she met. The last thing she’ll want to encounter in her kitchen is a cranky old man whose idea of a movie star is John Garfield.

  Not that he gives a damn, not really.

  Vaughan was seventy-eight when they got married and she was twenty-six. He’d never been without a companion in his life, and at the time it had seemed like the right thing to do, affirmative, pro-active.

  Or how about stupid?

  It’s a vanity trap he’s seen plenty of other guys his age fall into – having a beautiful young wife on your arm when you’ve already got one foot in the grave. But then he went ahead and fell into the trap himself.

  Trap.

  It’s not a trap exactly, it’s an age thing. She talks a lot, which grates on his nerves, not that he blames her for that, and she spends his money – mostly on real estate, décor and clothes. But at least she isn’t a monster, like Jake Leffingwell’s twenty-four-year-old, Lisa, who insisted on getting involved in the business from the start and has dragged Leffingwell’s staid old company through the mud with all sorts of expensive and high-profile litigation. It’s ironic, he thinks, poor old Jake has aged about ten years since he married Lisa.

  Vaughan goes into the study. He sits at his desk, and looks at the computer, but decides not to turn it on.

  He’s had enough. All morning, wall to wall.

  He thinks of poor Hank Rundle.

  Henry C.

  Talk about dragging a staid old company – and a respected family name – through the mud! By the time this is over, Clark and J.J. between them will have undone a century and a half of dedicated brand-building.

  Pair of jackasses.

  But as far as Vaughan himself is concerned, the damage is significant. There’s no question about that. At least it’s contained, though, it’s private.

  No one is tweeting about the Oberon Capital Group.

  Nevertheless, he will have to make a few calls and set something in motion. Paloma Electronics are on target for the first-phase rollout of the BellumBot, but to maintain any kind of competitive advantage they clearly need a new five-year plan, and a new source of thanaxite, one that doesn’t depend so heavily on the good graces of a nonentity like Colonel Arnold Kimbela.

  Vaughan looks at the phone.

  Time and tide, as it were.

  He picks it up and dials the number for Craig Howley at the Pentagon. After the usual song and dance, he gets through.

  ‘Jimmy, how are you?’

  ‘I’m good, Craig, I’m good.’

  ‘My God, have you been following this?’

  ‘I know, it’s horrible, isn’t it?’ He wanders from his desk over to the window. ‘Just horrible.’

  ‘I mean, what the hell makes someone flip like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I guess we’ll never know.’ Vaughan is gazing down now at the passing traffic on Park Avenue. ‘But in a roundabout way, Craig, that’s why I’m calling. We need to talk. I want to have another look at Logar Province.’

  Afghanistan.

  Southeast of Kabul.

  Although the discovery here a few years ago of a substantial thanaxite deposit was omitted from a recently published geological survey of the region, Vaughan has been reliably informed that it’s there. The trouble with mining in Afghanistan, however, has always been the country’s woefully inadequate transportation infrastructure.

  But it seems as if that might be about to change.

  The Chinese have embarked on a long-term project to establish a new trans-Eurasian corridor, a sort of modernised version of the old Silk Road. Vaughan’s idea is to get in early, establish a foothold in Logar. Fly under the radar for a while and see what happens.

  He’s learnt that you have to take a long view on these matters.

  ‘Sure, Jimmy, of course. I’m actually going to be in New York at the end of the week.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You want me to swing by?’

  ‘That’d be great.’

  They make an appointment for Friday afternoon.

  As he’s closing his phone at the window, Vaughan sees a car pulling up below.

  The driver gets out. The doorman appears.

  Showtime.

  A few moments later Vaughan is in the entry foyer, and feeling, almost in spite of himself, a flutter of anticipation. But not just for the next thirty seconds and his wife’s arrival home.

  For something more than that.

  For the future itself.

  The elevator glides open and Meredith steps out, followed by the doorman, who is carrying her bags.

  She is wearing a figure-hugging royal-blue pencil dress and black patent leather stilettos. Radiant and fragrant, she also has a new hairstyle, a bob, short and boyish.

  Vaughan likes it, likes it all.

  ‘Darling,’ she says, opening her arms to embrace him, ‘did you miss me?’

  An Interview with Alan Glynn

  Given the compexity of the story, can you remember what your starting point was when plotting Bloodland?

  Yes, I started with the idea of a helicopter crash on the Donegal coast. I wanted a shocking event like this to be the raw material for a conspiracy. The thing is, helicopter and plane crashes have been at the centre of a surprisingly large number of conspiracies over the years, where politically or commercially ‘convenient’ deaths occur – a classic case being that of Enrico Mattei, whose work in restructuring the Italian oil and gas industries posed a considerable threat to the international cartels. Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash in 1962. Officially, it was an accident, but no one really believed that. More recently, there was the Kaczynski crash in Russia, about which questions have been asked, about which theories abound. Of course, these things are enormously difficult to prove, making it one of the purest forms of conspiracy, and also one of the most horrific. In any case, unravelling the causes of my mysterious air crash, finding a nefarious justification for it, is what set the story in motion.

  Did the idea for Bloodland come out of the global financial crisis or were you already thinking about these ideas before that?

  The global financial crisis is not central to Bloodland. It’s there in the background alright, and it impacts directly on one character, but a lot of what happens in the story could have happened at any time. The scramble for resources in Africa is nothing new, corporate greed and malfeasance is nothing new and the venality of politicians is certainly nothing new. Where the story is rooted in the present, I suppose, is in the area of America’s identity crisis vis-a-vis China. That feels like a huge drama that will be unfolding for quite some time to come. But as with Winterland, any confluence between the book’s plot and current events is almost incidental as far as I’m concerned. What really interests me is the psychology, the interior life, of these people in positions of incredible power, people who seem to have no moral compass and very little awareness of the consequences of their actions.

  Bloodland is set in Paris, New York, Dublin and Congo: how did you go about making the sense of place as authentic as it is?

  And don’t forget Verona, and London. I’ve lived in a few of these places and I suppose I drew on memory for much of the detail. With the places I haven’t lived in, I simply did research - but this then crucially gets filtered through whichever character is involved in the scene. So it becomes a sort of double act of imagination, this person in that place. It was something I was particularly aware of when writing the scenes set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For these, I was able to buffer my lack
of direct knowledge with the densely layered perspectives of the characters, Tom Szymanski and Clark Rundle.

  Bloodland has the kind of plot where tiny details at the start lead to huge revelations by the end. How hard is it when writing a story like this to keep back secrets from your readers?

  It’s not easy. I continually re-read, re-write and revise. At the same time it’s an organic process and the subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. A connection that in the context of the story might seem inevitable, something meticulously and very deliberately placed there by the author, will often in fact have occurred to me at the very last minute. Maybe it was there all along, waiting to be discovered but the poor sap at the keyboard isn’t necessarily the first one to see it. But then when it all becomes clear, you have the luxury of being able to go back and re-arrange stuff, to re-weight and re-calibrate scenes in the overall context of the story. As the writer, you just have to pay attention, which I suppose isn’t too much to ask. Another way of keeping secrets back from the reader, of course is by not knowing them yourself, as you go along. No plan, therefore, no outline. It’s a good way of keeping things fresh and unpredictable, but it’s also fraught with danger. You can write yourself into a corner. Or fall of the tightrope.

  Bloodland follows in the footsteps of some great thrillers that have exposed corruption, from films such as The Parallax View, TV series such as State of Play and novels like The Constant Gardener. Do you have any particular favourites in the genre, and did any in particular influence you?

  I like all of them: Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man. These are the great conspiracy thrillers of the 70s that I grew up watching, and there is no question but that they have influenced me a great deal. I also love the later stuff you mention and would add Syriana and Michael Clayton to the list, as well as what I have seen so far of Rubicon. But there is, I think, a key difference between the two periods. In the 1970s – post-Kennedy, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate – America lost its innocence. Back then it was genuinely shocking for people to realise that their government was lying to them. But you can’t lose your innocence twice, and now we’re not surprised if our governments and corporations lie to us, we expect it even, and often expect them to do much worse, so the key feature we remember from back then – that creepy frisson, that dawning realisation of the truth – is no longer what animates the conspiracy thriller. That can’t be replicated anymore. But these days, perhaps, it’s a question of scale – corporate power, for example, has grown exponentially in the last thirty years. Perhaps it’s a question of the inescapable and controlling nature of power in the modern world. These stories, consequently, are as relevant now, if not more so, than ever before.