Deep Time

by Rob Sangster

  Waiting for the light to change, he thought about the upcoming meeting. Since returning from Chaos, he’d thought carefully about the pros and cons of Barbas’s demand that he get President Gorton’s help. Of several “cons”, the biggest was giving a high-rolling profiteer a blank check to operate however he wanted to, damn the consequences. He barely knew the man and had only a sketchy idea of what he was doing. It made no sense to help someone he didn’t trust.

  But there was a “pro” the size of an elephant. Barbas had made Gorton’s help a condition of remaining a client. Well, today he had to get Barbas to understand that he needed Strider & Vanderberg regardless of Gorton.

  He crossed on the green light, climbed the front steps, and entered.

  An elderly man in a starched white uniform with dark blue epaulettes was waiting just inside.

  “Mr. Strider?

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Barbas is expecting you. He’s in the card room. I’ll show you the way, sir.”

  Barbas, the only person in the hushed, dimly lighted room, waved him to a seat across from him at a chess table. Barbas scanned a document, signed it, and pushed it aside.

  “Good to see you, Jack. Hope you enjoyed your visit to Chaos. How about a gin and tonic? This button will bring the steward.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” he said as he sat. This was a relief. He’d been concerned that Barbas would show up as agitated and aggressive as he’d been on the platform. Instead, he seemed to have chosen the role of urbane host. More likely a tactic to get something he wanted badly.

  “Been a member here long?” Jack asked to break the ice.

  “Don’t know whether I’m a member or not. I think this place,” he said with a dismissive wave as if referring to a local YMCA, “is affiliated with The Jockey Club in Paris where I’ve been a member for decades. Now, let’s get right to it.”

  “I agree.” He’d already decided to take the initiative. “You asked my firm to help you obey all laws applying to your mining operation. Based on what you told me about Chaos and your processing plant on the Columbia River, we can do that. Our firm’s expertise goes beyond Debra and me. We have three associates who specialize in—”

  “No doubt you’d be very helpful, but right now I want to know that Gorton is going to make sure the Law of the Sea treaty isn’t ratified.”

  “I don’t know his position.”

  Barbas’s smile disappeared. “Have you contacted him about what I want?”

  A bald man pushed through the tall door into the game room. Leaning on an ebony cane, he started across the room toward the fireplace.

  “I reserved this room,” Barbas snapped.

  The man straightened as if he might make a fight of it. As a member, he must have been a mover and shaker in his time. He stared at Barbas for several seconds, decided against trying to assert himself, and shuffled out.

  With a snort, Barbas turned back. “I want you as my lawyer, so your answer to my next question is important.” Barbas’s voice was husky, as though holding back strong emotion. “Do you intend to get Gorton’s support for me?”

  If he answered honestly, he’d lose any chance he had to stop Barbas from damaging the Columbia River and maybe the northeast Pacific Ocean. Time for ambiguity.

  “I’ll say this. You have to rely on your lawyer to give you honest advice, even if you don’t want to hear it. You can trust me to do that. My advice is that seeking Gorton’s help is premature. Even if that treaty were ratified, you have no need to be concerned. If anything should come up in the future, I can advise you how to deal with it. If, down the road, you think we ought to talk with President Gorton, we can discuss that then.”

  That’s the bait. Hook the client. Then show him what’s in his best interests.

  “No one gets away with playing me for a fool.” Barbas made his left-handed chopping motion. “No one.” Black eyes flashing, he stood up and pointed across the table. “You’re fired!”

  Jack hadn’t expected that, not so fast, not so final. He stood, willing himself to be calm. “Let’s take a break and talk it over in a couple of days. My firm—” Barbas’s smile, a nasty mix of condescension and smugness, stopped him.

  “I didn’t get rich by being stupid.” Barbas leaned forward. “I knew from your reaction on Chaos that you wouldn’t come through for me, so I’ve already interviewed Stan Simms at Sinclair & Simms. When I told him I might replace you with him, he almost cheered. I think his words were, ‘I owe that bastard a big one.’”

  Jack felt his temperature soar toward the flashpoint. Barbas firing him was very bad. Replacing him with Simms was rubbing salt in the wound. “You two will make a great pair, and I’ll tell you this. If Gorton finds out Simms is your lawyer, he won’t let you in the White House even on a tour.”

  “I don’t know about that. What I do know is that if you continue being such a pain in the ass, I’ll really turn Simms loose on you, Debra, and your whole damned firm. Hell, I won’t even have to pay him for that. After you left Chaos, I made a deal to buy all the buildings on Pier 9. I figured that if you did what I needed, I’d make you a sweet deal. If you didn’t, I could kick your ass out.” He nodded in satisfaction. “By the way, be sure to tell Debra she’ll be in my thoughts.”

  “Barbas, you and I will meet again. Count on it.”

  “You better hope not. I play for keeps. A few people have tried to cross me the way you did. They’re dead—every one of them.” He grabbed his papers and stomped out.

  Jack dropped into his chair, heart pounding, fists clenched. He’d tried to persuade Barbas with reason. Now he wished he’d shouted, punched him in the teeth. Barbas had run a power trip on him. He felt humiliated. The fees the firm needed were gone. That was bad, but the situation was likely to get worse. He had a suspicion that Simms blamed him for the disappearance three years ago of his partner, Justin Sinclair. Simms knew Sinclair had gone to Washington, DC—maybe even that it was for a showdown with Jack Strider—and never been seen again. That disappearance had cost his firm millions. Now that Simms had Barbas’s backing and encouragement, he would be an even more formidable enemy.

  His left brain shouted a warning. Barbas had been suspicious of him. That was understandable. But he had acted on that and made the effort to set an ambush. When he hadn’t gotten what he wanted, he’d pulled the trigger without hesitation. Two lessons in that. First, for whatever reason, that treaty was damned important to him. Second, Barbas was a tougher enemy than he’d realized.

  He returned to thinking about Barbas’s threats. He wasn’t bluffing about Pier 9. He’d obviously learned that Jack’s office lease provided that if the buildings on Pier 9 were sold, the new owner could terminate all leases on thirty days’ notice. Jack had objected to that provision in the lease, but one family had owned the buildings for three generations, and the current patriarch had assured him the family would never sell. Weighing that, he’d considered the risk to be minimal. Barbas had turned the highly unlikely into reality.

  He’d chosen his office space with care, knowing it would be a second home. At his desk, he could contemplate legal issues while watching comings and goings on the Bay and savor the smells of international trade along the wharves. If Barbas thought he could flick him away like a fly on his sleeve, he’d damn sure show him otherwise.

  BACK IN HIS OWN office, he wrapped up a disclosure he had very much not wanted to make.

  “So that’s it,” he said to Debra and Gano. “Barbas is now our enemy.”

  Debra was silent, tight-mouthed, staring into the corner of the room.

  He tried to put himself in her place. She’d been a star at Sinclair & Simms, but that future had crashed after she sided with him against Sinclair. She’d been happy to become Jack’s partner in the new firm, but now that was on the verge of collapse. No wonder she was mad at him.


  Her face was stern when she finally said, “I’m not going to waste my breath giving you a sermon on what Barbas could have meant to our firm, but his threats worry me.”

  They should worry her. “Barbas told me his game plan, and that will help us protect ourselves. And he sent more of a message than he intended.” He used a deeper tone of voice to sound more confident than he felt.

  “Hey, he’s Greek,” Gano said. “He got excited. What’s the big message in that?”

  “Keeping the ISA from supervising his mining business might save him some money, but his reaction was way over the top. There’s some other reason he’s desperate to keep the ISA away. I’m going to find out what that is.”

  “Damn it, Jack, get your head back in the game,” Debra said. “Think Armstrong. Think overhead. Think Simms. Oh, for God’s sake!”

  A CHILL WIND swept under the Golden Gate Bridge and swirled around the Bay. Jack zipped up his windbreaker and eased the tiller to take advantage of a gust coming across the water. His boat was designed for speed, and he was pushing her hard. After an hour, he’d burned up some of the stress, so he turned more into the wind, slowed, and let more tension flow out through his fingertips. Now he could consider his confrontation with Barbas more rationally.

  He was troubled, even apprehensive. Barbas was a shark hardwired to behave in certain patterns. He was skilled at concealing his shark nature for a while but would always revert to genetic commands. When Barbas hadn’t gotten what he wanted, he’d bitten down hard. And he’d do it again and again.

  If he interfered with Barbas in any way, Barbas would declare all-out war that could harm more than just Jack Strider. That was bad, because interfering with Barbas was exactly what he intended to do.

  Chapter 14

  July 21

  5:30 p.m.

  Chaos platform

  HE WAS PETROS Barbas, by God.

  They envied his wealth, admired his flamboyant life, and feared his take-no-prisoners business style. But they’d seen nothing compared to the Chaos Project that would be his greatest triumph.

  Feet resting on a leather foot stool made of premium hides taken from a hacienda he owned in Argentina, he gazed idly through the bulletproof glass of his suite in the top level of the superstructure of the Chaos platform. Far from shipping lanes and commercial flight paths, with no land within two hundred miles, all he saw were the restless swells of the Pacific Ocean.

  He thought back to the morning in his Athens office years ago when his administrative assistant had advised him that a very strange-looking man named Dr. Renatus Roux was in the outer office. He claimed to have a plan that would make Mr. Barbas rich. Amused by the claim, and knowing the guard in the lobby had searched the man, he’d had him sent in.

  On first meeting Renatus, he’d felt put off by the man’s immobile face. Within fifteen minutes, his excitement was building almost as it had the day he’d launched his first cargo ship. With no idle conversation, Renatus had started to outline the characteristics of hydrothermal vents.

  “Very interesting,” he’d said to the strange man, “but I was told you had a plan that would make me rich. So tell me what that is, or get out.” Renatus had ticked the index finger of his right hand. “First, my calculations show it is theoretically possible for an HTV to exist that is more than thirty times larger than any yet discovered. Second,”—he ticked his middle finger—“if such a vent exists, I can find it. And finally,”—the fourth finger—“in the field surrounding it, such a vent will have produced very large deposits of valuable minerals, including gold and silver.”

  “For the sake of discussion, let’s assume all of that is true. What would you want out of it?”

  “If I’m right, you pay me five million U.S. dollars a year for as long as you continue mining. You also pay for my research on the HTV itself. If I can’t find that HTV, or the minerals aren’t there, you owe me nothing. I report only to you.”

  For what Renatus promised, he’d have paid far more, even given him a tiny percentage, but he’d quickly realized Renatus wasn’t motivated by money. As soon as they made the deal, Renatus had dropped out of contact.

  Petros looked around but couldn’t find the cigar he craved. He called to the steward who was, he knew, hovering outside the door. “Bring me a cigar.” The man returned in seconds with a Montecristo on a silver tray. “I’m tired of the Cuban stuff. Toss them all over the side, and bring me a Davidoff Nicaraguan Toro.” After the steward lighted it for him, he savored the complex floral and coffee tastes. He recalled that he’d waited impatiently for Renatus to resurface, had even considered having him tracked down.

  When Renatus showed up several months later, he said he’d identified an area most likely to contain a giant HTV and specified the equipment needed to find it. After listening to Renatus explain his calculations, he’d called in his own scientists. To ensure confidentiality, he gave each a separate section of the calculations and challenged them to refute Renatus’s work. None made a dent in it. After that, his holding company made its first big investment in the enterprise.

  While conducting the search of the target zone in the northeast Pacific Ocean, Renatus had personally controlled the submerged remotely operated vehicles with their multiple cameras and sensors. He allowed no one else to review the images. At the end of the third week of crisscrossing the seabed, Renatus had announced, “I found the vent. It’s”—for the first time, his whispery voice had contained emotion—“enormous.”

  Because he had no interest in the HTV itself, he’d said, “What about gold and silver?”

  “According to my calculations, the minerals will be there.”

  Using robots to bring up samples from almost a mile and a half down had been more expensive than he’d expected, but it was tolerable because they’d immediately found manganese, copper, and amazing veins of silver. There had been almost no gold, but Renatus had been unruffled. “Silver is on the seabed. Gold deposits are in the crust. Finding and extracting gold will be more difficult, but it will be there.”

  “Then I’ll buy a drill ship and go after it. I can get a decent one for under $200 million.”

  Renatus had rejected that approach. “We’re not after oil, so a drill ship won’t work. My system requires a semi-submersible platform that will cost at least $500 million. The entire project could run one billion dollars.”

  Petros took a long draw on his cigar. That number had been a shocker. Anything close to that amount would strain his entire corporate cash flow before he saw the first dollar in revenues. He shook his head, remembering how little he’d understood of what the scientist was saying. Being in that position had made him so uncomfortable that he’d begun calculating the considerable investment he’d have to write off. He was a high roller but not a fool, so he’d turned Renatus down.

  Finally convinced that Odyssey Properties was not going to fund the mineral mining project, Renatus had switched to a radically expanded business proposition, repeating key points as he would to a dim-witted student. In the end, Renatus had spun an incredible vision.

  Petros stood and paced, puffing more often. If he’d called it off right then, there would be no platform and none of the wild swings of exhilaration and depression he was going through, the depression coming too often now. But he hadn’t called it off. He remembered how his brain had started free-wheeling with possibilities far beyond what Renatus imagined. If he could pull off Renatus’s new business proposition, he could transform geopolitics. It was worth risking every drachma he had.

  That conversation had changed everything. Indifferent to his cash flow and ignoring objections raised by his accountants, he’d taken the biggest gamble of his life. He cut a deal with Daewoo Shipbuilding to give his project the highest priority in its shipyard in Okpo, South Korea. He hired the best naval architects away from Hyundai Samho Heavy Industries to us
e the latest block construction techniques. His giant platform had been assembled using prefabricated multi-deck segments with built-in pipes, electrical cables, and equipment. In record time, the platform, which he privately christened Chaos, was towed to the northeast Pacific.

  He paused in front of a window on the north side of his suite overlooking the main deck. He felt a glow of pride. This wasn’t just another tanker or hotel. This was the crown jewel of his kingdom, floating above an unimaginable treasure thousands of feet down. Getting that treasure to the surface rested solely on the shoulders of Renatus, a man who was a genius and, certainly, a sociopath.

  He heard the low hum of the powerful engines that meant robotic equipment was pulverizing the seabed near the HTV, and suction pumps were bringing the mineral slurry to the platform. Making all this happen had been an incredible high, far better than the finest hashish, dried mescaline, and various psychedelics he kept in the Chinese lacquer chest across the suite from him. He exhaled a funnel of smoke toward the ceiling.

  The huge system was working as planned—except that it was failing. The gold being collected wasn’t generating enough income to offset the cost of building and operating the massive platform. At the same time, his businesses around the world were hemorrhaging red ink. Pleas for cash were pouring in from every corner of his empire. The global recession combined with Chinese competition was strangling his shipping business. The only people vacationing at his luxury resorts were those who’d lost so much money they had to spend big to keep up appearances. The financial nut-crusher was getting worse. Only Renatus’s vision could save his company now, and that project was dead in the water.

  He’d thoroughly investigated Renatus’s reputation and gotten five-star reviews, but the man hadn’t been able to solve the problem preventing his vision from going into operation. When Renatus’s most recent experiment misfired, he’d calmly explained that it had been a valuable learning experience. But as far as meeting financial needs, it had been a total failure.