Bloodland: A Novel (31 page)

Just up ahead, on the grassy edge of a steep incline, a group of armed soldiers stand around smoking. Below them, sloping down and stretching out for about a square mile is this rough, brown, hollowed-out patch of earth, with a stream running through it. Surrounding it on all sides is lush greenery and rolling hills. Within it, scores of people move about the pockmarked terrain like ants in a colony. He can’t make them out clearly from here, but he understands what’s going on, what they’re doing.

‘This is the mining area, sir,’ Lutz says from the front, chirpy, like some sort of a tour guide.

Rundle doesn’t respond.

He
knows
what it is, Jesus. He’d just forgotten how differently they do things here.

‘Look, Clark,’ Ribcoff says after a while, ‘if you’re debating about whether or not to get out of the car, I wouldn’t. As you can see, the colonel’s men run this place.’ He pauses. ‘It can sometimes get a bit rough down there, a bit volatile.’

Rundle hesitates, then says, ‘Binoculars?’

‘Of course.’ Ribcoff is clearly relieved.

Lutz rummages up front for a moment, then turns around and holds out a pair. Rundle takes them. They’re light and compact. Lutz points out the focus and zoom buttons.

Rundle takes a moment, opens the window and trains the binoculars on the general scene below. The first thing he focuses on is a group of young men squatting at the edge of the stream, one of them sifting something, sand or gravel, in a hand-held sieve. They’re all in dirty, raggedy clothes and look lean and scrawny. With his finger, Rundle presses the zoom lever next to the eyepiece and pulls back with a start as the image leaps forward and magnifies. The guy with the sieve appears almost close enough now to touch.

Rundle flicks away from this and lights on another detail, a young man – a teenager, a
kid
really – battering at the hillside rock face with crude-looking tools, a hammer and chisel.

Then, in quick succession, he passes over a series of what look like holes in the ground – what actually
are
holes in the ground – little hand-dug pits, as far as he can make out. One of them is more than that, it’s wider, deeper, an improvised shaft, out of which he now sees a small child crawling, like an insect, followed by two others. They are carrying hammers and tin cans. How many others are in there? How deep is it? Rundle swallows and flicks away again. He sees women scrambling in the dirt, and more children. He sees soldiers patrolling along the edges, with Kalashnikovs, and on the far edge he sees a pile of sacks next to a truck. On the side of the truck is a familiar logo – he can just make it out.

Gideon Global.

This is the start of the chain.

Of the arrangement Kimbela spoke about.

His people run the site. They herd in the artisanal miners and supervise the extraction. Then Gideon personnel take over and transport the sacks of rock and dust to the airstrip, from where they’re flown to Kigali or Goma, and then on to processing plants in Europe. After that, the processed powder finally makes its way to the various components manufacturers in the US. No
comptoirs
, no
négociants
, no trading posts, no international dealers even. This is a rationalised, streamlined, highly controlled and above all secret supply corridor.

Which took a lot of time and effort to set up.

So many headaches along the way, and right from the get-go.

Rundle moves the binoculars back over the scene, sweeps across it, slides it into a blur. There must be a couple of hundred people here. Then he finds himself doing it again, going back, but this time slowly, scanning, searching for something.

What?

That open mineshaft.

He finds it.

A small, rough hole in the earth.

The three children he saw climbing out of it earlier are around it now, squatting, examining the contents of their tin cans. They are stripped to the waist and covered in a dirty brown dust. He zooms in carefully, and goes from one to the other, studying their faces.

Their big, blank solemn eyes.

He closes his own for a second or two, and then zooms out again, just a fraction.

But when he refocuses, the children have stopped doing what they were doing, all three of them. They’ve put their tin cans down on the ground and are peering up, looking – he realises – in his direction,
at
him.

He stares back, but only for a moment, before dropping the binoculars. He presses the automatic switch to close the window. Then he turns sideways, towards Ribcoff, and says, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’

*   *   *

Conway pulls his forehead back from the grimy window and turns to face Jimmy Gilroy. Now that he’s started this, he realises how far there is to go, and he’s exhausted.

‘Triobium-thanaxite,’ he says, with a sigh. ‘It’s a rare metallic ore. Congo is full of them, niobium, cassiterite, cobalt, uranium. You’ve heard of coltan, right? It’s used to make capacitors for cell phones and games consoles,
every
bloody thing, camera lenses, surgical implants. Well, this one is
extremely
rare. It has a unique chemical composition and until about four years ago had only ever been found in a remote part of Brazil. Then they discovered a deposit of the damn stuff in the mine at Buenke.’

‘Who’s
they
?’

Conway looks at Gilroy and almost laughs. ‘Well, at least you’re asking the right questions.’

This Jimmy Gilroy is young and inexperienced and has just admitted he’s unemployed, but Conway is fine with that. He doesn’t feel he’s made a mistake or anything by talking to him. Besides, Phil Sweeney said he was smart, and Phil would know. Phil also said
he’d
worked with Gilroy’s father. Conway never met Dec Gilroy, but he’s vaguely aware of his reputation – aware that anyone who ever did meet the man really liked him.

So while it might be overstating it to say that Conway likes the son here – they did only meet half an hour ago, and the circumstances are hardly ideal – he
is
comfortable with him. Curiously, as well – and this is crucial – he doesn’t seem to resent him.

All in all, he’ll do.

He’s fit for purpose.

Because this is
it
, isn’t it?

Conway’s already gone way too far to turn back now, and while he’s not quite prepared to admit it to himself yet, he’s almost relieved.

‘
They
,’ he says, ‘is an advanced satellite imaging company owned by BRX and the Oberon Capital Group. Obviously, given how rare the stuff is, and how valuable, they decided to try and keep it a secret.’

‘What’s it used for?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know. More of the same, I suppose, only bigger and better. Next generation apps.’ He shrugs. ‘Aerospace, defence turbines, jet engines. Nanotechnology, biotechnology. Who the fuck knows with these people.’

There is silence for a while as this sinks in.

‘And Gianni Bonacci discovered your little secret.’

‘It wasn’t
my
secret, Jimmy. Believe me. I was just trying to flog an old copper mine. But yeah, right after Bonacci dropped his bombshell I won’t deny that I put the squeeze on Rundle. He wasn’t too happy with that and pointed out to me that unless Bonacci was reined in there wouldn’t
be
any sale.’ He puffs up his cheeks and then exhales loudly. ‘The thing is, because Bonacci had used the words
We need to talk
, Rundle figured that that meant it was a shakedown. Which in turn meant that he probably hadn’t told anyone else yet.’

‘Right.’

‘Which meant there was time. In theory. A window of opportunity. To do something. But when I sat down with Don Ribcoff a while later, at Rundle’s request, and fed him every little titbit I knew about Bonacci, everything I’d heard or picked up on in conversation – about him, about Susie, about the two of them, about the coke, about the proposed helicopter trip the next day – I had no idea what I was doing, no idea that there’d be…’ He pauses, struggling, reluctant to say it straight out. ‘Consequences. I mean, it might sound disingenuous now, but at the time I didn’t really understand how serious it was, how seriously
they
were taking it. I didn’t understand how high the stakes were. Looking back, sure, but –’

‘What did you think?’

‘That they’d, I don’t know, pay him off. I was fully expecting them to pay
me
off, to hike up their offer, which they eventually did, of course.’ He then makes a sweeping gesture with his hand to indicate their surroundings. ‘It paid for this bloody place. Got it up and running, anyway.’ He shakes his head. ‘Look, there was a lot of frantic activity that night, a lot of back and forth, so my assumption was that
some
contact was made with Bonacci, and that therefore discussions would be ongoing. Besides, it wasn’t really any of my business. Whatever this thanaxite was, I didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to even think about getting involved in the extraction process myself. I was just delighted that the mere mention of it was apparently going to lead to a financial bonanza for me.’

There is another silence, during which Conway thinks to himself,
that
was pretty lame. Isn’t this meant to be some sort of confession? He looks at Gilroy and actually feels sorry for the poor bastard – having to stand there, having to listen to
this
.

‘Jimmy,’ he says after a while, a knot tightening in his stomach. ‘I don’t know what happened exactly, or how, but I can tell you this. Late on the Saturday night, Don Ribcoff came to me with a bag of cocaine the size of a pound of fucking sugar and told me to deliver it to Susie with instructions for her to babysit Gianni Bonacci, that’s the phrase he used,
babysit
him. She wasn’t to let him out of her sight, she was to go with him on the trip to Donegal. If she did that, there’d be another bag the same size waiting for her when she got back.’

‘And did you deliver it?’

A pause. ‘Well, what do
you
think?’

‘Then what did Susie ask? I mean’ – Jesus, the look on his face – ‘what did she imagine was going
on
, if she’d been the one who pushed Bonacci into –’

‘Remember,
that
was just speculation.’ He pauses. ‘And no, she didn’t ask anything. I’m afraid all Susie could see in front of her was this big fat bag of toot.’

Gilroy stares at him, in silence, no doubt trying to picture the scene. Conway can picture it all too vividly himself. He remembers thinking at the time,
this is fucking insane
.

‘So,’ he says, ‘she did what she was told. Exactly how she went about it, no one knows. Did she go to Bonacci straightaway? Did she go to his room? Did she
fuck
him? Maybe. What she definitely did do, the next morning, was inveigle Niall Feeley and Ted Walker into letting her go along on the helicopter ride. They probably took a bit of convincing, a
lot
of convincing, but no one ever said no to Susie Monaghan.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Then a few hours later the helicopter crashed along the Donegal coast and they were all killed.’

Conway is aware of what’s missing here, of what he’s not saying – of the gap, the final piece of the jigsaw, and Gilroy doesn’t ask him, doesn’t push it.

But he stands there, waiting.

‘No one said anything to
me
about it, Jimmy, not Ribcoff, not Rundle, no one, but after what they came out with the previous evening, I just … I mean … at first there was so much shock over the whole thing, over the crash, the country was convulsed with it, with grief, there was wall-to-wall coverage, and it was
all
about Susie. What had Rundle said?
Don’t make it obvious? Cause a distraction?
Well, they certainly did that, because I don’t think Gianni Bonacci’s name was mentioned more than a couple of times in the reports. And if it was, no one was interested.’ He exhales again. ‘I mean, sure, it occurred to me that they’d done it, somehow, rigged it, but I didn’t for the life of me know
how
, or how they could have done it so fast. It just seemed bizarre. But then as the days went by I discovered more and more about who Don Ribcoff was,
is
. I’d thought he was Rundle’s security guy, you know, a glorified bodyguard sort of thing, but then I found out he runs what effectively amounts to a privately owned army. One with unbelievable resources. And reach. So in the light of
this
’ – he laughs here, but it’s mirthless, more a snort of incredulity – ‘the whole thing started to seem horribly plausible.’

He laughs again in the same way, and nods, as though in agreement with what someone else has said.

Gilroy remains silent. He appears to be in shock.

‘I had no further contact with Clark Rundle,’ Conway quickly goes on. ‘It was all through his lawyers after that. They made a new bid for the mine, which was staggering, a multiple of what their original offer had been. It was the price they were prepared to pay for my silence.’ He pauses. ‘A price I was prepared to accept.’

And there it is, pretty much.

In all its glory.

‘But…’

‘Yes?’

The knot in Conway’s stomach tightens a little more.

Gilroy shuffles from one foot to the other, obviously struggling to formulate his question. ‘Are you … talking on the record here? Am I going to be able to quote you as a source? Because otherwise –’

‘How do you prove any of it?’

‘Yes.’

He’s right, of course. It’s all very well to spill this stuff out, but what happens then? Who follows it up? Who takes responsibility?

Conway feels a stinging sensation behind his eyes. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he says quietly, ‘no, I’m
not
talking on the record.’

‘Why not?’

‘Look…’ How does he explain this? ‘
I
can’t prove any of it either. Yes, I can tell you what happened, and maybe even why, but I have no real evidence.’

‘Then why bother talking to me? Why not tell me to fuck off?’