The Twain Maxim (12 page)

He turned in his seat and punched Kitson on the temple with all his might. Kitson sagged, then slumped into his lap. Baz punched him again in the side of the head and rabbit-punched him in the back of the neck. Then he released his own seatbelt and jumped up. Higgins was shouting something, but he wasn’t listening. He pushed Kitson upright, unclipped his seatbelt and opened the helicopter door.

Higgins was yelling at him now but he shoved Kitson towards the door. The wind force was stopping it swinging open, but he continued to push the man until a gap appeared and soon Kitson was half out of the aircraft. Baz sat on the
floor and used his feet to gain leverage. With a final huge effort the door flew wide and Kitson was gone.

Higgins hauled the Huey to a hover. “You fucking bastard!” he screamed.

“He was on to us,” shouted Baz.

The helicopter was swinging around crazily. “You fucking murderer!” Higgins was clearly beside himself. “I didn’t fucking sign up for that!”

Baz struggled back to his seat and as he buckled himself in he glimpsed a beige patch in the canopy of a tall tree. It might have been a body.

Higgins landed the Huey heavily on the pad and waited for the blades to slow. Then he and Baz got out.

“I’m really sorry,” said Baz.

Higgins decked him.

Baz groaned. “I deserved that.”

“You deserve a lot worse,” said Higgins, and stormed off to the gate.

Baz hauled himself up and followed. “Look,” he said, “he’d written ‘Scam’ all over his notebook – he was going to bury us.”

Higgins looked at him but said nothing and unlocked the gate.

Baz thought again about Kitson. If that had been him caught in the tree and he was still alive, he’d never climb down a hundred and fifty feet to the ground. Even if he did, he’d never make it back across country. And how likely was it, really, that it had been Kitson in the tree? There was no chance.

He’d have to bung Higgins a big pile of cash to keep him on side. He wondered how much.

It was low tide and parts of the foreshore were uncovered that Jim had never seen before. Where the gravel met the mud and where the mud met the shingle lower down, all sorts of tiny pieces of metal collected. He picked them up and put them into his pocket. Briefly he examined a little copper disc, a coin, but he had no idea of what period. He didn’t stop to wonder: in five or ten minutes the tide would turn and within a few moments the patch of goodies would be gone until another low tide took the water that far down.

The houses were far above him now, up a steep bank. Modern London seemed to have dissolved and had been replaced by an eighteenth-century shoreline where sailing ships had just departed for the high seas.

His phone rang. Bugger, he thought. He should have switched it off. Now he felt obliged to answer it. Why was Jules St John calling him at seven in the morning? “Hello,” he said.

“Jim,” said St George. His voice told Jim immediately that something was wrong. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Terence has had an accident at Barron. He’s fallen from a helicopter into the jungle. They don’t hold out any hope for him.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s on RNS for Barron and I’ve just got off the phone from them.”

Jim hadn’t seen that in the chart. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it. “What are we doing about finding Terry?”

“Well, Barron’s doing everything it can, but they were five hundred feet up when it happened so there isn’t much hope of finding him alive – or finding him at all, for that matter.”

“Fuck them, what are we doing?”

“Well, there’s not much we can do. We simply don’t have any way to react fast enough. It would be weeks before we could do anything meaningful.”

Jim spotted a. 22 round gleaming in the mud and bent down to pick it up. “How the hell do you fall out of a helicopter?” he said, looking at the pond-still river at its neap.

“I don’t know,” said St George. “Apparently he was leaning on the door trying to get a good look at something.”

“OK, Jules. I’m going back home to look at the chart – it might tell me something. I mean, the price’ll bomb, right?”

“I don’t know,” said St George. “Predicting markets isn’t my speciality.”

“Well, if he’s found alive in the next few days the price’ll rally, so I need to take a look.” Jim started to walk up the foreshore. There was a rustle from the river as the tide turned and a ripple ran upstream. He sighed. This was his fault. Things had been going too well, and something awful had had to happen to compensate for his immense good fortune. Now it had. And it was likely to be just the start.

He stared at Barron’s chart. Nothing about it said it was going to crash and bounce back. Nothing said it was going to plunge from the 87p at which it currently sat. It was only five minutes to market open and the market-makers were set up
to halve the share price on the get-go. He projected the line down and stared at the mine’s chart since its first days of trading. It still looked set to explode skywards.

He called St George. “Sit on the bid and take all comers. Don’t get off it until 87p.”

“If you go over twenty-nine per cent you’ll have to make a bid.”

“I’m up on the rules, Jules, don’t worry.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim. “Maybe so I can go down there myself and look.” He hadn’t meant to say that but it felt right.

“Very well,” said St George. “I’ll get one of the market-makers to give you a call right away.”

Jim watched as the market opened. Selling was slamming into the price and in moments Barron had dropped to 39p.

His mobile rang. He answered it. “This is Jim.”

“Hi, Jim, this is Denny on the desk. You want to take all comers on Barron?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want volume or do you want to support the price?”

“I want you to suck it up. Buy the fucking company if you can.”

“Right,” said Denny. “In that case I’ll just shake it like a Polaroid. If I slam it up to support it, the selling might stop. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “If the price is too strong, the sellers’ll change their minds and stop selling.”

“It’s an honour to trade for you, mate.”

“Thanks.” Jim hung up, a smile twitching at his face. He returned to the chart. What the fuck was the story with Barron? Something was way out of whack.

Denny was creating mayhem in the already wrecked market for the stock. He was pulling the price around like a pit bull savaging a rag doll.

Baz was outside as the morning heat gathered. It was ten thirty. The aerial of his sat phone was pointing into the sky. “Sorry, Ralph,” he said, “I don’t understand you. The price has crashed and you still can’t buy stock. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sorry, Baz, but our orders aren’t getting filled. Wherever we put them we get leapfrogged. It’s a big market-maker with some kind of flash technology that’s simply gazumping us.”

“How can that be?”

“We’re not geared up for this kind of thing. It doesn’t happen in small caps, only in big-company trading. I’ve never seen this before.”

“It’s Evans, isn’t it?” said Baz. “It’s got to be. You’d have to be fucking bonkers to buy now. Who else could it possibly be?”

“I don’t know, but it’s all a bit worrying, if you ask me. I’m not sure the boys are going to like this. People having nasty accidents isn’t good.”

“They’ve made a bob or two, haven’t they? It’ll be their stupid fault if they bail now.”

“I know,” said Ralph, “but when they make a profit it’s because of their brilliance, and when they don’t, it’s all my doing. There’s a hell of a lot of selling out there but we aren’t getting it.”

Baz grunted. “Try harder.”

“Where’s your limit?”

“Fifty p. Buy it up to fifty p.”

“Right,” said Ralph. “I’ll call you back in an hour.”

Baz hung up and went into his bungalow. The left side of his face was swollen and his lip split. He was reminded of his young days as a prospector in Australia. He had stopped a few punches in those days. A guy could look good with the right kind of bruises. An hour was going to be a long wait.

Jim called Baz Mycock’s mobile but it went straight to voicemail. He called Mycock’s broker. The phone rang out, but rather than leave a message, he sent an SMS: “Call me. Jim Evans.”

Seconds later his mobile rang.

“Hello, Jim, how can I help you?”

“Well, you know my friend Terry just had an accident at Barron? I want to go to the mine and look for him.”

“All right,” said Ralph. “I’ll pass that on to Mycock. He’s at the mine right now, though I think he’s coming back to report to the board.”

“Who’s looking for Terry?”

“I’m sure they’ve got everyone they can lay hands on involved in the search. There’s not much Baz himself can add to that.”

“Well, tell him to hang on because I’m heading over there as soon as I can get my things together.”

“I’ll pass the message on.”

“Tell him I want a seat on the board too.”

“I certainly will.”

“I knew it was him,” said Baz. “It was bloody obvious.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“First off, kill our order. Let him have as much as he likes. Send out the ‘no cobalt’ announcement.”

“You think that’ll scare him off?”

“I doubt it.”

“But he’ll end up owning pretty much all the free float.”

“That’s OK,” said Baz. “Let him have it – in fact, sell him a load from one of our friendly holders.” He was referring to his secret accounts.

“Oh,” said Ralph. “Really?”

“Yeah,” said Baz. “Let him get up to, say, thirty-five per cent, if he’s prepared to trigger a bid.”

Ralph was feeling uncomfortable. “OK.”

“There you go. All sorted,” said Baz, and hung up. When
it was announced that someone had taken their stake to the brink of a takeover, the speculators would pile in and the price would rocket. He would sell into that and then, if Evans was to meet with a nasty accident, the price would crater, Baz would cover his position and that would be that. Perhaps the diamonds-and-gold story wouldn’t be necessary. He’d have to lie very low afterwards, but that wouldn’t be hard – he’d done it so many times before.

“No,” said Higgins. “Not for two million dollars, not for three million dollars, not for five, ten, twenty, a hundred. Doesn’t your fat lip tell you all you’ve got to know? I don’t kill innocent people for money. I’m not a hitman.”

Baz poured himself another whisky. “But you don’t mind standing by.”

“No, I don’t,” said Higgins. “I’m not a policeman. I’m not a righter of wrongs. I do a job and I look after myself and that’s it.” He took the bottle and refilled his glass. “Now get off the subject before I have to punch you again.”

“Phah,” said Baz. “This could set you up for life.”

“No, Baz. Don’t you realise that this kind of situation is just the thing that ends your life? You cross that line and there’s no way back. You ruin everything. The moment you become a killer, you’re a dead man.”

“I don’t see that,” said Baz.

“Then you’re a stupid fuck. Mining stock scamming is one thing, murder is another.” He chugged his whisky. “You should be thinking about closing this whole thing down right now. You certainly shouldn’t be thinking about offing Evans – that’s just fucking crazy.”

Baz took the bottle and topped up Higgins’s glass again.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “you’re probably right. I’ll think about closing up – it’s an option – but I’d like to knock Evans off his perch. Then we’d be in the big money.”

“No. You’re. Wrong,” Higgins said. “If you do that, you’ll be up to your neck in shite and you’ll never escape it. I’ve seen it so many times before. Trust me, mate. Cut your losses before it’s too late.”

Baz nodded. “Let me think on it. I can make a fair amount running the company down. There’s no need to get in any deeper.” He drank a slug of whisky. No way, he thought. No way am I going to let some young twat fuck up my brilliant scheme.

“Don’t be silly,” said Tulip. “I’m not going to let you go.” She was playing with the hairs on his chest. “You’re not well enough to travel. You can’t go to places like that with those sores on your side.” She stroked the three small plasters that covered the unhealed but slowly shrinking wounds.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t trust those people to look for Terence – they don’t impress me one little bit. And if I don’t I’ll hate myself. My scabs have almost gone now, so I’ll be OK.”

“You can’t just go charging off to Congo,” she said, tugging on the hairs. He winced.

“I can,” he said, and swatted away her manicured hand. “As soon as the satellite phone gets here in the morning I’m on the jet. It’s the least I can do.”

“You don’t have to do anything. It’s not your responsibility.”

“I think it is. I want to make sure everything’s being done. Until they find a body there’s hope.”

“It’s very brave of you, but it’s not sensible.”

“I don’t think sensible applies to me,” he said, sitting up and reaching for his half-empty glass of champagne. “Nothing in my life is sensible. Anyway, Mycock and his people are meeting me at the airport, so it’s hardly going to be an adventure.”

“Well, I’m not happy about it,” she said sulkily.

In his eyes her stock was dropping fast. Maybe dealing with women was like trading shares: you bought in when there was a bit of excitement and when it ended you dumped them. He considered that for a second. It had a certain logic.

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.”