The Twain Maxim (8 page)

The flotation paperwork was about ten feet thick and the whole process had cost Baz around seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It was all legal cut-and-paste work, put together by well-paid but clueless junior lawyers and accountants’ minions for the fat cats who ran firms that floated companies on the stock market. The firms he used specialised in mining explorers – or mining promotions, as they’d referred to them when they called a spade a spade rather than “environmentally friendly mineral extraction equipment”.

The right fees ensured that his engineering reports were perfectly prepared. Very shortly he would be selling Barron’s story to the institutions. As Higgins had said, it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. The market wanted speculative mines and, by God, it got them. Did they ever turn into billion-dollar mines? It happened occasionally, just as a racing punter got the odd winner in the Grand National.

Still, the City needed speculative mines because the audience loved them, and fund managers, who couldn’t outperform the index if their lives depended on it, relied on mining stocks to give them a shot at a freak win.

There was no perfect market, no random walk: the financial world was just an encrustation of fools, crooks and
functionaries driven by fear and greed. Baz fed the greed and the City paid him for it.

Barron was going to be a hell of a ride. Even those who knew what he was up to, and that included many around the table at the completion meeting to finalise the flotation, still thought they could ride along to their advantage. They could own the share on the ride up and drop it on to a greater fool before it turned to shit.

The wild journey might last three years – he never knew how long a story would hold. What he did know was that he would make another fortune and get away with it. In the thirty years he had spent taking the piss, no one had even come close to collaring him. It was
caveat
fucking
emptor
.

Everything was ready to go into phase two and he felt as bullish as hell.

He was going to place 49 per cent of the business for
£
30 million ostensibly to fund the mine and he would start sucking that money out of the business almost immediately. Then he would ramp the stock price higher with exciting but bogus news, secretly selling shares as it rose. Then the bad news that the mine had chewed through the money raised in the float would collapse the price. He would buy back the stock he had sold, closing his short for a massive profit, and the cycle would continue until the market tired of the Barron story and it was time for Baz to lie low and drop his notebook into the lagoon.

I don’t fucking need this, thought Baz, as the DC-9 started its approach to Goma international airport with a tight, bumpy swerve. None of the planes that flew into Goma were allowed to fly anywhere other than domestically – the EU listed them as too dangerous to fly at all but, as usual, standards were different in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It would be ironic if, after all his hard work, a dodgy junk aircraft was his undoing.

The millions were raised and now it was just a matter of siphoning the money away without leaving any obvious clues that it was all one big con. In theory the location was perfect. The forty square miles of prospect were north of Goma and between a set of volcanoes. It really was the arse end of the world. Not only had it been a war zone until recently, but the two volcanoes went off as regularly as clockwork. No one in their right mind would go there and he was suddenly regretting being quite so thorough in his selection of a site that no one would check up on.

He was going to stay in Goma and make arrangements for his expatriate construction party. They would fly in and put up the mining compound. Then he would ship in the putative drillers and appear to be prospecting. He had to get the ball rolling: soon enough people would be enquiring
about progress and he’d need photos of how things were going to keep them happy.

The plane was shaking as if it was about to fall apart. He took a slug from a miniature of vodka and gritted his teeth. He could see Nyiragongo through the window.

Fuck me, he thought. That really is a mean-looking bastard. McCoy was a fucking idiot: this certainly was the place where the devil would put the pipe in to give the world an enema. Lava had flowed across much of the city and had even swept over the end of the runway. Perhaps the enema had already happened.

When the two men met in the airport building, Higgins looked happy enough. He was worth every cent Baz paid him. But Baz was either getting softer or the world was getting harder: whichever it was, he promised himself that this would be his last ramp. He’d have enough from this job to last him for all time. Once it was over he’d sit on his beach and screw and drink himself to death.

“Good news and bad,” said Higgins, as he slammed the jeep’s door.

“Tell me the good news first,” said Baz. “I could use some after that flight.”

“Well, we’ve got a nice hotel on the lake. Good grub, clean, friendly and a pretty view over the water.”

“And the bad news?”

“If there’s an earthquake we’ll get gassed.”

“Gassed?”

“Yeah, the lake’s full of carbon dioxide from the volcano, and if there’s the wrong kind of seismic activity, up it comes and goodbye, Vienna. Everyone around the fucking lake dies.”

“Ah, choice,” said Baz. “Ker, ker, ker, ker, ker, ker.” The jeep was bouncing over potholes. “This is going to be a riot. Anything else I need to know?”

“Oh, nothing much,” said Higgins. “The civil war’s about to break out again and there’s still genocidal militias rampaging around the area.”

“Anything else?”

“We’re a bit too close to the gorillas for comfort.”

“Can we buy them off?”

“No,” said Higgins. “Or not without tonnes of bananas at any rate.”

“
What?
”

“Not guerrillas. The animals. We’re on the edge of a reserve. We might attract a bit of tree-hugger attention if we’re not careful.”

“Christ, that’s all we need.”

“And there’s a pygmy problem. They’re swarming all over our forty square miles.”

“And what are they doing that’s a problem?”

“Just being there. Some of the locals are scared of them. They’re, like, magical.”

“
Magical
?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ve got magical pygmies?”

“That’s right.”

The jeep took a particularly big jolt.

“And this is a problem?”

“Yeah, because it could prove hard to hire local people and stuff.”

“I see,” said Baz. “Anything else?”

“That’s about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, there’s …”

“Shut up, Mark!” Baz was laughing again. “Just don’t tell me about the cannibals.”

“Funny you should say that …”

“No shut up, will you? Just shut up.”

The volcano had what looked like a cloud of steam perched over it, and now he could see the lava that had flowed through the city in tar-like solid rivers. He marvelled at how two million people could place themselves, their families and their worldly goods in the lap of disaster. All you had to do was leave and go somewhere else. Anywhere would do, so long as it wasn’t beside an exploding mountain. How hard could it be?

As long as the mountain didn’t go bang in the short term he and his plans would be fine. But the benighted citizens of Goma had ended up and would spend their whole lives in this perverse location. It seemed like a basic form of
self-preservation
to leave. But if a smoking mountain and streets full of lava couldn’t convince you to get on your bike then nothing would.

Hotel Ihusi would be their base, and Baz would marshal his forces from the side of Lake Kivu. Then, when
everything
was in place, he might venture out to see the property. Or maybe not this time. Once they had the compound sorted, he would helicopter in and cut out all the nonsense of driving a hundred kilometres over barely passable roads.

Once the compound was in place things would be a lot easier, Baz thought. Higgins had signed up as his on-site manager and was turning up trumps. Settling down had done the old bruiser no end of good, it appeared. After years of
proving otherwise, he had now made plain that he could, in fact, operate his brain, which would be convenient for both of them.

Barron Mining was due to go public any day and Sebastian was nervous. He hadn’t received a call about it and he was expecting one. He saw on his Bloomberg that a ten-day notice had been released and therefore that the company was in the final days of its flotation but calls to the broker were going unanswered. Something was up and he decided to write a stinky email.

That should get their attention, he thought. He didn’t think they’d appreciate his bank’s team of red-hot financial gurus let loose on them. A bad note from them and the whole issue might be scuppered. It was a threat of mutually assured destruction.

Sure enough, his BlackBerry rang.

“Sebastian, I’ve been meaning to call you for days. Very busy, you understand.”

“Of course. What uplift is the IPO coming in at?”

“A hundred per cent of the pre-IPO.”

“Excellent.”

“Would you like to be taken out?” asked the broker.

If they took the stock he’d bought he’d make a very tidy sum but, as they clearly wanted it, the share price was obviously about to ride high after the float. “How much is the float raising?”

“Thirty million pounds.”

“Is anyone else coming out?”

“Plenty,” said the broker.

That sounded like no one to Sebastian. “I’d like an allocation in the IPO,” he said.

There was a note of hesitation at the other end. “I’m not sure,” said Ralph. “This is institutional placing, not a PA round. How much were you looking for?”

“Two million,” he said, rather rashly. He’d have to borrow it from the firm’s credit line to him.

“All right. I’ll put you down for two million but there will be a scale back, so you won’t get the full amount. I’ll know more nearer the time.”

Sebastian felt relieved. Going in for another two million was madness. If he was sensible he’d cash his pre-IPO position now and take the fat profit. “Let me know,” he said.

He had dreamt every night about the mine in Congo: sometimes the dream was pleasant, but at others it was a nightmare.

On Monday morning his phone rang again. “The offer’s closed,” said Ralph. “It was fifty times oversubscribed but I managed to get you another hundred K.”

“That’s pathetic,” Sebastian protested.

“A lot of people got nothing, but, as you were in from day one, I called in a favour.”

“Can’t you manage some more?”

“Sorry. It was hard enough to get you this many.”

“When’s the first day of trading?”

“Next Monday.”

“Is it going to pop?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ralph, “and if you want to sell, just give me the nod and I’ll get you out right away.”

“Thanks. I’ll be in touch” He slammed the phone down, his pale skin flushing red. Bloody hell! He’d missed out on a huge amount of money again.

Now all his dreams were nightmares. In the worst, Jemima had run off with Jim, his old junior, now a zillionaire. They were dismantling his home brick by brick and auctioning it off on eBay. He hadn’t made a fortune and that was exactly the same as losing one.

He was going to buy in the market on the first day. He was sure the Barron Mining deposit in Congo was a huge one, that ‘the boys’ knew it and wanted it all for themselves.

At eight a.m. on Monday morning Barron Mining opened for trading. Sebastian had typed its ticker into his screen and watched the market-makers open their prices. The Barron Mining stock ticker was “BOM” and people would use these three letters to look up its share price from now on. On the chat sites they were calling the company Barmin and the posters seemed to know a lot of stuff he hadn’t heard about. Apart from the cobalt there were unannounced kimberlitic structures on the land. Amazing, thought Sebastian. And then it all made sense. That was why they’d been so keen to buy back his stock at every stage of the flotation process. The
diamonds Baz had shown him weren’t a sideshow but the real deal. Everyone knew the area was riddled with them. The reason the place had been a war zone was because it had so many. After all, the site was right next to several volcanoes and that was where diamonds came from. All the pieces fell into place.

He bought in the market as it opened 60 per cent up from the IPO price. He chased the price as the share zoomed up, and, by the time he had spent his borrowed two million, the price was two pounds. He felt strong and powerful. He had sussed their little game.

Barron was 200p and sooner or later it would be a fiver – maybe even a tenner.

The price ticked down and started to drift off. Who was selling?

By the close of play the share price was 155p. Sebastian had lost nigh on three-quarters of a million pounds and a lot of his initial profits had been eaten away. At the flotation price he could have taken a six hundred thousand pounds’ profit.

Within minutes of the opening, if he hadn’t bought more, he would have been sitting on a
£
1.2 million win.

At two quid he would have been more than one and a half million ahead, but he had gone “all in”, and after the
last-minute
faint in the price he was back profit-wise to roughly where he would have been if he’d let them sell his initial stake at the float price. The trouble was, the stakes were now so very much higher.

That night the nightmares came again. What the blazes had he done?

In the morning the share price opened up 5p. His frown
turned immediately into a smile. The first days of trading were going to be volatile. He should switch off his screen and look at it again in a week. It would save him a lot of trouble. Instead he fixated on Barron’s progress. Every tick up was delicious, every tick down a smack in the face. But it was ticking up slowly and, as the days passed, its rise accelerated.

Barron was the talk of the Internet. On the ADVFN website, posters were singing the stock to the skies. Small investors riding the wave were cheering it on like football fans.

To Sebastian, they seemed well informed, while the “
de-rampers
”, who suggested it was just another swindle, were clearly evil shorters, trying to ruin a perfectly good mine.

The only people posting who really knew any more than was in the share prospectus were Baz’s Filipino team of rampers, employed to spread the word, or at least Baz’s version of it, around the grapevine of the web. It was they who kept a flame under the wild talk that spewed out of the speculators. This was a world that Sebastian didn’t know existed. While his bank might float a company for a few billion, he had no idea how the small-cap market worked.

Any company worth below two hundred and fifty million was considered a minnow and ignored as irrelevant. A company of Barron’s size was too tiny to warrant anyone’s time at his bank so he had never been involved at that end of the market. He was ignorant of the situation in which he now found himself.

Barron pulled back from 198p a share. He told himself it was profit-taking at the 200p level and that soon enough it would break new ground. In a fit of excitement he bought another half-million, trying to push it over the 200p price line. He managed it but it immediately fell back. He had now
bought nearly
£
3 million of the stock and found himself having to announce a significant interest in the company to the stock exchange. That was a little embarrassing. A compliance officer turned up and asked him lots of loaded questions.

He hadn’t done anything wrong, though, so unless they wanted shot of him, nothing would follow.

The share price popped up on the announcement. The bulletin boards were singing that a big wheel in a big bank held a huge stake, proof enough that Barron would be a billion-pound company by Christmas. Sebastian smiled to himself. That was flattering. The price hit 220p.

Then it slipped again.

Jim looked out on to the foreshore as the tide dropped to its lowest point. On the other side of the river, someone was walking along the bank searching among the stones and rubble. He got up and opened the window. There was a ladder just below the sill, leading down to the grey, pebbly beach. He climbed down it and began to search between the stones. Apart from broken bricks and slates, there was lots of smashed pottery, much of it ancient, lumps of iron, nails, screws and bolts. On a chalk bed he spotted a dull silver disc, picked it up and peered at it. There didn’t appear to be anything on its surface. He walked on.

The City looked different from down there, a view he had never had of it before. His nan had always warned him to keep away from the river. “Sinking mud,” she would say, “will suck you down and drown you.” Now he could see that was nonsense. It was just a stony riverbank littered with the rubbish of a thousand years.