The Twain Maxim (9 page)

Barron Mining had been slipping every day. Sebastian’s profits were gone and now, as the share price hit 100p, he was looking at a nasty loss, a six-hundred-thousand-pound loss, equivalent to more than half of his annual salary in one horrific investment, rather than the fat profit he had started with. The brokers who had sold him the deal in the first place always made reassuring noises when he called them – the project was going well, they declared, and there were buyers in the wings.

According to the mining reports, Barron was an amazing resource. It had untold quantities of cobalt, which was in huge demand for hardened steel. Every now and then the price would spike upwards and he would be sure it was about to take off again – until it then slipped off and headed south. Sebastian contacted his own broker and looked into selling.

“What?” he had found himself shouting. “What do you mean I can only get ten thousand pounds away without hitting the price?”

“Eh, eh,” his broker had replied. “This is a market-maker stock and that’s all they’ll take at a go.”

“I didn’t seem to have that problem buying,” he said. “And I’ve got three million pounds of stock I might want to sell.” In fact, he hadn’t got three million pounds of stock any more,
but he held so much that he couldn’t get out – at least not quickly. It might take months to unload a position of that size
and
at a whopping discount. If he tried to withdraw slowly and got lucky, he might get out over weeks or months and then, unless something unexpectedly good turned up, he’d have nailed the price indefinitely at the current level. Most likely, though, he’d drive the share price into the ground – he might halve it if he tried to get out quickly.

“These microcaps are tricky,” said the broker finally. “I can leave an order with the market-maker.”

“You mean you’ll tell them I’m a seller of a huge block of stock?”

“That’s how it works.”

Sebastian looked at the screen showing the market-makers in BOM: they would buy a maximum lot of 10,000 shares at a time. He was stuck in his multi-million share position, unable to sell enough to get out for weeks. He was in big trouble. At least the price was holding above 100p.

Sebastian’s BlackBerry buzzed. It was seven forty. An alert about Barron, an RNS stock-market news release, had been emailed to him on the phone’s screen. He was in the middle of telling the traders that the month had been a fair one and to keep at it. They didn’t pay him much attention when he gave them a bollocking or a pep talk: they were the masters of the universe who saved or broke markets. At least, they had been when Jim had been there. Now they were living off the legend.

Sebastian stopped talking and picked up the phone. He opened the email and practically dropped the BlackBerry. He let out a little cry. Barron had problems, and the price was going to crash at the open. He collected himself. “Thanks,
guys,” he said, his face white and speckled red, then stumbled to the door and out of the room. He was going to vomit for sure.

“Thanks, apropos fucking nothing, to you too,” said Dirk, the options specialist, a little startled by his boss’s abrupt departure. “What’s got into him?”

“Irritable bowel,” said Fat Joe, and took a big swig of his latte.

The traders scowled at each other and got up to leave.

Sebastian was sitting miserably on the toilet waiting for two things to happen: the danger of puking to subside, and the market to open in six minutes. In the cubicle, though, with just a web page for company, it was hard to tell what was going on. At his terminal he would be able to see the FTSE futures trading, suggesting either strength or weakness in the market. The market-makers would be coming online with their orders before kick-off and this would give him an idea of what would happen when trading started. But he was caught in a China limbo and, with his tiny screen, all he could do was refresh the page with yesterday’s price on it while he waited for the market to open.

The drilling rig for Barron’s initial exploration programme had been seized in Customs at the Rwandan border and had been impounded. The project was going to be delayed. It wasn’t the end of the world by any means but it was sure to smash the price. The final seconds ticked down unbearably slowly. Then, at last, it was 8:00:01.

He hit the page refresh: 38 per cent down. He blinked in the hope that he had misread it. He refreshed again – 42 per cent down

Suddenly he was calm. He’d had it. He was well and truly scuppered. He got up, flushed the toilet to complete the fiction, and left the stall. He was powerless. He was like an ant scooped up in a spoon of sugar and about to be dropped into a cup of boiling tea.

By the time he reached his screen the price was down only 25 per cent His whole body reacted in a moment of pure relief. Maybe it would zoom ahead now.

His life was hanging by a thread and the market makers, the stock market’s middle men who mediated the price swings of shares, seemed to be pulling him upwards to safety. Now it was only 15 per cent down. Maybe it had been falling because the insiders had known this bad news was coming and were getting out. Now the price would recover as they bought back in. Why the hell wasn’t he an insider on this?

The price suddenly dropped 10 per cent. He closed the screen and opened his email. He had to find a way out of this mess.

He called Ralph, the stinking broker who had sold him the stock, but he wasn’t in.

“Nine o’clock!” he heard himself protest. “The market opens at eight.”

“Not around here,” said the junior sheepishly.

By the time Ralph called the price was at 90p. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come good, but you’ll have to take the rough with the smooth on this one. The DRC is a bit difficult.”

“Can you place my stock?”

“In what way?”

“Well, take it off me at a pound.”

“Well, the share’s at 90p at the minute.”

“I can see that, but when it gets back there.”

“Perhaps. The market’s a bit thin right now, but we should be able to do something when the next good news comes out.”

“When will that be?”

“That’s tricky. Is your line recorded?”

“No – I’m on the mobile.”

“Good. Have to be careful, you know.”

“Of course.”

“Well, there are reports from the kimberlites.” Sebastian remembered the tiny diamond – he still had it somewhere. “My analysts think they’re important. We have some satellite photos showing a very interesting cluster of kimberlitic structures on the property. Most stones in the region come out of local hand-dug pits only a few metres deep, but the potential for proper exploitation is colossal – and there’s the Eye of Kivu, a five hundred carat stone that showed up in Goma only last month. It’s all very promising.”

“When do you think all this will come out?”

“Can’t be sure. Things always take a little longer than you expect, but it’s a strong management team.”

BOM was falling again, ticking down to 85p.

Sebastian had a good mind to buy some more, but he was in way too deep. The price ticked up again as he hung up. He scrunched his eyes up to peer at the Barron chart and tried to make sense of it. He wanted to draw lines on it but there was so little to go on. Then he had a good idea.

The riverbank was full of fascinating old bits and pieces. Wherever Jim looked his eyes picked out strange shapes that turned into old coins or broken cutlery. He could spot even
the slightest edge of something interesting and on the banks outside his flat there seemed no end of junk.

Stafford seemed to know what it all was. “The corner of a seventeenth-century pewter shoe buckle,” he might say. “A James the Second tin farthing in very poor condition. An early twentieth-century penknife I should think. A decorated clay-pipe bowl, from the mid-seventeenth century.” He claimed he was no authority, but Jim was impressed, amused and pleased. When he found the pewter end of a Stuart scabbard, which felt like treasure, he was totally hooked.

Stafford had sourced a large glass display case and Jim was filling it with his precious finds. There were two tides a day and only one usually in daylight. Each one was different as every tide had a different rise and fall, and there were miles of foreshore for him to visit.

He had found a passion, if not a purpose.

As he climbed back through the window Stafford was waiting for him. He stepped out of his boots on the large mat that had appeared one day out of the blue. Jim sat on the sofa and emptied his pockets on to a cloth that Stafford produced. “I have tidings, so to speak,” said the butler, plucking a small piece of copper whatnot from the dirty pile. “Anglo-Saxon strap end. Very nice.”

“Really?” said Jim, taking it back. “Really?”

“I should think so.”

“Wow.”

Stafford picked up a tiny slice of what had been a disc. “A quarter-cut penny, thirteenth to fifteenth century. My word you have a sharp eye.”

Jim took the tiny piece of stamped metal. “Wow,” he said again.

There was a pair of ship’s dividers, corroded solid but open. Stafford picked them up and examined them very closely. “Very, very interesting,” he said, lost for a moment in thought.

“Really?”

Stafford looked at Jim queerly. “It depends,” he said mysteriously. He put them down. “Anyway, there’s someone I’d like you to meet, seeing how much you enjoy the ancient. The lady in question is currently excavating Mearde Street in the City. A huge development’s going up and they’re on a site picking over the Roman layer. Would you like to see?”

“Bloody right!”

Stafford picked up a grey piece of twisted metal with a blob on one end. “A sixteenth-century spoon handle.”

Although it didn’t look like it, Baz owned 53 per cent of Barron Mining through a series of front companies spread around all the tax havens of the world. The arrangement wasn’t too elaborate but was complicated enough to confuse and stymie any investigation into who really owned the company. Once his holdings were anonymous he was free to do as he liked with the stock, so he lent it to himself in the guise of yet another company and sold it. When his good news was made public, he would sell into the buying, and when the bad news arrived he’d buy it back after the fall. In due course he would sell the stock into the ground and buy it back when the company had to raise more money to fund the expensive dig that wasn’t happening. The cash needed to pay the bogus costs went to him.

The combination of his fabricated news, his rumour mill and the happy gambling muppets who punted his share was like the key to the back door of a bank vault. He was going to shovel money out of it and into his waiting van for as long as it was prudent to do so. His campaign had started well: the millions were already piling up.

He had been doing broker presentations to institutions. They liked the story, and as the stock was cheap, they were happy to snap it up in the market. As they bought, he sold. The price might rise but soon enough it would fall again. He could sell it down to zero if he wanted to, and he could crash the price by releasing a news story or two. He was lining up to do just that.

Jim gazed down at the door lying on the black mud. The archaeologist was squatting on her haunches. She waved her trowel in a large arc. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she said.

“And it’s Roman?”

“Yes,” she said, surreptitiously chewing Nicorette gum, “preserved in the mud. It’s basically waterlogged at this level.”

“And why is it lying there like that?”

“Good question.”

“Is there like a Roman basement down there?”

“Probably not. We think it’s symbolic.”

“Symbolic of what?”

“The door to the underworld.”

“Hell?”

“Not quite. Hades wasn’t considered hell, just a kind of heaven, an afterlife.”

“And under the door is a staircase to hell?”

“We’ll find out shortly, because we aren’t going to leave it behind.”

“I’d love to be there when you open it.”

“I think we’ll be more lifting it than opening it,” she said, a faint smile on her lips.

“If I may,” said Stafford, stepping forwards, “I wondered, Jill, what your next project will be.”

She stood up and looked rather sad. “I don’t know,” she said. “It depends on funding. There’s not much going around at the moment.”

“Funding?” said Jim. “What does a dig like this cost?”

“Oh, a lot,” she said, “hundreds of thousands.”

“Is that all?” He laughed.

No one joined in.

Jim decided to press on with the thought. “Maybe we could organise a dig in my back garden.”

“Your back garden?” Jill said, throwing Stafford a look.

“The Thames, my dear,” he said. “I’m sure Mr Evans will be very happy to cover the costs.”

“Wapping,” said Jim. “I’m bloody sure all the good stuff’s down deep. We could put a dam in and dredge it.”

“That would cost a fortune.”

“No worries.”

Jill turned to Stafford for confirmation. He smiled reassuringly.

“Planning will be tricky but I can sort that.” She rested her chin on the handle of her trowel. “A ten-by-ten-metre dam excavation could come in at over a million.”

“Can you make it bigger?” asked Jim.

“Probably,” she said. “Things can usually be done bigger.”

“Can I touch it?” said Jim, pointing at the door.

“Yes,” she said, “but gently.”

Jim hunkered down and ran his finger over the rough wet wood. “Now I can say I’ve touched the door to hell itself,” he said.

“Again,” said Stafford.

Jim was about to query this but Jill clapped her hands. “I’m getting excited now,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to strip a piece of the river back to the beginning. It’s never really been done. Imagine what we might find.”

Jim could see it now, right outside his window. It would be awesome, he marvelled. His thoughts were interrupted by his phone. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID on the screen

It was Sebastian Fuch-Smith.