Conway suddenly seems overwhelmed. He turns away and starts massaging his temples. He walks over to the big, grimy window that looks out onto the empty plaza.
Jimmy stands there, watching, waiting. Questions are piling up in his mind now. He tries to filter some of them out and to prioritise others – the obvious first question being, what is thanaxite?
That’s the word – the name – Conway used, isn’t it?
Jimmy pats his jacket to find a pen. He flips his notebook open and scribbles the word down – a preliminary version of it, at least – and then a few quick notes.
Photo of a document? Taken on a mobile?
Does anyone know about this?
Bleach him?
After a few moments, Jimmy glances up at Conway – at his stooped frame, his hunched shoulders, his head leaning forward against the dirty glass of the window.
Is he losing him?
With no other way to frame the question, Jimmy just blurts it out. ‘Mr Conway… what is thanaxite?’
As the convoy pulls out of the compound, Rundle feels a surge of contradictory emotions – acute relief and intense irritation. He’s relieved that he can go back to Vaughan with the good news, but he’s irritated that he had to come all the way down here to hear it in the first place – given that J.J. had apparently heard the very same thing a week earlier.
He’s also irritated by Arnold Kimbela himself, this little tin-pot piece-of-shit who insists on being treated like a form of royalty – he won’t use phones or e-mail, won’t deal with middle-ranking executives, even refuses to work with accountants. If he wasn’t sitting on an invaluable deposit of thanaxite, the man would have run out of money, arms, supplies and friends a long time ago.
But it doesn’t take Rundle more than a minute or two to realise that the relief here far outweighs any irritation. He controls the supply chain, which he’s just locked down for another couple of years, more or less. Effectively, that now means he’s got Jimmy Vaughan by the balls.
He turns to Ribcoff and says, on a whim, ‘How far are we from the mine?’
They’re on their way back to the airstrip.
‘Fifteen miles.’ Ribcoff answers. ‘About. Why?’
‘Can we make a detour?’
Ribcoff calculates. ‘Sure. There’s time. I guess.’ He pauses. ‘Is that such a good idea?’
Rundle nods his head firmly. ‘I just want to have a quick look.’
Ribcoff leans forward to relay the change of route to Lutz, who radios ahead to the car in front.
About a mile or so farther down the road the convoy takes a left turn and within seconds conditions get considerably rougher – the road twistier, bumpier.
Rundle has never been hands-on when it comes to his business, not really, not the way old Henry C. was, visiting sites, rolling up his sleeves, examining geological charts, talking to foremen, certainly not the way his great-grandfather was, Benjamin Rundle, who apparently used to get down and dirty operating steam shovels, laying railroad tracks and digging irrigation canals. Maybe it’s part of the evolutionary process, but Rundle has always been a head-office man, the boardroom and the bank being his natural habitats. BRX has operations worldwide and he has travelled extensively, but how often has he strayed beyond the climate-controlled confines of the airport, the hotel and the conference centre?
He did once visit a BRX mining facility in Brazil, now that he thinks of it. It was to mark the start of a massive drilling project using a new and innovative technology.
Somehow, he suspects, this will be different.
Quite how different he has no idea until they arrive on the outskirts of the mining settlement.
It proves to be something of a shock.
What was he expecting, though? An open pit? Excavators? Dump trucks? Maybe some timber structures and an abandoned copper smelter? He would have seen photos and advanced satellite imagery of the Buenke mine back when they were negotiating the purchase of it from First Continental, but these wouldn’t have made any lasting impression on him.
As the convoy stops, Rundle leans forward to get a better view. ‘What the fuck?’ he says.
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.