Desmond Bagley
Landslide
For Philip Joseph and all good booksellers
One
I
I was tired when I got off the bus at Fort Farrell. No matter how soft the suspension of the bus and how comfortable the seat you still feel as though you’ve been sitting on a sack of rocks for a few hours, so I was tired and not very impressed by my first view of Fort Farrell — The Biggest Little City in the North-Eastern Interior — or so the sign said at the city limits. Someone must have forgotten Dawson Creek.
This was the end of the line for the bus and it didn’t stay long. I got off, nobody got on, and it turned and wheeled away back towards the Peace River and Fort St John, back towards civilization. The population of Fort Farrell had been increased by one — temporarily.
It was mid-afternoon and I had time to do the one bit of business that would decide if I stayed in this backwoods metropolis, so instead of looking for a hotel I checked my bag at the depot and asked where I could find the Matterson Building. The little fat guy who appeared to be the factotum around the depot looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and tittered. ‘You must be a stranger round here.’
‘Seeing I just got off the bus it may be possible,’ I conceded. I wanted to get information, not to give it.
He grunted and the twinkle disappeared. ‘It’s on King Street; you can’t miss it unless you’re blind,’ he said curtly. He was another of those cracker-barrel characters who think they’ve got the franchise on wisecracks — small towns are full of them. To hell with him! I was in no mood for making friends, although I would have to try to influence people pretty soon.
High Street was the main drag, running as straight as though it had been drawn by a rule. Not only was it the main street but it was practically the only street of Fort Farrell — pop. 1, 806 plus one. There was the usual line of false-fronted buildings trying to look bigger than they were and holding the commercial enterprises by which the locals tried to make an honest dollar — the gas stations and auto dealers, a grocery that called itself a supermarket, a barber’s shop, ‘Paris Modes’ selling women’s fripperies, a store selling fishing tackle and hunting gear. I noticed that the name of Matterson came up with monotonous regularity and concluded that Matterson was a big pumpkin in Fort Farrell.
Ahead was surely the only real, honest-to-God building in the town: an eight-storeyed giant which, I was sure, must be the Matterson Building. Feeling hopeful for the first time, I quickened my pace, but slowed again as High Street widened into a small square, green with cropped lawns and shady with trees. In the middle of the square was a bronze statue of a man in uniform, which at first I thought was the war memorial; but it turned out to be the founding father of the city — one William J. Farrell, a lieutenant of the Royal Corps of Engineers. Pioneers, O Pioneers — the guy was long since dead and the sightless eyes of his effigy stared blindly down false-fronted High Street while the irreverent birds made messes in his uniform cap.
Then I stared unbelievingly at the name of the square while an icy shudder crawled down my spine. Trinavant Park stood on the intersection of High Street and Farrell Street and the name, dredged out from a forgotten past, hit me like a blow in the belly. I was still shaken when I reached the Matterson Building.
Howard Matterson was a hard man to see. I smoked three cigarettes in his outer office while I studied the pneumatic charms of his secretary and thought about the name of Trinavant. It was not so common a name that it cropped up in my life with any regularity; in fact, I had come across it only once before and in circumstances I preferred not to remember. You might say that a Trinavant had changed my life, but whether he had changed it for better or worse there was no means of knowing. Once again I debated the advisability of staying in Fort Farrell, but a thin wallet and an empty belly can put up a powerful argument so I decided to stick around and see what Matterson had to offer.
Suddenly and without warning Matterson’s secretary said, ‘Mr Matterson will see you now.’ There had been no telephone call or ring of bell and I smiled sourly. So he was one of those, was he? One of the guys who exercised his power by saying, ‘Keep Boyd waiting for half an hour, Miss So-and-so, then send him in,’ with the private thought — ‘That’ll show the guy who is boss around here.’ But maybe I was misjudging him — maybe he really was busy.
He was a big, fleshy man with a florid face and, to my surprise, not any older than me — say, about thirty-three. Going by the extensive use of his name in Fort Farrell, I had expected an older man; a young man doesn’t usually have time to build an empire, even a small one. He was broad and beefy but tending to run to fat, judging by the heaviness of his jowls and the folds about his neck, yet big as he was I topped him by a couple of inches. I’m not exactly a midget.
He stood up behind his desk and extended his hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Boyd. Don Halsbach has said a lot of nice things about you.’
So he ought, I thought; considering I found him a fortune. Then I was busy coping with Matterson’s knuckle-cracking grip. I mashed his fingers together hard to prove I was as big a he-man as he was and he grinned at me. ‘Okay, take a seat,’ he said, releasing my hand. ‘I’ll fill you in on the deal. It’s pretty routine.’
I sat down and accepted a cigarette from the box he pushed across the desk. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to fool you, Mr Matterson. This hasn’t got to be a long job. I want to get clear of it by the spring thaw.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Don told me about that — he said you want to get back to the North-West Territories for the summer. Do you think you’ll make any money at that kind of geology?’
‘Other people have,’ I said. ‘There have been lots of good strikes made. I think there’s more metal in the ground up there than we dream of and all we have to do is to find it.’
He grinned at me. ‘We meaning you.’ Then he shook his head. ‘You’re in advance of your time, Boyd. The North-West isn’t ready for development yet. What’s the use of making a big strike in the middle of a wilderness when it would cost millions in development?’
I shrugged. ‘If the strike is big enough the money will be there.’
‘Maybe,’ Matterson said noncommittally. ‘Anyway, from what Don told me, you want a short-term job so you can get a grubstake together in order to go back. Is that it?’
‘Just about.’
‘All right, we’re your boys. This is the situation. The Matterson Corporation has a lot of faith in the potentialities of this section of British Columbia and we’re in development up to our necks. We run a lot of interlinked operations — logging-centred mostly — like pulp for paper, plywood, manufactured lumber and so on. We’re going to build a newsprint plant and we’re making extensions to our plywood plants. But there’s one thing we’re short of and that’s power — specifically electrical power.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Now we could run a pipeline to the natural gas fields around Dawson Creek, pipe in the gas and use it to fuel a power station, but it would cost a lot of money and we’d be paying for the gas for evermore. If we did that the gas suppliers would have a hammerlock on us and would want to muscle in with their surplus money to buy a slice of what we’ve got — and they’d be able to do it, too, because they’d control our power.’ He stared at me. ‘We don’t want to give away slices — we want the whole goddam pie — and this is how we do it.’