Rare Earth Page 2

  ‘You are here, Dr Truman,’ he said ‘to answer certain allegations of the mismanagement of funds disbursed to you by this committee for the Oracle of Ammon Project at Siwa. We’ve had our accountants go over your books, and they find at least twenty thousand pounds unaccounted for.’

  He peered at Truman over his half-moon glasses. ‘Would you care to say what happened to the money? Have you perhaps been playing the horses, Dr Truman?’ There were restrained titters from the stuffed-shirts. ‘Or did you take the opportunity to pay off the mortgage on your house?’

  ‘That’s preposterous,’ Truman said. ‘There may be anomalies in the accounts, but all that money has been spent on the dig in one way or another. You know as well as I do that there are invisible overheads — incentives paid to local big-wigs, bonuses for the labourers — items that aren’t specifically allowed for in the budget, but have to be paid. Normally they’re covered up under other headings, but I’ve been too busy. I never had any interest in accounting. That’s my mistake, I suppose.’

  A surge of anger swept through him as he stared at the truculent, vulturine faces of the committee. ‘But that’s not what this is really about, is it?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Oldfield asked blandly.

  ‘There are at least three members of this committee who’ve written papers on the tomb of the Oracle,’ Truman said, ‘all of them agreeing that her body was removed from Siwa before the Muslim invaders arrived. The Santariya Column suggested to me that she was buried secretly in the Sand Sea. That’s what this is about, Sir John, and you know it.’ He was standing up now, shouting. ‘It’s about your damn reputations! You know perfectly well I never siphoned off a cent in my life. You just couldn’t stand the idea that I might actually find the tomb of the Hidden One and prove the lot of you were barking up the wrong tree!’

  For a moment there was an embarrassed silence. Then Oldfield said quietly, ‘You had three years looking for the tomb of the Oracle, Dr Truman. You had your innings and you came up with nothing. You were wasting your sponsor’s money. Unless you can reimburse the missing funds, no one’s going to take you on again — not even as a field assistant. If you behave yourself you might just manage to get a job teaching English to foreign students.’

  And that had been that. Truman had walked out of the meeting, knowing there was no point in arguing. One part of him felt relief. In the desert he’d grown accustomed to the slow rhythms of a more primitive existence, and now the world he had come from seemed a frightening, frenetic and unpredictable place.

  He’d been wondering what to do next, when out of the blue there had come a phone call from Gus Maynard. Maynard had been low-key, polite, and very persuasive, asking if he could possibly call at the Kortex office in London some time in the next two days.

  ‘I would very much like to talk to you about Harris,’ he had said. ‘I want to thank you personally for getting Harris’s personal effects and the samples back, and per-haps discuss a matter of mutual benefit. Were you aware that I offered a reward for the discovery of Harris’s body?’

  Truman said he wasn’t, and explained rather brusquely that he’d brought the samples back only because he’d had a space in a container that happened to be going back to the UK the following day. Maynard paused, obviously noticing Truman’s surliness, but repeated that he would be most obliged if Truman would call in at the office in the next two days. At first Truman had declined firmly. That evening, though, he had phoned Maynard back, saying he’d reconsidered. He had added that he was curious to know what Harris had been up to in the Sand Sea. Maynard had agreed to tell him the full story, and they had made an appointment. Now, loitering in the cold outside Maynard’s door his nerve almost failed him. He blew a smear of condensation over the brass plate, then rubbed it off with his bare hand as if he might rub the name Kortex Mining Company off the face of the earth. It was still there when he took his hand away, so he pushed the door open and went in.

  *

  A giant Rastafarian with dreadlocks was sitting behind a desk in the reception hall amid gilt-framed mirrors, frayed kilims and a smell of floor polish. The desk looked far too small for the man, who must have weighed twenty-two stone and had a build somewhere between an armoured car and a rhino. The big fellow’s presence was immediately threatening, and it was that more than anything that drew Truman on. Truman was hardly the macho type, but he had an uncontrollable urge to challenge those he felt threatened him, just as he had challenged the Ashmoleum committee when he should have kept his mouth shut.

  The Rasta stood up and took a neat dance step out from behind the desk, raising himself to full height like a grizzly. A plastic badge pinned to his barrel chest bore the name Cliff; in big cursive letters.

  Truman drew himself up straight.

  ‘I have an appointment with Mr Maynard,’ he said. ‘Dr Truman?’

  ‘It’s cool,’ Cliff said truculently. ‘But I gotta frisk you, see if you’re carryin’.’

  ‘Carrying what, exactly?’ Truman enquired.

  Cliff glared at him. ‘Whaddya think, man?’ he said. ‘A piece.’

  ‘A piece of what?’

  ‘A gun, man. A gun.’

  Truman shrugged. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘In Hanover Square? Kortex must get some creeps for clients.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Truman allowed himself to be frisked. Cliff worked on him with cold detachment, laying a massive hand between his legs and patting his trousers all the way down to the parquet.

  ‘Is Mr Maynard in?’ Truman said drily. ‘Or not?’

  Cliff grunted. ‘The boss is upstairs,’ he growled. ‘He’s expectin’ you.’

  Chapter Three

  MAYNARD WAS WAITING FOR HIM ON the second floor in a room that looked more like a down-at-heel gentleman’s club than an office. A coal fire blazed in an antique fireplace decorated with Dutch tiles, and there were threadbare Kirghiz rugs and shapeless leather armchairs. A ball-and-claw footed desk was the only hint that anything commercial might be undertaken here, and that impression was countered immediately by its adornment of photos of teenage children, and of the strikingly handsome Scandinavian-looking woman Truman assumed was Maynard’s wife. Half of the wall space was taken up with fitted bookshelves and over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of some forgotten Scottish nobleman, with a gilt frame six inches wide. Maynard stood up to greet him. He was anything between sixty and seventy-five, a small man with a prosperous waistline, a silver goatee, and the remains of his hair brushed back sharply from a forehead that was an atlas of liver spots and wrinkles. His face had red patches from some allergy and his eyes, red veined and watery, stood out in a puff of tissue, half disguised by severe school-ma’am glasses. He was wearing a comfortable kashmir cardigan, and exuded the clubby air of a college president rather than a Mining Company CEO.

  ‘Dr Truman,’ he said in the same prim Scots patrician Truman had noticed on the phone. ‘Such a pleasure. Sorry about the patting down — a bit gruff, Cliff, but believe me there’s a heart of gold under the beef.’

  Truman accepted Maynard’s handshake, looking into an inscrutable mandarin grin that seemed to show everything but give away nothing. Maynard might be grinning like that when he stuck a knife in your back, Truman felt.

  ‘Mr Maynard,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know what this is about. I returned the things I found. You sent me a cheque to cover my expenses and I considered the matter closed. As I told you, if I’d had my way I’d have buried the samples with the cadaver.’

  Maynard assumed a pained expression and moved over to a carved blackwood chest that doubled as a drinks cabinet.

  ‘Scotch?’ he asked, as if whisky was the panacea for all social awkwardness.

  Truman shook his head. ‘A bit early for me,’ he said.

  ‘Poppycock,’ Maynard said pleasantly, topping his own drink up with a generous shot from a bottle of twelve year old single malt. ‘It’s never too early for a dram, and anyway, it’s Christmas — at least, almost.’

  He lifted the cut glass in salute. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Merry Christmas to you, Dr Truman. Please sit down.’

  Truman shrugged and plumped down in one of the leather armchairs next to the fire, warming his knuckles. Maynard sat opposite.

  ‘Now, whatever the case,’ he said, ‘I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for bringing those samples home. Thank God you didn’t bury them.’

  ‘Look,’ Truman said, ‘you thanked me in your letter.’

  Maynard flapped the air with a pudgy hand.

  ‘Now just hear me out a minute, Dr Truman,’ he said. ‘I’m talking more about what we could do for each other.’

  Truman gave a hollow chuckle. ‘I’m an archaeologist, Mr Maynard,’ he said. ‘I don’t do mineral samples. OK, so trowel-jockeys work in the good earth like miners do, but with a different object. I think you’ve got your professions muddled up.’

  Maynard put down his glass and placed his hands together as if in prayer as he considered the undulating flames in the fireplace. When he glanced up he looked like a vicar about to perform a funeral service.

  ‘I don’t need a prospector,’ he said solemnly. ‘Tell me, did you examine the map, the sketch and the GPS unit?’

  Truman thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he said. ‘The map showed the whole Western Desert of Egypt and the Sudan, but there was a circle round a place called the Bint Hammou Plateau — a desolate mountain massif straddling the Sudanese border. The GPS had recorded landmarks in the same area. The sketch I don’t know about — it’s of what they call an aiguille, a rock obelisk fashioned by erosion. It’s covered in graffiti — mostly tribal camel-brands. At first I thought the samples must have come from Bint Hammou, but the plateau is about five hundred miles south of Siwa across the Sand Sea, so Harris couldn’t possibly have walked from there carrying that bloody back-pack with no water. He could have got the samples from Bognor beach, for all I know. He had a visa for Egypt in his passport but none for the Sudan.’

  Maynard’s eyes were opaque under the deep glasses. ‘So you thought about the matter quite carefully,’ he said.

  Truman glanced at him feeling a twinge of guilt. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I was curious, and reconstructing things is my job.’

  ‘Weren’t you also curious about the samples?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Truman said non-committally. ‘But I was more interested in how Harris turned up a stiff in my camp on the edge of the Great Sand Sea. He wasn’t collecting samples in the erg, I’m sure of that, and if he was prospecting in the Sudan it wasn’t on the up-and-up because he had no papers, not even a visa.’

  Maynard smiled almost gloatingly.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Harris was geologizing illegally in the Sudan. He couldn’t afford to take chances. There’s a civil war on there. The Bint Hammou Plateau is inhabited by unadministered nomads, and if the nomads had found official papers on him they’d probably have rubbed him out. He started off with a Land Cruiser, but it must have conked on him somewhere. My guess is he started walking and just dropped dead from thirst.’

  ‘So you sent him to the plateau?’ Truman said.

  Maynard blinked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And he was overdue back. When he didn’t show I offered a reward for the body.’

  ‘You were so certain he’d kicked the bucket? Didn’t you consider he might have done a runner?’

  Maynard looked annoyed.

  ‘Not Harris,’ he said. ‘He was one of the most loyal men who ever worked for me. Been with me twenty years. Did you notice the eye-patch? He lost the eye in a cave-in while he was working for the Rand Corporation. Ever heard of it?’

  Truman shook his head. ‘Miners and archaeologists are oil and water,’ he said.

  ‘Rand’s is a big mining cartel based in Johannesburg,’ Maynard went on. ‘Harris served his apprenticeship with them — his father and grandfather had worked for them too, so it was the family tradition you might say. He was a mining engineer and a damn good one — one of those guys who can read the ground like a story. Eye like a snapshot when it came to strata. Rand’s shoved him on the fast-track, but the cave-in put the kibosh on that. Actually he’d already warned them that the shaft was unsafe, but no one took a blind bit of notice. Six people ended up strawberry jam, and Harris got off with a rock splinter through the retina. He was lying in hospital recovering when some slick young company lawyer breezed in and told him Rand’s wouldn’t employ him any longer because of his partial sight, and that he could forget the compensation. If they’d admitted culpability they’d have had to pay through the nose for the six stiffs, you see, and the stiffs were all blacks. Sordid business. Harris tried to bring a civil action, but Rand’s boss — guy called Marcus Rand — sent his heavies round to threaten him. Ben was so pissed off he decided to get the boss back personally. He was a dab hand with explosives, was Harris, and he rigged up a booby trap with a timing device on Rand’s car. He always said he never meant to hurt anyone — they all knew Rand left his car in the exec parking lot every day from nine to twelve, regular as clockwork. The idea was to rubbish the car and do collateral damage to a few others. What he didn’t know was that the day he’d chosen for his little op was the birthday of Rand’s eight year old daughter, Jenny, and Rand was taking her out to McDonald’s or somewhere as a treat. At 11 a.m. when the car went up, Rand and his girl were on their way downtown. The girl got vaporized and Rand waved bye-bye to his legs — or most of them.’

  Truman thought automatically of Jonathan, who’d also been killed on his eighth birthday.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What a bastard!’

  Maynard gulped like a salamander.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Harris never forgave himself. Wore a hair shirt for the rest of his life. Never got hitched — just devoted himself to work, swearing one day he’d prove Rand was wrong to sack him. A few weeks ago in the Bint Hammou Plateau he finally got the chance. He found the sampo.’

  Truman peered at Maynard curiously.

  ‘The sampo?’ he repeated. ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘The sampo, Dr Truman,’ Maynard said, ‘is a term out of Norse mythology meaning the “golden dream” of the gods in Valhalla. It’s used whimsically by prospectors to denote the legendary strike of a lifetime — the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end. When he pegged out, Harris had just made the best strike of his life.’ Maynard’s holy expression was replaced by an almost palpable look of cupidity. He didn’t quite rub his red-backed hands together, Truman noticed — but almost.

  ‘I had the samples analysed last week,’ he said in a reverent whisper. ‘They contained high deposits of palladium complex. That, my dear Dr Truman, is the sampo — a matrix of palladium, platinum and iridium, the most valuable minerals on earth.’

  Chapter Four

  MAYNARD PICKED UP A SILVERCHASED humidor and flipped open the lid, displaying a selection of exquisitely expensive cigars.

  ‘Have one,’ he said. ‘No, take two. To celebrate the strike of the century.’

  Truman picked a cigar out, sniffed it and looked at the label. It was a genuine Davidoff. He replaced it in the box.

  ‘This isn’t some kind of publicity stunt, is it?’ he inquired doubtfully. ‘Last I heard, palladium was only found in Russia.’

  Maynard took a Davidoff from the cigar box and brought a silver cutter from his pocket. ‘My doctor says I shouldn’t,’ he commented. ‘Says it doesn’t do my heart any good, but I say what the hell?’

  Truman watched his small, deft fingers as they fed the cigar butt into the cutter for execution. There was a crisp snap as the blade descended and a tiny wedge of cigar dropped on to the carpet. Maynard examined the excision with interest, then poised in the act of lighting it.

  ‘It’s not a publicity stunt,’ he said. ‘True, the Russians have seventy percent of the palladium market, but there are smaller deposits in South Africa, where it’s mined by Harris’s old chums, the Rand Corporation. This new find in the Sudan is going to upset the whole applecart — the samples reveal a yield of about a kilo of palladium per cubic metre.’

  Truman whistled. ‘That’s a lot of palladium.’

  Maynard examined the end of his cigar again and licked it with the tip of his tongue. ‘Palladium is what we call a rare earth. It’s vital to the computer industry, but it’s also a precious metal in its own right. The current market price is $550 an ounce, which makes it about twice the value of gold, at $260 an ounce. Platinum trails a bit behind palladium at only $520 an ounce, but I’m sure you’ll agree that’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. I don’t know how good your maths is, Dr Truman, but mine isn’t bad and I calculate that at $550 an ounce, palladium sells for about $20,000 a kilo. There’s a whole mountain of it in the Bint Hammou Plateau. With a kilo per square metre, you don’t have to have a degree in calculus to work out the profits.’

  Truman shook his head. ‘OK, I see why you’re so grateful I brought the samples back. The strike is worth a king’s ransom, and Ben Harris got there before Rand’s. But I fail to see what all this has to do with me — I’m an archaeologist.’

  Maynard showed a set of predatory teeth. ‘Correction, Dr Truman,’ he said. ‘You were an archaeologist, but they kicked you out on your ear for mismanagement of funds. You’re currently unemployed.’

  The verbal blow was delivered so unexpectedly and with such force that for a moment Truman felt genuinely shocked. He reeled back stunned as if Maynard had punched him. ‘How the hell do you know that? It’s none of your damn business!’ He stood up abruptly and reached for his coat, but Maynard flapped a yeasty hand at him.