Gold Digger (10 page)

Henri glanced down at his belly and ran a finger through the white splotches there, a tired, sensuous grin on his lips, though Nikolai wasn’t sure it was genuine. Face-saving? Pretending to not have noticed that faux-pas? “I’d say I’m sorry I woke you up, but I’m so not sorry.”

Nikolai huffed and smiled back. He should ask, shouldn’t pretend it had been nothing, but the truth was, he was grateful that Henri had downplayed it. If they both ignored it, it would go away, right? “So not sorry I came back.”

Henri held his gaze, but he gave nothing away. As if he wasn’t feeling it. “I’ll make it worth your while whenever you come back. Whenever you’re in the area, just call me.”

He really wanted to get out of this bed and do something else. Something harmless and just move on. “Get your ass in the shower. I’m not taking you for breakfast covered in my cum.”

“And mine,” Henri said, and climbed out of bed. “Join me?”

“Too distracting.” Nikolai gathered the condom up and went to the bathroom to throw it in the bin, while Henri started the water. The glass door didn’t do anything to hide his body, and Nikolai watched how he casually washed his dick and balls and ass, how the water plastered his dark hair to his head.

He grabbed a large towel for Henri and handed it to him when he emerged from the shower, then stepped under the spray himself. When he stopped the water, Henri was no longer in the bathroom.

Downstairs, Henri was looking at the newspaper, his hair damp and curly. He put the paper down and smiled. “I should tell your sister thanks for rattling you so much you came back.”

Nikolai chuckled. “She’d probably think that’s perfectly reasonable.” He rolled his shoulders. “Let’s go for breakfast. Tamás found a great place yesterday. They do maple-smoked bacon there, and the coffee’s good.”

“How is it going over there in Canada?” Ruslan’s gentle Russian accent always put Nikolai in mind of his father. The softening of some of the consonants was something his ear really liked, even though he himself spoke and thought mostly English these days. Much like his father, ironically, who was increasingly losing the width and breadth of expression in Russian. Nikolai wondered if that was due to the Scottish husband or just another way to shut out his past.

Ruslan was a polyglot who spoke half a dozen languages fluently. By Nikolai’s standards, the man was a fucking genius, a drilling pioneer who could have made an absolute fortune at Schlumberger or Halliburton or any of the other big oil services companies. Instead, he’d struck out on his own, saddled a completely new horse, and now knew a great deal about gold. Just in time before gold prices went bananas from something like three hundred dollars an ounce to fifteen hundred and more.

“I’m just getting ready for dinner at LeBeau’s. The silverback wants to talk to me in a more private setting.”

“Silverback? You mean he’s the four hundred pound gorilla in the room?”

“He is. He’s really quite impressive, though I think we should have hired a pile of bankers to deal with him. I’m severely outclassed here.”

“I don’t like bankers,” Ruslan said gruffly. “We know what Cybele’s worth, and we have good lawyers on retainer to make sure we’re going to be all right when we get into bed with them.”

Already been there with the junior, haven’t you, Nikolai?

Nikolai ignored the pang of guilt. “I’d have taken one along as an adviser. Look, Ruslan, these guys can easily play hardball. I know our value proposition is solid. Cybele’s a good company, we’re sitting on a pile of gold, gold is still hot. But compared to LeBeau Mining, we’re so small they won’t even notice squashing us.”

“Then we won’t sign.” Ruslan remained placid—Nikolai had never seen him worked up or irrational. He was a man who calmly left a burning building and closed all doors and windows behind him to slow the fire down. “I trust you, Nikolai. You have a good eye for people—people like you.”

“And I can be away from the company.”

“Yes, at the moment. But my Georgia talks went well. Now I’m waiting for some more data, but it’s looking good. And I just got new results from the Hydra prospect. We should be able to upgrade our forecast by at least another hundred thousand ounces, likely more, but I’m leaning toward a conservative estimate. Ironically, Hydra might hold more than Cerberus.”

“That’s great.” There was absolutely no use trying to stop Ruslan when he wanted to share news, so Nikolai listened to the latest drill report analysis. More than understandably, Ruslan was excited about Hydra, which looked feasible for open-pit mining, the cheapest way to get at the gold. Between Cerberus, Hades, Persephone, and now Hydra, they were sitting on more than three million confirmed ounces, and maybe two million inferred.

And that was just the gold deposit. There was also plenty of silver—which, Ruslan kept saying, would see big leaps in price since world demand was growing at ten percent, whereas mining was only growing at three percent. As an industrial metal, it was absolutely vital for all kinds of goods and electronics, and recycling didn’t fill the gap.

“Ruslan, maybe we should just keep Cybele and go through banks. There have to be banks out there that would lend us the money. Do we absolutely need to raise more cash? Can’t we do this on our own?”

“Having a senior partner is not a bad thing.”

Nikolai didn’t have the heart to tell him that the senior partner might turn out to be a giant shark who’d swallow them in one gory, horrible bite. “Just maybe talk to some bankers? The other shareholders? Maybe raise some capital from them?”

“It’s a bad time to ask anybody for money right now.”

Well, a Russian bank had been interested, but Ruslan didn’t like them very much. Too much entanglement with the Kremlin, which he found problematic for a gold exploration company focused on post-Soviet states. Maybe the Saudis might be interested, but no, Ruslan was adamant about getting the money from what he called “a trustworthy, transparent source.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do here, but don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work out.” At least he could prepare him for the inevitable.

“You’ll do fine. Anything else?”

“I’ll be off to Wellington after this to meet my father.” Nikolai flinched as though he’d bitten into something nasty.
Only, he’s not my father.

“Well, just drop me a call. I’ll send you the new report. Maybe you can show LeBeau the new results?”

God, he hated that gently hopeful tone in Ruslan’s voice. “Will do. Thanks. Don’t work too hard; Cybele still needs you, okay?”

“Getting too old for all-nighters, Nikolai.”

“Well, I won’t be there to carry you from your desk to the field bed.”

“Point taken. Will go to bed before it’s light outside.”

“Wow. Progress.”

Ruslan chuckled. “Okay, the PDF is sent. Let me know if it got stuck.”

Nikolai refreshed his inbox, and there it was. “No. It opens fine. Right, I’d better get ready. I’ll call you tomorrow for an update, or when I hit the ground in Palmerston North.” He ended the call and stood again to knot his tie correctly, then took the briefcase.

Tamás was waiting down at reception, and within a few minutes, they were picked up by a driver who took them outside the city. This was going to be at LeBeau’s own house, so Nikolai steeled himself for extravagant displays of wealth.

He wasn’t disappointed. The house was a vast, one-level bungalow with several outlying buildings and two wings, all in white with modern architecture, glass, water sculptures, and manicured gardens.

LeBeau greeted them with his wife, and Henri showed up shortly after. Drinks were served in a large room with an open fireplace looking out over a vast garden you could have played golf in, and Nikolai struggled to keep the small talk going.

LeBeau was too intense a man to be thrown off the scent about anything for long, but Nikolai gathered that the business part of the evening would happen after dinner. So they talked about the global economy in general, Armenia and Georgia in particular, and Cybele’s history, as well as how awesome a company LeBeau Mining was. Nikolai had never doubted that—they were Ruslan’s favored option, after all.

“Did you know that Henri here ran the commercialization of the Saturn prospect?” LeBeau said as a maid gathered their plates.

Nikolai glanced over at Henri, who was deliberately folding his cloth napkin. “I’m not aware of the Saturn prospect.”

“It wasn’t outer space, though it looked like it for a while. We bought a small explorer in northern Malawi five years ago. I ran the integration into LeBeau and drove the drilling and production. It was one of our best investments in the last two decades.” Henri looked pointedly at his uncle.

“Really? That’s impressive.”
And you told me your official CV as the guy who makes stuff happen was all bullshit?

“Not just a pretty face,” Henri said with a fair dash of irony.

Nikolai smiled, but kept his attention on the elder LeBeau. “Tell me you’re not aiming for what I think you’re aiming for.”

LeBeau leaned forward. “You’re a quick thinker, Nikolai.”

“Cybele is looking for a partner, not a master. We’ll take a senior partner, obviously, because we’re small, but we’ll keep control of this project.”

“Is that what Polunin thinks?”

“All of us do. We haven’t put in years of our lives to simply hand over the keys and walk away. We’ve built this from the first license—hell, from looking at the promising stone formations in our Armenia project—to now. We’ve grown the company, drilled fifty kilometers, nailed the resources down, got backers in, signed licenses, and all the other hard work, and we won’t just walk away. I won’t.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But you said—”

“I said
you
don’t have to,” LeBeau snapped. “You’re clearly a smart, passionate young man. When Henri replaces Polunin, he can use you.”

“
Use me?
” Nikolai nearly choked on an angry breath. “Polunin will never hand his company over. It’s his baby. He’s in her DNA. There’s no way he’s going to give Cybele up.”
And there’s no fucking way I’ll give
him
up.

“He’s an oil man with no track record of turning an explorer into a miner.”

“Is that all? It’s hardly rocket surgery. You start drilling, the gold is in there—we know where it is and we’re sitting right on top of it—and producing it hardly requires CEO-level experience. Nothing that can’t be hired in.”

“He does
not
have a track record, and that’s my last word,” LeBeau snarled, flat hand slapping the table surface.

Nikolai stood and noticed that, with a careful delay, Tamás stood too. “Mr. LeBeau, I have the strongest respect for you and LBM. You are our preferred option, by far. Your Malawi project sounds like just the experience we need. But we’re a small company, and we owe Ruslan our loyalty for all the things he’s done.”

“He won’t walk away empty-handed,” Henri tried.

“So you’re backing this?” Nikolai asked.

Henri withered away. “We’re not going to steal his company. He can stay on the board as a senior consultant. But Cybele will need a new CEO, and if we own most of it, we’ll appoint one. And it’s likely going to be me.”

“Henri, you know what?” Henri looked up, and he looked pained and uncomfortable, but that did nothing to alleviate Nikolai’s rush of anger. “Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you. If you think I’m betraying somebody who’s been nothing but good to me, or that I’d support such a plan, then you really sold your fucking soul for that MBA.”

“There’s no reason to get crass here,” LeBeau snapped.

“What I said to him?” Nikolai stared at LeBeau Senior and pointed at Henri. “Same to you, but twice. Thanks for the meal. We’re going now.”

“What just happened?” Tamás asked as they trudged down the long, long private street that led up to the house. They might be walking for an hour before they made it to anywhere near civilization.

Nikolai rubbed a hand over his face, then turned back to the house. “I swear, if he comes after me in that ridiculous car, I’ll punch him out.”

Tamás almost audibly shut up before he could say anything, and Nikolai hated being so angry. It so rarely happened that when it did, he almost frightened himself. Truth was, he didn’t know what he was capable of in that state, and he really, really didn’t want to find out. He didn’t want to end up killing somebody, so that “gentle giant, protective brother” thing was what he focused on. He forced himself to be always calm and reasonable, and normally that wasn’t hard. But anybody attacking his friends had it coming.