The Brittle Limit, a Novel (7 page)

“Well, this shouldn’t take long. I have just
a few questions.” He pulled out a notebook. “OK if I take
notes?”

Severine raised her eyebrows, looking at the
notebook. “So official. Am I to be on the record?”

“It’s just to help me remember. Over forty,
my memory is shot.”

Severine nodded. “OK.” She took a seat by
Andrew on the bench, leaving a wide space between them.

Andrew consulted the list of questions he had
written up last night and a few more he had added this morning
after the encounter with Severine at the hotel.

“I understand Ben’s work was demining? Is
that what he was doing in Mondulkiri?”

Severine smoothed out her long tan skirt and
said, “Most of his work was demining farms and forests in the
provinces. There are so many mines still in this country, even now,
after so many years…But this job was different. This client didn’t
hire him to do any demining.”

Andrew looked up from his notebook.

“What was he hired to do?” he asked.

“Prospecting.” Severine said the word
carefully, her accent heavy on the first syllable.

“Prospecting.” Andrew repeated the word and
Severine nodded.

“For?”

“Metal.”

Andrew narrowed his eyes. This was news.
“Like…scrap metal?”

Severine looked at him with thinly veiled
exasperation. “No. Precious metal. Gold, silver, like that.”

“Who hired him to do this work?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Andrew stared at her, unsatisfied with this
response.

“Sorry for how this sounds but…how can you
not know who your husband worked for?” Andrew asked.

Severine gave him a cold stare and then
asked, “Do you know how many NGOs there are in town, Mr. Shaw?”

“No. I do not.” He knew the term though. NGO.
Non-Governmental Organization. A lot of the young people he’d met
at Ruby’s last night had worked at NGOs. They all seemed to have a
burning cause.

“Over two thousand. Two thousand NGOs.”
Severine was fired up, Andrew could see. She clearly didn’t like
being faulted where her husband was concerned. But she was talking,
so that was good. Only way he was going to get any answers. He let
her continue uninterrupted.

“Ben worked for so many of them, often for
free. Maybe one hundred NGOs he worked for, maybe more. And those
are the ones I know about. You try to keep it straight, which field
your husband is digging in for explosives and for whom. It is not
so easy. After a while, I stopped asking.”

Andrew nodded, chastised. He thought it best
to change topics. He’d try a different approach on that topic.

“Where’d he pick up the demining skills? Not
really something you learn in school.”

“In the Army.”

“He was military?”

Severine looked up. “Yes. I assumed you knew
that, you know so much about him. He was in four years, enlisted.
That’s why he didn’t get along with his father, who’d wanted Ben to
go to university. Ben didn’t see the point when he could help right
away.”

“Where’d he serve?”

“Afghanistan. 2006-2010. He was
Infantry.”

“What province?” Andrew didn’t think she’d
know. She surprised him.

“Helmand,” Severine answered. Andrew looked
down at his notebook. He’d had some buddies there.

“Why didn’t he stay in?”

“He lost an eye to an IED,” Severine
said.

Andrew nodded in understanding. He knew
plenty of guys who had lost limbs and lives to the improvised
explosive devices used in today’s warfare. But he was most curious
about something else.

“So he went from the service into
humanitarian demining? How does that happen? Seems like not the
first choice of careers?” Andrew asked.

Severine opened her hands in front of her, as
if presenting a gift. “The children. He worried so much about the
children in these countries. No toys, no games, all they have is
the outdoors. But for many, there is no safe place to play. He’d
seen the impact war had on children. So when he got out, he picked
a developing country and went to help.”

“And so, Cambodia. How did you two meet?”

In her lap, Severine’s cell phone rang, a
loud traditional bell ring. She glanced down at it.

“Please, excuse me.” She put a hand on
Andrew’s arm and then stepped away from the bench to take the
call.

In the second story window, a small Cambodian
girl, her dark hair in high ponytails, peaked out at Andrew from
behind a thin blue curtain. Andrew waved at her and she giggled and
disappeared.

Severine ended her call and returned. “I’m
afraid I’ve got to cut our time short. My donors are stopping by.
This is completely unexpected. They’ve just flown in from Canada
and are en route here. I need to get the children and myself ready.
When the donors come in person, I need to reassure them that I’m
spending their money wisely.”

“We’re not quite done, I’m afraid.” Andrew
glanced at his notebook, where several key questions were still
answered.

Severine ran her hands through her hair,
pulling at a tangle. “In fact we are, I’m afraid. Truth be told,
we’re broke here. If I don’t get a check from them today, these
kids won’t eat. I’ve got a month’s worth of cash, that’s it.”

Andrew glanced up at the window. This time
there were three children, all smiles and giggles, peaking out from
behind the curtain. Severine turned to see what Andrew was staring
at.

“Ohh, those rascals. They’re supposed to be
studying. They are too curious for their own good.” Severine made a
fake scowl at the children, her hands on her hips, and the children
ran away from the window, giggling, knowing full well they could
never be in big trouble with her. The sound of their scampering
feet in the hallway echoed in the courtyard.

Severine looked back at Andrew. “So, more
tomorrow perhaps?” she said, with an almost embarrassed grimace.
She started toward the gate.

“Sure.” Andrew hurried toward her and the
gate. “Here’s my number, in case you think of anything else in the
meantime that could be useful.” He handed her a slip of notepad
paper, on which he’d written his local phone number.

Severine took it, smiling at the ripped
paper. “Nice card.”

Andrew shrugged. “It’s all I could get on
short notice.”

Severine raised her eyebrows. “This isn’t my
day job,” he offered.

Severine smirked. “It shows.” She waved at
the guard to get his attention. “Vith will let you out.”

Vith was busy sweeping the stoop and looked
up at his name. He placed the straw broom against the white wall
and unlocked the gate, as Severine hurried away across the
courtyard and down the long arched hallway. Andrew looked back
after her. Vith jangled his keys to hurry Andrew along.

Andrew walked out the gate and onto the dirt
road. His waiting tuk-tuk was parked across the road, its cheerful
driver chatting with a red-helmeted motodop driver, a distant
cousin he’d not seen in ages, who lived in this neighborhood.
Seeing Andrew, he started the engine. Andrew hopped in, leaning his
weary shoulders against the steel metal bars, his bare legs white
on the ripped red vinyl seat. “Back to the Embassy.” He still had
more questions than answers. But it was a start.

Chapter 8

Thin afternoon sunlight filtered in through
the grubby rectangular window of Andrew’s basement lair. Andrew sat
hunched over his computer. He’d spent most of the afternoon calling
mining companies in Phnom Penh, a list pulled from the Internet.
One by one, he’d asked each person who answered if they had
employed an individual prospector named Ben Goodnight in the past
year. He didn’t expect them to say ‘yes’ outright, but he figured
he would be able to tell from a hesitation or reluctance to answer,
who deserved a follow-up in-person visit.

But most of them said ‘no’ and convincingly
so, explaining, unprompted, that they used larger outfits or had
their own internal people for early stage prospecting. No one
sounded like they had anything to hide. One person expressed her
condolences. She had heard through the local gossip mill, alive and
well in this small town, what had happened to Ben.

Aside from the calls, Andrew had read
everything he could find on-line about the local mining industry.
It was booming, attracting all sorts, including a handful of
unsavory characters, like any venture that promised easy money.
Companies paid the Cambodian government for the right to prospect
in the remotest reaches of the country, Mondulkiri, Ratanakiri,
Preah Vihar, no stone unturned in the search for riches.

From what Andrew could tell, no one had
struck it rich yet, not in a big way. But the handfuls of gems and
gold that had been found, mostly from artisanal mines in the north,
were enough to feed the frenzy. People kept coming.

Andrew flipped through the articles he'd
printed and highlighted, looking for one particular piece he'd
skimmed earlier. Something in it had stuck in his mind. He found
the page and scanned down the article, an interview with a local
mining industry expert, talking about capital markets in
Cambodia.

“Most of the companies here are public,
listed on major exchanges on Hong Kong, Australia, the US. Sure,
there are a one or two private companies still remaining, but we’d
certainly expect them to go public in the next year, to take
advantage of the capital infusion. Mining is capital-intensive and
you need to have a solid long game to stick around for the big
payoff."

All the companies Andrew had called that
afternoon were public companies. He kept reading the article:

"What are those?"

“KMM and Kingdom Gold. Both small firms,
mostly focused on exploration."

“KMM?”

“Kampuchea Mining and Minerals.”

The interview went on to discuss more
esoteric issues in mining, like the depths of mines and types of
drilling for different rock formations.

Andrew typed ‘Kingdom Gold’ into the search
field. The company website was a plain blue background with text in
the middle, explaining that the company was no longer in operation.
Looked like it had gone under.

Andrew typed the next name, Kampuchea Mining
and Minerals, into the search field. This search yielded a more
elaborate website, a deep gold background with a temple silhouette,
black angular lettering listing the company’s address and phone
number, and a “Contact Us” button along the side, presumably for
interested investors. Understated but classy, Andrew thought.

He copied down the address and phone number
and dialed the number to see if anyone was still in the office on
this late Monday afternoon. A receptionist answered the phone.
Andrew hung up, grabbed his gun and keys from the desk and hurried
upstairs. If he pushed it, he could get there in time to catch
someone for a chat.

******

Andrew’s motodop pulled up in front of a
squat two-story office building across from the Caltek Bokor gas
station in Boeung Keng Kang, a neighborhood popular with expats,
about a mile from the Embassy. Andrew studied the scratched and
heavily fingerprinted brass plaque by the locked front door. It
listed several tenants, including a dentist, a physical therapist,
and a masseuse whose name was also written in Khmer script below
the English letters. On the fifth-line down, he saw the name
Kampuchea Mining and Minerals, listed as occupying the second
floor, Suite 213.

Without warning, the front door swung open
and a Cambodian woman pushed her way past Andrew, barely glancing
at him. Andrew assumed this was the secretary who had answered the
phone when he’d called twenty minutes earlier. Andrew caught the
door as it drifted close and stepped into the dim hallway.

While the outside of the building was run
down, the inside was done up in an expansive, professional style.
The wooden floors were shiny and new, the walls painted a deep red
and decorated with high-end, local art, etchings of elephants and
temples, black and white photographs of local tourist spots.

Andrew made his way up the staircase to the
second floor, where he saw the sign for KMM at the far end of the
hallway. He pulled the door open and stepped inside. A fat
red-faced man sat sideways at a large L-shaped wooden desk,
watching his computer screen as he muttered a string of expletives,
in a thick Australian accent. He turned toward the door when Andrew
walk in.

“What the blast are you doing in here? We’re
closed!” the man yelled, huffing like a steam train as he stood up
from the desk to reveal his massive stomach, which tested the
buttons of a wrinkled blue shirt. He’d been holding a lit cigar in
his right hand, which he’d dropped at Andrew’s unannounced
entrance. The cigar now lay on the floor, singeing the carpet. The
smell of smoke and burning polyester filled the room.

“Sorry, I called but I got cut off, so
thought I’d just head over and pop in.”

It was sort of true, he figured. “I’m Andrew
Shaw. I’m with the US Embassy.” He stepped forward and extended his
hand.

The man ignored the greeting. “I don’t give a
blast who you’re with. This isn’t the United States, if you’d
failed to notice. No one gives a shit who you are with in this
town. What the fuck do you want?”

Here’s a charmer, Andrew thought. “I have a
couple questions for you about Ben Goodnight. He recently was
killed in the field.”

This information settled the old boy down, as
he harrumphed himself back into his seat and into a lower-grade
hysteria. He’d picked up his cigar from the floor and puffed on it
but the flame was out. He relit the cigar tip with a cheap green
plastic lighter and squinted at Andrew.

“Yes, I’d heard about that, bloody shame. He
was a good kid. Hard working. Willing to take a risk. Hard to find
dependable talent out here. All the young folks doped up on cheap
available drugs or can’t pull themselves off of all the cheap
available ass. Or both. But that Ben, he was a good one. Solid.” He
puffed on his cigar as he eyed Andrew. “What did you want to ask
me?”