The Twain Maxim (19 page)

Jim woke because something was buzzing in his pocket. His mind caught up. It was his semi-useless London phone, vibrating to wake him. He pulled it out. It was three a.m. He switched it off and struggled in the dark to stow it. He had fallen asleep and not even noticed. He grabbed the goggles, fitted them on to his head and switched them on. They gave off a little turbine-sounding whine and lit up green. He could see everything as if a giant green candle illuminated the world. He picked up the blanket and stepped out of his hiding-place, opened the blanket up, turned it inside out and hung it on the tall grassy reeds. Through the goggles, green light shone from it like an emerald lighthouse as the infrared bounced off the insulating foil and back down the optics and electronics to his retinas.

He looked through the few feet of cover at the walk downhill to the mine. He could just make out Pierre curled up on his side. A figure sat ten feet away from him in a chair, a rifle in his arms. The generator had gone off and wouldn’t come on again until mid-morning.

He took a deep breath and strode forwards.

He could hear his every breath as he walked, the knife in his hand. There looked to be a deer to his far right grazing and bats flew above him. His feet were loud in the
undergrowth as he picked his way forwards, his heart drumming in his chest. His eyes were watering and sweat was pouring off him. The compound was still, not a single light shining from anywhere but the sky. It was just a five-minute walk but each step felt like a minute passing. He reassured himself that if anyone came out they couldn’t possibly see him but his nerves were on fire with anticipation. He was breathing deeply as, one foot at a time, he paced through the rough grass and tussocks that covered the uneven space between the bush and the mining camp. He moved on to the rough, dusty pathway that led from the jungle to the camp. A pair of eyes stared out at him from a spindly tree – some kind of bird, he thought. He was fifty yards from Pierre and maybe thirty from the guest bungalow he had slept in just a few days ago – it felt like years.

The ground in front of the bungalows was gravelled and made a loud grating noise as each step pressed down on it. The guard was asleep, his mouth open in a quiet snore. Pierre was asleep, too, and as Jim approached he saw how swollen and battered the boy’s face was after the beating he’d received.

Jim’s breathing was quickening and his heart racing. He was trying to stay calm but losing the battle. He was at the wooden pillar where Pierre’s leash was fastened. If the boy woke with a start they were screwed. He lifted the leather handle, put his blade between it and the pillar and tried to slice through it. The leather was tough and wouldn’t cut easily, the knife gnawing into it. The chain rattled a little. He glanced at Pierre, who had woken without Jim realising and was looking up at him, his eyes wide. He checked the guard, ready to rush him if he woke, but the man was motionless.

The handle was two-thirds cut through. He hauled on it with everything he had, holding his breath, and heard a tearing crunch as it gave.

Jim took the chain and lowered it carefully into Pierre’s lap, knelt down quickly and cut the boy’s ankle bonds as if they were paper. The knife was razor sharp, after all. Pierre didn’t need his hands to run so they could make a break for it now if they had to, but Jim threaded the blade gently between Pierre’s wrists and, with a quick careful movement, severed the rope. Pierre was standing and pointing at the soldier and his gun. He drew his hand over his throat.

Jim shook his head. He wasn’t going to cut anyone’s throat.

Pierre motioned to Jim to give him the knife.

Jim shook his head again.

Pierre clenched his fist in frustration but Jim grabbed his hand and pulled him in the direction of the jungle. Perhaps they were both going to live after all, he thought. The silver blanket shone like a beacon half a kilometre in front of them and every step was one step closer to a dangerous kind of safety.

Jim pulled down the blanket and towed Pierre into the bush. “We must keep going,” said Pierre. “In the morning they will come looking for us right away.” He was undoing the neck collar.

“OK,” said Jim, stuffing the blanket into the pack.

“I will carry that,” said Pierre. “I can go faster than you weak people.”

“Thanks,” said Jim. “Be my guest. Where shall we head?”

“To the Pygmies.”

“Pygmies? You sure?”

“Christ Reunion is more scared of them than we are. They are gentle people.”

“OK,” said Jim, “that’s not what you said a couple of days ago.”

“Compared to the Reunion they are gentle people.”

They clambered out of the bush and Pierre threw the pack on with a grace that underlined his strength. He pushed ahead of Jim. “I can find the way,” he said.

“How?” whispered Jim.

“My eyes and my feet,” he said, “they follow the trail uphill. When we find a stream, we follow its course.”

“Fine,” said Jim, following as Pierre picked his way into the bush.

Adash stepped out of the shower and pulled on his long flowing robe. The diamond looked even better wet and he marvelled at its size. No wonder this mine was worth a billion. If they had found diamonds of this size and so many
of them that they were giving them to their servants it must be a mine of unlimited treasure.

Diamonds were power and these would buy him enough, perhaps, that he would again answer to no one. He stepped into worn brown sandals and sauntered to the door of the bungalow. He walked out. Dog was gone and so was his guard. He sat down on the chair and waited. Someone had rescued the boy and the guard had sensibly fled. Who would rescue Dog Bites Man? Surely not some miner. He went back into the bungalow and picked up the papers found in the next villa.

They were emails to a Jim Evans: he owned 10 per cent of the mine, or so Adash thought the English said. If it was him, he was brave. That was good, because the brave were much easier to trap and kill. 

Jim was exhausted: they had gone five miles and he was ready to drop. They were eating some of the last of the rations he had with him, sitting by the huge trunk of a nameless mighty tree that rose two hundred feet into the air. Pierre had snagged some avocados but they were as hard as cannonballs. Hopefully they’d ripen in the heat.

By dark, if he could get a second wind, they’d just about make it to the area where the pygmies had scared the hell out of them. Pierre didn’t seem bothered by the exertion even with the weight of the pack. His face was a mass of swelling and cuts, but he bore it as if that was its normal state. He just walked in silence, occasionally looking back at Jim to make sure he was OK.

They hadn’t said anything since they’d started their trek back up the mountain; the overriding necessity was to move – fast.

Apart from his exhaustion, Jim was happy. He had done the right thing and got away with it. Now all they had to do was march through thirty miles of mountainous jungle. Suddenly he had an idea. He rifled through the rucksack and pulled out the sat phone.

“Light a fire, Pierre.”

“Are you going to cook the phone?” asked Pierre.

“Yeah,” said Jim. “You’ve got it in one.”

“I know it’s dead, but you still can’t eat it,” said Pierre.

“A little cooking will do it good,” said Jim, pulling off the battery compartment.

Pierre put down the rucksack and went into the trees. A few moments later he returned with a branch covered with dead leaves and broke it into kindling. Then he whittled some of the wood into tiny feathers. He rubbed two matches hard against his trouser leg to dry out any damp and lit the little heap he had made. The fire was quickly alight and Pierre built it up to a blaze. “Nothing too wet,” he said. “We don’t want to send smoke above the trees.”

Jim had stripped the battery out of the sat phone and carefully cut off the plastic cover leaving just the plain metal jacket. He stuck the jungle knife into the middle of the fire. It wouldn’t be so sharp when he took it out, he thought. “I’m going to heat the blade and then warm the battery on it,” he said. “With a bit of luck that’ll give it some juice.”

“Maybe it explodes,” said Pierre.

“Probably,” Jim agreed, “but it’s worth a try.”

Jim watched the knife in the fire and imagined it somehow red hot. A simple fire could never do that. The wooden handle was very hot and Jim slid the blade out of the glowing centre of the flames and laid it flat. He licked a finger and dabbed it on the metal. It hissed. “Too hot,” he said, “I think.” He counted a few seconds off and tried again. No hiss. “Here goes,” he said, and dropped the battery on to it. He sat back a bit, expecting the case to pop open and start burning. It didn’t. He counted a few seconds, then turned the battery over with a quick flip. It was hot but not so hot as to blister his fingers. The blade was losing its heat quickly and
Jim turned the battery again. It was as hot as if it had been in hard direct sunlight for a long time. He got ready with the sat phone in one hand and snatched up the battery with the other. He snapped the battery in. It was suddenly a very tight fit. He clipped the back on and pressed the on button. “Come on, baby,” he said, “you know you can do it.”

The screen came on, but it had last time, then gone out again after a few seconds. He selected normal transmit mode and held his breath. The phone was searching for a signal. He stood up and tried to find a stretch of ground with little canopy in the way. There was a single bar of power and signal, and they were both flashing.

He went to SMS.

“In deep shit,” he typed, and sent it to Jane. He pulled the message up again and tried to send it to John and Stafford.

The phone rang. “Jane Brown,” read the screen.

He pressed
answer
but the phone went dead and the screen was blank. He switched it on again and the phone started to boot, only to flip back into darkness.

He stuck the knife back into the fire. “Well, we got through,” he said.

In a couple of minutes the embers had heated the knife again and he laid the battery on the blade. There was a crack, a bang, a fizz and the battery caught fire. Jim and Pierre jumped back as a small spitting white cloud spewed up. Jim grabbed the handle of the knife and spilled the battery on to the ground. It was burning hard, like a badly constructed firework, jumping about in little fits and starts.

“We’d better get going,” said Pierre. “We need to keep far ahead of them.”

Jane tried the number a couple of times before she gave up. Then she plugged her phone into her notebook and made a secure connection. She traced the call.

What the hell is he doing in Congo?

She booted up the satview. The globe spun and zoomed into an area of jungle in the DRC near the Rwandan border. There was a little flag on the mountainside. Why would Jim be in a place like that?

She selected the Situations, Issues, Threats icon and a window opened and loaded. The scroll bar shrank and shrank. The software wasn’t loading a report: it was loading an encyclopedia of trouble. She scanned it. The tags said: Insurgency, Genocide, Civil War, Trafficking. Never mind deep shit, Jim had got himself into a major clusterfuck. The DRC was about as far away from her and America as you could get. It was in the middle of Africa and, as such, on the edge of the world.

She called Max Davas.

Max was waving his arm over the digital whiteboard. His room of Quants – like bank traders, but each with a PhD in maths – didn’t seem to get his point. These guys were so smart that with the advanced physics of their derivatives they
had nearly bankrupted the world only a few years ago by accidentally creating the equivalent of a financial black hole. Davas hired the best of the best.

The phone in his pocket was buzzing and he knew if it rang it was more important than a room full of his private army of brilliant but today pea-brained mathematicians.

“It’s intuitively obvious,” he said, in conclusion, and pulled out the phone. “Excuse me,” he said, and made for the office door.

The mathematicians looked at the fluctuating surfaces on the whiteboard and then at each other. They liked to think their peers didn’t understand and hoped they thought
they
did.

“Jane, an unexpected pleasure.”

“Do you know why Jim is in deep shit?”

“No,” said Davas, “only that he went to the Congo to try and find his broker.”

“Funny place to go look for your broker.”

“The man fell out of a helicopter over a mine Jim has an ownership in.”

“OK,” said Jane. “I just got a text from him saying he’s in big trouble.”

“What exactly did it say?”

“It said, ‘In deep shit’.”

“Just that?”

“Yes.”

“So he must be in really deep shit,” said Davas.

“Yes.”

“That’s very bad.”

“Max, I’m going to need your help. Stand by.”

She called John Smith. “Have you heard from Jim?”

“Why?” asked Smith.

“Is that, like, no?”

“It could be.”

“He’s in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Don’t know. I just got a single text.”

“What did it say?”

Jane sighed with irritation. “‘In deep shit’.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“He must have been pushed for time.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my thinking. The signal came from a sat phone smack in the middle of the African jungle.”

“Need help?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can probably get backing,” said John.

“In DRC?”

“DRC? That’s a tricky one.”

“Tell me about it. Look, stand by, OK?”