watchers there might have been.
By the time he’d walked up towards Soho Square he’d listened to his father’s message again. Dad had always been so open with his feelings when they’d been together. Fathers and sons were always going to fall out at some stage, Dad told him once, but Max should understand that, no matter what happened, he loved him with all his heart. So, Max reasoned, if his dad was usually open about how he felt, why was he saying so little on a recording which he knew would be played if something happened to him? Perhaps it was because he feared someone else might have listened to it first-if that was the case, was there a hidden message Max hadn’t picked up on yet? He didn’t know, but he’d keep listening until he had exhausted that possibility.
Soho Square, its edges planted with shrubs and trees, made a welcome oasis among the city buildings. There were office workers grabbing a quick coffee or a sandwich as they took their lunch hour; a couple of people sleeping rough hogged the benches, while pigeons ducked and bobbed as they hunted for crumbs from the sandwich- eaters.
Max skirted the square, then cut across it diagonally. He was as certain as he could be that he was no longer being followed. He approached a black, high-gloss-painted door, which was crammed unobtrusively in between two other old buildings. One, the Zaragon Picture Company, was an independent filmmaking company, the other the head office for a wine merchant. Max checked the small brass plaque on the black door-FARENTINO-to make sure he’d remembered the location correctly; it had been a couple of years since he was here last.
Max could smell the musky odor of the animal’s skin. It seemed so out of place in the well-furnished rooms of Angelo Farentino. The animal pelt had never been properly cured, but it served its purpose of protecting the bundle of handwritten notes from the elements. As Max let his hands feel the texture of the animal skin and the papers it protected that he had just been given, Farentino paced back and forth, his expensive Italian shoes making hardly a sound on the marble floor. Max wanted to devour the words on the pages-they were his father’s field notes-so he skimmed across them, desperate to learn any information about what had happened to him in Africa.
“Your father knew something was very wrong,” Farentino said as he paused to pour himself a glass of red wine. “He always sent his notes by email and a disc copy by courier. This”-he wagged a finger at the bundled papers-“this is … extraordinary!”
Angelo Farentino was not a man to be taken by surprise. For thirty years he had been a publisher of books on environmental issues, and with Tom Gordon on his travels had helped draw attention to many of the most damning ecological disasters across the world. Max kept reading. The notations were neat but in places looked as though they were written in a hell of a hurry….
Farentino sat, his arms resting on an antique walnut table, his fingers nervously fidgeting. “Max. I fear for your father and he is obviously frightened for you. That’s why he gave you so little information. He knew he could trust you to use your brains and not show anyone anything. Which is why he sent you to me.
“And this Canadian, Jack Ellerman? I’ve never heard of him.”
“Fictitious. To throw anyone interested off the scent. So I’m going to send you to very good friends of mine in northern Italy. You’ll be safe there until I can help you find your father.”
Max gazed at his father’s papers. They were pockmarked with grime, and grubby from dirty hands; some of the pages were stuck together and in one place an ugly brown stain crept like a squashed lizard across the paper. “Is this blood?” Max asked.
Farentino shrugged. He wasn’t sure, and even if he were he wouldn’t admit it. Max took another bite of the pizza Farentino had ordered in and sipped the peach smoothie the Italian was so good at making. Despite everything that had happened, Max was hungry and knew he had to keep his blood-sugar levels up if he was to concentrate and make any sense out of all this. “Dad sent his notes, wrapped in a gazelle skin, across two hundred kilometers of desert and wasteland in the care of a Bushman.”
“That’s right. The Kalahari Bushmen are nomadic; they’re the last indigenous people in Africa to live like that, and your father must have established a rapport with them. The Bushman took these notes to a farmer who runs a wildlife sanctuary, a sort of private game park, and who is, I suppose, someone either your father or the Bushman knew.”
“And he sent them to you.”
“To a literary agent I use in Johannesburg. That was the instruction Tom, I mean your father, had written. Max, he was so far out in the wilderness, there was no communication. There are so few people out there. He saw something he shouldn’t have, is my guess.” Farentino averted his eyes.
“What?” Max asked him.
Farentino shrugged and gave a small, noncommittal gesture. “Maybe it’s nothing. No, maybe it is.” He hesitated. “The literary agent I used. His office was destroyed by fire and he was badly injured. Yesterday. The same day you were attacked.”
Max let that sink in. Obviously a big effort was being made to stop any information about Max’s dad or what he’d discovered from getting out.
“Who knows about these notes?” asked Max.
“No one else. I’m not letting anyone know anything until I can work through them. Trouble is, the gazelle skin has sweated acids into the paper. It’s going to take weeks for us to separate the pages.”
“Are there any clues at all in what Dad wrote?” Max asked hopefully.
“We haven’t found anything extraordinary yet; they’re so incomplete we can’t make much sense of them.” Farentino sipped his wine. “But the place the Bushman delivered them to is hundreds of kilometers away from where I thought your dad was working.”
“Is anyone looking for him?”
Farentino winced; he unwrapped one of his expensive cigars, rolled it in his fingers, sniffed it.
Max waited. “Angelo, tell me.”
Farentino looked hard at Max. “No one is looking. Not really. I have tried to do what I can. The Foreign Office has asked local police and game rangers to keep an eye out.” He dabbed the cigar between his lips in a small, nervous gesture. Max knew there was more to come and he felt a tightening in his stomach muscles. Maybe the pizza hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
Farentino opened a file on the desk and showed Max some corporate reports and press clippings concerning an international exploration company called Shaka Spear Exploration. Every picture featured a man as big as an international rugby player-in fact, he looked like a Maori, except that his head was shaved and he wore a topknot of hair like the Chinese warriors Max had seen in the movies. “That’s Shaka Chang,” Farentino told him. “His father was a Zulu, his mother Chinese. He has connections that would make the president of the United States envious. He has a fearsome reputation as a corporate businessman, but he also has an incredible track record for helping the underprivileged, so he’s pretty much untouchable.”
Max gazed at the man who controlled one of the biggest exploration companies in the world. In none of the pictures was Shaka Chang smiling. “Namibia has enormous deposits of diamonds. Is that what Dad was looking for?” Max asked.
“No. A dam is being built there. It has created much controversy. Not everyone is happy. Ecologists are trying to stop it. It will create a massive hydroelectric scheme and bring a lot of wealth to the country. It’ll be worth billions. Shaka Chang is behind it.”
“If the dam is already planned, what was Dad doing there?”
“That I am not sure about,” Farentino replied anxiously. “From what I understand, it will not only flood ancient Bushman burial grounds but will have a huge impact on Namibia’s unique ecosystem. So he was searching for aquifers.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Max said.
“Think of deep underground layers of rocks … like a honeycomb of rocks. All those nooks and crannies contain fossil water. Water can be more precious than diamonds out there, and if your dad found any subterranean rivers or
