makes his next move and try to nab him then?”
“That was Nyman’s tactic, and look how far it got him. No, I think it would be more sensible to force his hand. Lure him out. Let’s us make the running for once.”
“You have a plan.”
She did. A sketch of one. It would require Kellaway’s full backing, some string-pulling, and the mobilisation of considerable manpower and resources, but she doubted she would have trouble securing any of those things. The chief super was no less keen than she was to see the Conquistador dead or in custody. A commanding officer could shift the blame onto subordinates only for so long. Mal sensed she was his last throw of the dice. If she didn’t come up with the goods, Kellaway would most likely be kneeling beside her in the quadrangle at HQ, waiting for the shimmering whir of obsidian and the farewell to earthly existence.
The galling thing was — and Mal could never share this with anyone, not even Aaronson — she had been on the point of turning in her resignation this very morning. For the past few weeks she had been trying to pluck up the courage to write her letter of notice and hand it in. Today, she’d been convinced, was going to be the day. In fact, back in the quadrangle earlier, with Kellaway, she had been close to blurting out the words “I quit”several times.
Events had taken on their own momentum, however, and almost before she realised it she’d been assigned the Conquistador investigation. It was too late to change that now. In spite of her disenchantment with her job, the Jaguar motto still had some resonance for her: Never back down, never pull out.
Besides, just as this case that could break a career, it could also make one.
All the more crucial, then, that her plan got given the green light, and worked.
THREE
6 Vulture 1 Monkey 1 House
(Tuesday 27th November 2012)
The British Airways aerodisc touched down at Palermo at 11am local time. It was a commercial long-haul flight out of Heathrow, and the yellow quadrant on the disc’s compass totem was highlighted to indicate its southerly bearing. For the onward journey east to Beijing, with recharge stopovers at Istanbul and Karachi on the way, the red totem quadrant would be highlighted, in accordance with divine precept.
Stuart Reston disembarked with all the other business class passengers. A flight attendant enquired if he’d had a pleasant trip, and he nodded, although in truth the flying time was so brief — a little over an hour — that he felt like he’d scarcely fastened his seatbelt before it was time to unfasten it again.
He was met in the terminal building by a uniformed chauffeur holding up a sign with his name on it.
“ Niltze,” the chauffeur said.
Reston responded to the Nahuatl greeting with the equivalent in Italian: “ Buon giorno.”
The chauffeur took one item of his luggage, a sturdy leather briefcase, and shortly Reston was in the back of a limousine, cruising along the A20 on the northern coast of Sicily. Beside him sat Ettore Addario, CEO of the Compagnia Coltivazione delle Miniere di Mongibello, a man with something to sell and every hope that Reston would buy.
“A pleasant flight?” Addario enquired. Like everyone else in the world of non-Anahuac origin, he spoke Nahuatl fluently as a second language, but he happened to have near-perfect English as well and hoped to impress Reston with it.
“The usual. Quick. Boring.”
“Ah. Like making love to my wife.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Reston said.
“I should hope not, signor. Not for my sake but for yours. A miserable experience. My mistress, on the other hand… Then I would have grounds for jealousy!” He chuckled at the joke. Reston looked unamused. Oh, the English. So uptight. Addario realised he wasn’t going to break any ice with salaciousness, so changed tack. “Your first visit to our beautiful island?”
Reston nodded.
“If there is time, perhaps I can introduce you to our native cuisine. Rabbit in chocolate sauce, for example, and pasta alla Norma. I know this wonderful trattoria in Taormina, right by the beach, where they serve the most delicious pani ca meusa. Some say a burger made from fried spleen sounds disgusting, but believe me, when you taste it…”
“My return flight departs at four. Just show me your operation, so I can see for myself what I might or might not be purchasing.”
“Of course, signor.” Not just uptight — businesslike to the point of being rude. Well, that was an admirable trait, Addario supposed, if you ran as large a corporation as Reston did. No one got to earn a seven-figure annual salary by being nice. Still, would a little civility go amiss?
The Mediterranean glittered to their left. To the right, pale against the brilliant blue sky, stood Mount Etna, growing ever closer. A plume of smoke drifted from the summit of its snow-streaked cone, a smudge of grey pastel in the air. It seemed a benign thing, that plume, given the seething subterranean turmoil that generated it. The sigh of a man whose passion for life is spent.
Etna could rage, though, if the Great Speaker willed it. Nearly every volcano on the planet could.
The limo wound through low fertile foothills, eventually pulling into the public car park on Etna’s eastern flank. A four-wheel drive waited to ferry Reston and Addario onward to the CCMM site. They bumped along a track grooved by truck tyres and caterpillar treads, upwards through a landscape of ash and rough clinkery rock. Here on these barren black slopes it seemed like the world was constantly being rubbed out and restarted, never finished, an eternal first draft.
Addario pointed out the fusion plant that hunkered half a mile away in the huge depression known as the Valley of the Ox. Its domes and cooling towers wobbled like mercury in the heat haze. On the Great Speaker’s say- so, the plant could send intense bursts of energy deep into Etna’s magma chambers in order to trigger volcanic activity. This might happen at any time, contingent on His Imperial Holiness’s whim. It was rare if a volcano was not erupting somewhere on earth, spewing ash and gas into the atmosphere and keeping the thermostat on the planetary greenhouse turned up high.
“As long as we receive the standard twenty-four hours’ notice,” said Addario, “we can pack up our equipment and be off-site with plenty of time to spare. In fact, our safety record is amazing, if I do say so myself. In the past decade we have lost only thirteen workers, and all those fatalities have been due to sudden catastrophic machinery failure or individual negligence. Not a bad statistic, and well below average for a company this size.”
“Nothing worth obtaining comes without loss of life.”
“Well put, signor. Indeed.”
The four-wheel drive deposited them in the thick of CCMM’s current mining site. The obsidian lode was located not far from the Piano Caldera near the base of Etna’s summit cone — a deep seam of felsic lava that had been churned up during recent eruptions and cooled under just the right conditions. A high silica content gave it the necessary viscosity to remain solid rather than become crystalline.
Mechanical diggers were busy excavating the area, exposing the layers of volcanic glass for workmen to hew out with pneumatic drills. Addario handed Reston a pair of overboots, a hard hat and an emergency particulate respirator. Then he led the Englishman on a tour of the site.
Conversation was kept to a minimum, as they had to compete with the roar of diesel engines and the staccato hammering of the drills. Addario assumed anyway that Reston already knew what he was looking at. The man’s family had been in the obsidian trade for four generations, and Reston Rhyolitic Ltd. was Britain’s largest importer and distributor of the mineraloid. It would be odd, to say the least, if the Englishman had had no first-hand experience of the noise, dust, heat and sulphur stench of a volcano-side mine, nor any understanding of the crude, brute-force methods needed to extract obsidian from where it was birthed at these rupture points in the earth’s crust.
Work halted as Etna stirred underfoot. The ground heaved, growling louder than the drills whose chatter it had silenced. Everyone waited for the tremor to pass, poised, ready to down tools and run if need be. There hadn’t
