beavers back in the States were arriving at the office all caffeined up and keen to show their mettle.
‘Phil Larson.’
‘Phil? It’s Martin Nguyen.’
‘Hi, Mr Nguyen.’
‘Phil? Phil? Are you there?’
‘Sure I’m here.’
‘I can’t hear you, Phil! Can you hear me?’
‘I can hear you fine, Mr Nguyen. Maybe there’s a problem with the connection.’
‘Phil? There must be a problem with the connection. I’ll call you right back.’
Oh no you won’t, thought Phil, speed-dialling another number.
‘Hi, Phil.’
‘Hi, Jason,’ replied Phil, pushing open the door. Jason looked up at him in surprise and made to clam his cell.
‘Leave it on!’ Phil told him. ‘I need to block an incoming while I unwind.’
After a quick rinse in what they called the sewer shower, Phil emerged wearing his street clothes. The others were all set to go. Phil told them that he’d be along later, retired to his office and scrolled down on the mobile till he hit ‘Rapture Works’.
‘Martin.’
‘This is Phil, Mr Nguyen.’
‘Finally! I’ve been trying to get you for almost half an hour. Where the fuck were you?’
Phil was not a serious student of human nature — too many variables — but Martin Nguyen had always struck him as being the nearest thing to the electrical circuitry that he loved and understood. Now he sounded like some goddamn chick. What was up?
‘I had to take another call, Mr Nguyen. Our aviation fuel distributor didn’t deliver on schedule and we’ve only got fifteen hours’ supply left. Anyway, I’ve sorted it all out. The gasoline’s going to arrive tomorrow, trucked in from…’
‘I don’t want to hear your goddamn life story, Larson. Report progress.’
‘Well, we’ve been working twelve-hour shifts and getting through around a hundred kilometres each day.’
‘But you haven’t found anything.’
‘You’d have heard if we had.’
‘So how long is this going to take?’
‘No way to tell, Mr Nguyen. We might find it first thing tomorrow, or it might be at the far end of our last beat.’
‘How can we speed up the search?’
‘We can’t. The ultrasound waves require a given amount of time to penetrate down into the ground and reflect back up to the receiver. The duration of each wave bounce represents a physical constant. If the forward motion of the monitoring vehicle exceeds the envelope created by that constant, the information returned is worthless.’
Martin Nguyen’s hiss echoed down the line.
‘Then we need to grow our resources. Hire another helicopter.’
‘Choppers are no use without the hardware.’
‘Have extra units shipped over.’
‘Well, you’d need to talk to head office about that, Mr Nguyen, but I think it might be a problem.’
‘You mean a challenge?’
‘No, I mean a problem. The scanner we’re using was originally developed for military purposes, in highflying planes or drones. The civilian variant, operable at low altitudes, is still in development, but Aeroscan was able to get hold of a beta release prototype for use on your project. It’s a beauty, works just great, but as far as I know there aren’t any more available right now.’
‘Okay. You say you’re working twelve hours a day. That’s only a fifty per cent effort. Get your company to fly out more people, hire another pilot — maybe another gas supplier while you’re at it — and keep going right around the clock.’
‘I hate to tell you this, Mr Nguyen, but it can’t be done. This is strictly visual navigation. We’re flying at less than a hundred feet in a complex environment on the outskirts of a major city surrounded by mountains on three sides. We’re working the flood plain now, but some of the side valleys on our survey chart are barely thirty feet across near the bottom. No aviation instruments could cope with that. The authorities have been pretty co- operative so far, but they’d never let us operate between civil dusk and dawn. Apart from anything else, we’re supposed to be selecting prime locations for a movie shoot. How can you do that in the dark?’
That hiss again.
‘So, worst-case scenario, when is the latest we’ll know whether there’s anything there?’
‘About a month, if all goes well.’
‘That’s way too long.’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mr Nguyen. I didn’t think this thing was time-dated.’
‘The situation has changed. The director of the movie we’re using as cover for the operation now wants to start shooting next week.’
‘So? He won’t bother us none.’
‘No, but you’ll bother him. He’ll wonder what this helicopter is doing all day, patrolling up and down when he’s trying to set up a scene. When he asks around, he’ll be told that it’s surveying locations for scenes in his movie. Bullshit, he’ll say, I never asked for anything like that.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Nguyen, this is way beyond my area of competence.’
‘All right, let’s see how competent you are, Larson. You don’t have a month any more. You have barely a week, so you’ll have to prioritise.’
‘On the basis of what criteria?’
‘How do you mean?’
Phil sighed.
‘Mr Nguyen, our project chart is posted right here on the wall of my office. I’m looking at it now. What I’m seeing is a large-scale map of the area divided into fifteen-metre-wide strips. Those that have been completed are shaded in — apart from today’s, because I haven’t had a chance yet. All the remaining strips look pretty well identical to me. I don’t even know what we’re looking for, except it’s a man-made structure buried somewhere down beneath the riverbed. You’re now asking me to favour some sections of the survey over others, so I’m asking you who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They don’t seem to be wearing their hats.’
‘Don’t get flippant with me, Larson!’
‘Sorry, Mr Nguyen. The heat must be getting to me. Plus everything’s a whole lot tougher since Newman went AWOL. Just yesterday this Italian guy comes around wanting to know what we’re doing and where’s our authorisation from the city. At least I think that’s what he was saying, his English wasn’t too good. I gave him the agreed cover story but he wanted to see the paperwork. I don’t know where those permits are. Never even seen them. And I sure as hell can’t deal effectively with people like that in a foreign language. That was what Pete Newman was for. I do electronics.’
Another, briefer silence.
‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ Martin Nguyen announced.
The isolated stone barn had evidently lain derelict for years, but still smelt strongly of sheep and manure, interwoven with more recent layers of rot, damp and mould. The floor was of beaten earth and the windows filled in with roughly mortared blocks of terracotta brick. Once Giorgio had closed and bolted the massive door, the darkness was broken only by peeps of light from the roof, whose flat stone slabs had shifted over the years. He turned on his torch and suspended it from a loop at the end of a length of rusty wire attached to the main roof-beam, so that it dangled down like a domestic light fixture, then he moved away into the shadowy depths at the fringes of the building.
It was only now that Mantega realised there was another odour present. It was the smell of fear, and the fear was his own. A couple of days after Peter Newman’s kidnapping, an envelope had been deposited in the letter
