Arctic Drift dp-20

by Clive Cussler

  “Don’t forget the tax that British Columbia imposes for each metric ton of carbon transferred across its border, a fraction of which goes back to the federal coffers. The fact is, it is a safe moneymaking play for the province. Plus, you may have noticed our dock facility.” Goyette pointed to a huge covered building across the grounds that sat adjacent to a small inlet. “We have a five-hundred-foot covered dock capable of accommodating tanker ships that can carry liquid CO2. We’re already receiving shipments and intend to show that we can process carbon waste from Vancouver industry, as well as logging and mining businesses up and down the coast. Allow us to build similar facilities across the country and we’ll be able to manage a large portion of our national carbon quotas. And with excess capacity built into the new coastal facilities, we can even bury American and Chinese carbon at a nice profit.”

  The politician’s eyes glimmered at the prospect of additional revenues flowing to the government’s ledgers.

  “The technology, it is perfectly safe?” he asked.

  “We’re not talking nuclear waste here, sir. This facility was built as a prototype and has been operating flawlessly for several weeks now. Mr. Prime Minister, it is a no-lose proposition. I build and operate the plants, and ensure their safety. The government just gives me the go-ahead and receives a cut off the top.”

  “And there is plenty left for you?”

  “I’ll get by,” Goyette replied, roaring like a hyena. “All I need is the continued site and pipeline approvals from you and the resources minister. And that won’t be a problem, will it, Minister Jameson?”

  Jameson looked at Goyette with a beaten subservience. “I should think there is little to interrupt our trusting relationship,” he replied.

  “Very well,” Barrett said. “Send me your draft proposals and I’ll run it past my advisers. Now, where’s some more of that fine champagne? ”

  As the group made their way back to the refreshment tent, Goyette quietly pulled the resources minster aside.

  “I trust you received delivery of the BMW?” Goyette asked with a sharklike grin.

  “A generous gift that my wife is quite ecstatic about. I would prefer, however, that future compensations remain less conspicuous.”

  “Not to worry. The contribution to your offshore trust account has already been made.”

  Jameson ignored the comment. “What is this nonsense about building new facilities along the coast? We both know the geology here is marginal, at best. Your so-called aquifer at this site will reach capacity in just a matter of months.”

  “This site will run indefinitely,” Goyette lectured. “We have solved the capacity issue. And as long as you send me the same geological assessment team as before, there will be no problem with our coastal expansion plans. The chief geologist was quite amenable to revising his conclusions for a rather nominal price.” He grinned.

  Jameson grimaced at the knowledge that corruption flourished within the department well beyond his own dirty hands. He could never recall the exact day that he woke up and realized that Goyette had owned him. It was several years past. The two had met at a hockey game, when Jameson was making his first bid for a seat in Parliament. In Goyette, he had seemingly found a wealthy benefactor who shared a progressive vision for the country. The political campaign contributions grew as Jameson’s career advanced, and somewhere along the way he had foolishly crossed the line. Campaign contributions progressed to jet rides and free vacations, ultimately leading to outright cash bribes. With ambition in his heart and a wife and four children to support on a civil servant’s salary, he blindly took the cash, convincing himself that the policies he promoted for Goyette were just. It wasn’t until he was appointed natural resources minister that he saw the other side of Goyette. The public perception of him as an environmental prophet was just a cleverly designed façade, he came to learn, disguising Goyette’s true nature as a money-hungry megalomaniac. For every wind farm he developed with public fanfare, there were a half dozen coal mines he operated, his actual ownership buried in a laundry list of corporate subsidies. Phony mining claims, forged environmental impact statements, and outright federal grants to Goyette’s holdings were all jury-rigged by the minister. In return, the bribes had been steady and generous. Jameson had been able to purchase an elegant house in the upscale Ottawa neighborhood of Rockcliffe Park and accumulate more than enough cash in the bank to send his kids to the finest schools. Yet he had never intended for things to slip so far, and he knew there was nothing he could do to escape.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can support,” he told Goyette in a tired voice.

  “You will support as much as I need,” Goyette hissed, his eyes quickly turning ice cold. “Unless you wish to spend the rest of your days at Kingston Penitentiary.”

  Jameson physically wilted, accepting the reality with a weak nod.

  Confident in Jameson’s indenture, Goyette, features softened, waved an arm toward the tent.

  “Come, cheer up now,” he said. “Let us join the Prime Minister and drink a toast to the riches he is about to bestow upon us.”

  9

  Clay Zak had his feet up on the plant manager’s desk while casually perusing a book on frontier history. He glanced out a picture window as the thumping from the departing helicopter rattled the glass panes. Goyette entered the room a few seconds later, a suppressed look of annoyance on his face.

  “Well, well, my capital planning director,” Goyette remarked, “looks like you missed your flight out.”

  “It was rather a cramped ride,” Zak replied, placing the book into his satchel. “Quite stuffy, as a matter of fact, with all those politicians aboard. You should really get a Eurocopter EC-155. A much faster ride. You wouldn’t have to spend as much time trapped conversing with those prostitutes. By the way, that natural resources minister? He really doesn’t like you.”

  Goyette ignored the remarks and slid into a leather chair facing the desk. “The PM was just notified of Elizabeth Finlay’s death. It was reported as a boating accident.”

  “Yes, she fell overboard and drowned. You’d think a woman of her means would know how to swim,” he smiled.

  “You kept things tidy?” Goyette asked in a hushed voice.

  A pained look crossed Zak’s face. “You know that is why I don’t come cheap. Unless her dog can talk, there will be no reason to suspect it was anything but a tragic accident.”

  Zak leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling. “As Elizabeth Finlay goes, so goes the movement to halt natural gas and oil exports to China.” He then leaned forward and prodded Goyette. “Exactly how much would that bit of legislature have cost your Melville gas field operation?”

  Goyette stared into the killer’s eyes but saw nothing illuminating. The man’s weathered, slightly longish face showed no emotion. It was the perfect poker face. The dark eyes offered no window to his soul, if he even had one, Goyette thought. Hiring a mercenary was playing with fire, but Zak was clearly a tactful professional. And the dividends were proving to be enormous.

  “It is not an inconsequential amount,” he finally replied.

  “Which brings us to my compensation.”

  “You will be paid as agreed. Half now, half after the investigation is closed. The funds will be wired to your Cayman Islands account, as before.”

  “The first stop of many.” Zak smiled. “It might be time for me to check in on my little nest egg and enjoy a few weeks of R and R in the sunny Caribbean.”

  “I think vacating Canadian soil for a short time would be a good idea.” Goyette hesitated, not sure whether to keep rolling the dice. The man did nice work, he had to admit, and always covered his tracks. “I’ve got another project for you,” he finally proposed. “Small job. It’s in the States. And no body work required.”

  “Name your tune,” Zak said. He had yet to turn down a request. As much as he thought Goyette a cretin, he had to admit that the man paid well. Extremely well.

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sp; Goyette handed him a folder. “You can read it on the next flight out of here. There’s a driver at the gate who will take you to the airport.”

  “Flying commercial? You may have to get a new capital planning director if this keeps up.”

  Zak rose and strode out of the office like an emperor, leaving Goyette sitting there shaking his head.

  10

  Lisa Lane rubbed her tired eyes and again scanned the periodic table of elements, the same standard chemistry chart posted in most every high school science class across the land. The research biochemist had long ago memorized the table of known elements and could probably recite it backward if given the challenge. Now she gazed at the chart hoping for inspiration, something that would trigger a new idea.

  She was searching for a durable catalyst that would separate an oxygen molecule from a carbon molecule. Scanning the periodic table, her eyes stopped at the forty-fifth element, rhodium, symbol Rh. Lane’s computer modeling kept pointing to a metal compound as a likely catalyst. Rhodium had proved to be the best she had found so far, but it was totally inefficient, in addition to being a horribly expensive precious metal. Her project at the George Washington University Environmental Research and Technology Lab had been called “blue sky research,” and maybe it would stay that way. Yet the potential benefits of a breakthrough were too enormous to overlook. There had to be an answer.

  Staring at the square denoting rhodium, she noticed the preceding element had a similar symbol, Ru. Absently twisting a lock of her long brown hair, she said the name aloud: “Ruthenium.” A transitional metal of the platinum family, it was an element that she had not yet been able to test.

  “Bob,” she called to a wiry man in a lab coat seated at a nearby computer, “did we ever receive that sample of ruthenium that I requested? ”

  Bob Hamilton turned from the computer and rolled his eyes. “Ruthenium. The stuff is harder to obtain than a day off. I must have contacted twenty suppliers, and none of them stocked it. I was finally referred to a geology lab in Ontario that had a limited amount. It cost even more than your rhodium sample, so I only ordered two ounces. Let me check the stockroom to see if it came in yet.”

  He walked out of the lab and down a hall to a small storeroom where special materials were kept under lock and key. A graduate assistant behind a caged window retrieved a small box and slid it across the counter. Returning to the lab, Bob set the container on Lisa’s desk.

  “You’re in luck. The sample arrived yesterday.”

  Lisa opened the box to find several tiny slivers of a lusterless metal housed in a plastic container. She selected one of the samples and placed it onto a slide, then examined it under a microscope. The tiny sliver resembled a furry snowball under magnification. Measuring the mass of the sample, she placed it in the sealed compartment of a large gray housing that was attached to a mass spectrometer. No less than four computers and several pressurized gas tanks were affixed to the device. Lisa sat down at one of the keyboards and typed in a string of software commands, which initiated a test program.

  “Is that the one that’s going to be your ticket to the Nobel Prize?” Bob asked.

  “I’d settle for a ticket to a Redskins game if it works.”

  Glancing at a wall clock, she asked, “Want to go grab some lunch? I won’t be able to get any preliminary results for at least an hour or so.”

  “I’m there,” Bob replied, slipping off his lab coat and racing her to the door.

  After a turkey sandwich in the cafeteria, Lisa returned to her tiny office at the back of the lab. A minute later, Bob ducked his head around the door, his eyes opened wide in bewilderment.

  “Lisa, you better come take a look at this,” he stammered.

  Lisa quickly followed him into the lab, her heart skipping a beat as she saw Bob approach the spectrometer. He pointed to one of the computer monitors, which showed a string of numbers rushing down the screen beside a fluctuating bar graph.

  “You forgot to remove the rhodium sample before you initiated the new test. But look at the results. The oxalate count is off the charts,” he said quietly.

  Lisa looked at the monitor and trembled. Inside the spectrometer, a detector system was tabulating the molecular outcome of the forced chemical reaction. The ruthenium catalyst was successfully breaking the carbon dioxide bond, causing the particles to recombine into a two-carbon compound called an oxalate. Unlike her earlier catalysts, the ruthenium/rhodium combination created no material waste by-product. She had stumbled upon a result that scientists around the world had been seeking.

  “I can hardly believe it,” Bob muttered. “The catalytic reaction is dead-on.”

  Lisa felt light-headed and dropped into a chair. She checked and rechecked the output, searching for an error but finding none. She finally allowed herself to accept the probability that she had hit pay dirt.

  “I’ve got to tell Maxwell,” she said. Dr. Horace Maxwell was director of the GWU Environmental Research and Technology Lab.

  “Maxwell? Are you crazy? He’s testifying before Congress in two days.”

  “I know. I’m supposed to accompany him to the Hill.”

  “Now, there’s a suicide mission,” Bob said, shaking his head. “If you tell him now, he’s liable to bring it up in testimony in order to obtain more funding for the lab.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing?”

  “It would if the results can’t be duplicated. One lab test doesn’t solve the mysteries of the universe. Let’s rerun things and fully document every step before going to Maxwell. At least wait until after he testifies,” Bob urged.

  “I suppose you’re right. We can duplicate the experiment under different scenarios just to be sure. The only limitation is our supply of ruthenium.”

  “That, I’m sure, will be the least of our problems,” Bob said with a hint of prophecy.

  11

  The Air Canada jet skimmed high over Ontario, the landscape below appearing like a green patchwork comforter from the tiny first-class windows. Clay Zak was oblivious to the view, focusing instead on the shapely legs of a young flight attendant pushing a drinks cart. She caught his stare and brought over a martini in a plastic cup.

  “Last one I can serve you,” she said with a perky smile. “We’ll be landing in Toronto shortly.”

  “I’ll savor it all the more,” he replied with a leer.

  Dressed in the traveling businessman’s uniform of khaki slacks and a blue blazer, he looked like just another sales manager headed to an off-site conference. The reality was quite different.

  The only child of an alcoholic single mother, he’d grown up in a ragtag section of Sudbury, Ontario, with little guidance. At fifteen, he’d dropped out of school to work in the nearby nickel mines, developing the physical strength that he still retained twenty years later. His life as a miner was short-lived, however, when he committed his first murder, driving a pickax into the ear of a fellow miner who’d taunted his family lineage.

  Fleeing Ontario, he assumed a new identity in Vancouver and drifted into the drug trade. His strength and toughness were put to use as an enforcer for a major local methamphetamine trafficker named “The Swede.” The money came easily, but Zak treated it with an unusual intelligence. A self-taught man, he read voraciously, and judiciously studied business and finance. Rather than blowing his ill-gotten gains on tawdry women and flashy cars like his cohorts did, he shrewdly invested in stocks and real estate. His lucrative drug career, however, was cut short in an ambush.

  It wasn’t the police but a Hong Kong supplier looking to expand his control of the market. The Swede and his escorts were gunned down during a nighttime deal in Vancouver’s rambling Stanley Park. Zak managed to duck the fire and disappear unscathed into a maze of hedges.

  He bided his time before taking revenge, spending weeks staking out a luxury yacht leased by the Chinese syndicate. Setting off a timed explosive charge, using knowledge gleaned from his days in the nickel mines, he blew up the boa
t with all of the Hong Kong associates aboard. Watching from a small speedboat as the fireball erupted, he saw a man on an adjacent yacht get thrown into the water by the concussion. Realizing the authorities would spend little time investigating the death of a known drug dealer but might expand the dragnet if a wealthy socialite was an added victim, he sped over and fished the unconscious man out of the water.

  When a sputtering Mitchell Goyette came to, his gratitude was uncharacteristically effusive.

  “You saved my life,” he coughed. “I will reward you for that.”

  “Give me a job instead,” Zak said.

  Zak enjoyed a huge laugh when he reminded Goyette of the whole story years later. Even Goyette conceded the humor in it. By then, the mogul had come to admire the subversive talents of the former miner, employing him as a high-level enforcer once again. But Goyette knew Zak’s loyalty was based solely on cash, and he always kept a wary eye on him. For his part, Zak enjoyed being the lone wolf. He had influence with Goyette, and while he enjoyed the compensation he also enjoyed tweaking his rich and powerful employer.

  The plane landed at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport a few minutes ahead of schedule. Shaking off the effects of the in-flight martinis, Zak stepped out of the first-class compartment and headed to the rental-car counter while waiting for his bags to be unloaded. Taking the keys to a beige four-door sedan, he drove south, skirting the western shoreline of Lake Ontario. Cruising the lakefront expressway for another seventy miles, he exited at a sign reading NIAGARA. A mile below the famous falls, he crossed the Rainbow Bridge and entered the state of New York, handing the immigration officer a phony Canadian passport.

  Turning past the falls, it was just a short drive south to Buffalo. He found the city airport in plenty of time to catch a half-empty 767 to Washington, D.C., flying under yet another assumed name, this time with a phony American identification. Dusk had fallen as the jet crossed over the Potomac River on its final approach to Reagan National Airport. It was Zak’s first time in the nation’s capital, and he duly stared at the city’s monuments from the back of a cab. Watching the blinking red lights atop the Washington Monument, he idly wondered if George would have deemed the towering obelisk an absurdity.