Blood Is Dirt (28 page)

‘How's Selina?' asked Vassili, when his friend stood up to go for a leak.

‘She's coming over from Lagos tonight.'

Vassili explained something to his friend, who listened by the door and leaned a hairy, sinewy forearm up against the wall. He grunted and played with his balls then went out into the yard.

‘He doesn't speak English, your friend?'

‘Only French and it's good for me to speak Russian. Makes me... you know... emotional for the old country.'

‘What's his game?'

‘He has no game. He's just visiting. We're talking.'

‘What's so interesting?'

‘He's been telling me about something called red mercury. You know it?'

‘I've heard of it. I've heard it's nothing. Expensive nothing.'

‘That's what the Americans say. That's what they hope.'

‘The Germans too.'

‘Yes,' said Vassili, tossing back a shot, ‘but my friend disagrees.'

‘How would he know?'

‘He used to work at Chelyablinsk-65 up in the Urals and after that at a research reactor in Tashkent.'

‘An interesting man.'

‘If you're interested in that kind of thing. I prefer vodka.'

‘What's he doing here?' I asked. ‘Nobody just visits Benin.'

‘He looks for work.'

‘Selling cars?'

‘Why not? It's money.'

‘It's not nuclear science, though, is it?'

‘There are too many nuclear scientists. How many people want someone who can design a plutonium reprocessing plant? Who needs to reprocess plutonium? A lot more people want to buy cars and nobody wants to kill you if you do that.'

‘Why should anybody want to kill him?'

‘He has knowledge. He could sell it to unpopular people. Iraqis, for example. That would upset other people. Americans. He's telling me it's big problem. There are two thousand scientists, in Russia, now, who can build a bomb... but where's the work? How do you earn a living?'

‘This guy can build a bomb?'

‘No, no, no. He worked in plutonium reprocessing. But now they dismantle the missiles. These missiles will produce a hundred tons of plutonium and four hundred tons of uranium. Where's his job gone? Who needs to reprocess plutonium now?'

‘Tons? A hundred
tons
of plutonium?'

‘Tons, my friend, and it only takes five little kilos of plutonium to make a bomb. A hundred thousand kilos of plutonium stretched out over the whole of Russia. Well, that could easily become ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five kilos, no? You see the problem. There are people who understand the technology with no work, and there's the material, too much material.'

‘And then there are people like your Kazakh friend...'

‘Yes. He said he had six and half kilos. So you see...'

‘Your friend here... he really wants to sell cars?'

‘No. I try to persuade him. He wants me to speak to the government. Get him government job. You see, he's a Russian, they like to work for the state. I tell him if the government want to start a programme like that, what they need him for? They buy the material, they buy the scientist but what they need more than anything is the engineering. A nuclear bomb isn't just plastic explosive and a detonator. It takes precision. This is something we must thank God for.'

‘How do you know all this, Vassili?'

‘The Kazakh bastard tell me last week.'

‘How long's your friend going to be around?'

‘Some time.'

‘Have you spoken to Selina?'

‘Not since the night she drank the piri-piri vodka. My God, she's some woman. If I wasn't so fat,' he said, slapping his gut.

Vassili introduced me to his friend, Viktor. He gave me the keys to the Peugeot and went through the documents. I drove back across the lagoon and didn't even notice how the car was running, purring like Vassili's wife. I was thinking about Russians. How they all come together in one place. How suddenly they all know something about nuclear bombs. How they're all so well tuned in to the boodle frequency... for communists. Or maybe it was the vodka culture that brought them out of themselves.

Heike was asleep when I came in at 9 p.m. I called a lawyer friend of mine. A woman with the unlikely name of Isabelle Lawson, a Togolese with Ghanaian family, bilingual and very strong on Francophone and Nigerian law. I asked her if she was interested in advising on the Letter of Credit and told her to wear something suitable for the Italian evening and wait for my call.

I was late but the chief didn't mind. He had Selina, who had miraculously arrived at 8.30 p.m., to talk to. She had the look of an athlete at the top of her game. She radiated confidence and the chief was basking in it like a sunbathing python with a pig inside.

We talked about the meeting with the Cotonou rice agents, and in covering the AMObank Letter of Credit details, I mentioned Isabelle Lawson. The chief told me to bring her on. Within half an hour we were eating bowls of pasta and talking
scaloppine
like any bunch of business people on a jolly. Ben was sitting with his hands clasped behind the back of his chair. He could see the chief's boiler was close to the red line over Isabelle, and it was the only way to stop his own hands dancing across the table and losing him his job.

We split at midnight, as pumped as a sales crew after a guru session. I dropped Isabelle off at her home in the Cocotiers district and took Selina back to the house. She wanted to hit the New York New York with me but I told her Heike was off games. I asked her what she'd been doing all day.

‘Covering ground,' she said.

‘Does the chief know how you got the rice?'

‘No way.'

‘But Franconelli knows who it's for?'

‘Sure.'

‘Does Franconelli get anything?'

‘Maybe.'

‘He agrees things on a “maybe”?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Is this the client talking?'

‘Nice car,' she said, and lit a cigarette.

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘You still want to sell the chief some nuclear material?'

‘I don't think there's anything he wouldn't buy off me now.'

‘I might have the answer to a problem.'

‘Which one?'

‘Verifying the product,' I said. She didn't leap. ‘Not so interested after all?'

She shrugged. We continued in silence. I eased the car up and down the troughs of the dirt road and pulled up at the gates. I opened them and drove in behind Heike's Pathfinder.

‘Did you tell Heike about our little tussle last night?' she asked.

‘There didn't seem much...'

‘So, no. Right?'

‘Vassili knows you, Selina,' I said. ‘You're a tow bitch.'

‘That's not what Franconelli thinks. Roberto to me.'

‘Wait 'til he gets to know you better.'

‘He's in love with me.'

‘That was quick.'

‘Older men fall for me.'

‘So the rice deal's a gift. A love token.'

‘He's not that sentimental.'

‘I thought he might be after what he's been through.'

‘That's true. It wasn't as expensive as it should have been.'

‘What's he want?'

‘He wants to know how Graydon's oil deal goes.'

‘Why?'

‘He's involved.'

‘So how come he doesn't know?'

‘They don't trust each other, these guys.'

‘So what was all the ground you covered?'

‘The next bit'll cost you.'

‘Forget it, Selina.'

‘No sex.'

‘Just a chaste little kiss?'

She laughed, ditched her cigarette and crushed it with her foot. She tapped her bottom lip with her finger.

‘You have to promise me something.'

‘What do I get if I promise?'

‘You get to give Gale what she needs.'

‘I wouldn't call paying Gale off my responsibility.'

‘You also get a bonus.'

‘Of what?'

‘Whatever's left in the bag by the time we're finished. You've already got the car.'

‘I lost one too.'

‘That's right, you did. It feels such a long time ago.'

‘Is that it?'

‘And I'll leave you alone for ever.'

‘Don't go and break down crying now.'

She gave me a withering smirk and folded her arms.

‘Well?' she asked.

‘So what have you got?'

‘Promise first.'

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘I want to pull the plutonium scam on the chief, but you've got to help me right to the end. No chickening out.'

‘Babba Seko must not end up with any of that material.'

‘He won't. I promise.'

‘And you mustn't say a word to Heike.'

‘About last night?'

‘About selling plutonium to people like Babba Seko.'

She giggled and flicked her lighter on and off.

‘OK, it's a deal,' I said. ‘Your turn.'

‘I've got proof that the chief and Graydon between them have ripped off Roberto for around twelve million dollars on these oil scams.'

‘You know, all you got to do is tell Roberto that and those guys'll be concrete moorings for floating jetties out in the Gulf.'

‘I know,' she said, ‘but where's the fun in that?'

When Franconelli told Selina he wanted to know about the oil scam she'd read him absolutely right. As soon as we were out of the office she hit the nearest PC. She had one piece of information from Roberto, which was the name of the company through which they worked the Nigerian end of the oil operation—BASOLCO. One snag. She needed a password. Not even Babba Seko was that stupid and, anyway, it was Ben who'd set up the system.

It didn't take female intuition to know that the password was going to have something to do with the boss. She spoke to his secretary. She was the daughter of the chief's wife's brother which gave her the chief's wife's maiden name. Great. It didn't work. Misread the man. Not personal enough. This did get her into the chief's office though, tagged by the secretary and there it was, up on the wall—the photograph of the Nigerian national football team. Who was the chief's favourite player? Rashidi Yekini. She volleyed that at the screen and scored.

The BASOLCO accounts were done by shipment. The sale was made. The money was paid into the Caymans, Neruda account. The expenses were deducted—the freight to the shipowner, the larger bribes directly into safe-haven accounts and the smaller ones in a lump in Nigeria. There was nothing strange about any of this except that fifty-eight of the seventy-two shipments made over the last four years had been done by four ships—the
Limnos III,
the
Ohio Warrior,
the
Red Solent
and the
Mithoni VII.
They were all Panamanian flag vessels. Each ship was owned by an individual Panamanian company and those companies were owned by a holding company called LUNEXCO'S.A. of the Cayman Islands. What drew Selina was the name of the managing director of the Panamanian companies—José Marcos. She remembered the phone call Graydon took in his office—‘Hi José.'—and we were dismissed.

She called a friend in London who was an expert on offshore companies and asked if he could do some digging around on LUNEXCO. He came back within the hour to say that LUNEXCO was solely owned by Graydon Strudwick. Then she looked at the freight rates. She spoke to a broker in the oil department at Clarksons in London. The freight rates were consistently between $1 and $2 per ton above the market level and there had always been other ships in the area who would have, in the broker's opinion, been prepared to drop the market rate even further. The only time the cargoes were fixed at market levels were on the fourteen occasions when one of Graydon's ships weren't around.

That seemed typical of Graydon—not in it for the money but the humiliation. He wanted to be able to sit on the swing sofa with Franconelli and think, ‘I'm ripping you off, spico.' Just like his videos did, it gave him power.

If Franconelli got hold of this it wouldn't be the money that would get Graydon killed, it would be the lack of respect, and, if Selina was right, respect was something Roberto was having trouble with right now.

Selina came across the second set of BASOLCO accounts as she was closing down. In these accounts everything was the same except that the bribes paid to the important people with offshore accounts (one of whom was Robert Keshi, the guy from the storage department at NNPC) were twenty-five per cent higher than in the original BASOLCO accounts. She flicked through some of the chief's offshore bank accounts and came across one in Madeira which had amounts corresponding to the loading on the bribes. The chief was doing the same thing, gently ripping off Franconelli for around $100,000 a shipment.

One thing that Selina couldn't find was any indication that these cargoes of oil were paid for. There seemed to be no sums of money going from BASOLCO into NNPC, although she matched a lot of names from the NNPC personnel listed in their published Year Accounts with the people receiving bribes into offshore banks from BASOLCO. Another thing that wasn't clear from these accounts was whether Graydon knew what the chief was doing and vice versa.

The reason Selina had been talking to Clarksons was that she wanted to fix a ship from Port Harcourt to a refinery in Rotterdam with the 120,000 tons of oil Graydon had offered her. There were three ships and she worked all of them. One of them was the
Ohio Warrior.
; which fell out of the running early on because she wouldn't drop her rate from $2 per ton above the market. The broker was puzzled and Selina fixed the cargo on a vessel at 25 cents per ton below the market rate. It looked as if Graydon was using her to persuade Franconelli that the BASOLCO shipping operations were straight up.