The Abrupt Physics of Dying (20 page)

Cathinone Sprint

During the five-hour drive back to Aden they chewed steadily from a large sheaf of
qat
that lay on the seat between them. Leaf by leaf, Clay built a tumour of green mash that stretched the skin of his cheek tight. Neither man spoke, Hussein hunched over the steering wheel of the Land Cruiser as the desert distances unravelled.

Surely here, where Allah was the sole arbiter of fate, cause and effect were now evident. And as the longshore dunes and the blue of the ocean flashed past and disappeared along the black ribbon of asphalt in the rear-view mirror, he was sure that Hussein was calling upon God to exact retribution. The instrument of justice was there, its square black butt wedged between Hussein’s back and the seat cushion. All that was required was an agent to wield it. Out here, a body dumped face down in a scraped roadside hole would remain unknown to all except God.

And if justice was inherent, if it was
real
, if its existence were somehow twinned with a sentient, all-seeing deity capable of perfect knowledge and judgement, then surely he
was
guilty, and if anyone deserved to die it was him. How many times over the last ten years had he visualised his own end, put a gun to his head in the solitary depths of a black sleepless morning, determined to redress the balance, do what God had failed to do? But each time he’d desisted, stopped short of pulling the trigger, dragged himself out of the pit. And each time he’d wondered why.

By the time they drove through the gates and pulled into the office compound in Aden it was late, past eleven o’clock, and the
cathinone was in control of his nervous system. His heart hammered at his ribs. Sweat poured from the backs of his knees and the top of his scalp and from every pore until his body was covered in a film of slime.

The nightguard waved them in. Only a couple of big Toyota Land Cruisers and a Mercedes diesel remained in the parking bays. The lights were still on in Karila’s office. Hussein pulled the vehicle up at the front steps. ‘Don’t leave Aden,’ he said.

Clay jumped out, ran up the big marble staircase three steps at a time to the first floor, and pushed on the door to Karila’s office. It was locked. He rapped hard on the wood planking. Nothing. He tried again, shouting out the Finn’s name, pummelling the door with his fist. There was no one. He spun away and lurched down the corridor towards the accounting offices. He searched the floor, but the lights were off, office doors closed and locked.

Parnell’s office was at the top of the stairway, beyond the bureaucratic defences of the secretarial station, occupying the view corner of the building. Moon shadow cut the floor and walls into wedges of silver and black. The door was bathed in grey light from the secretary’s computer screen. He pushed down on the handle. It was locked. He turned and looked back to the landing and the stairway and stood very still and listened, but all he could hear was the throbbing of his heart. The fluorescent dial of his watch showed 23:27. He pulled his knife from its pouch, flipped open the long probing blade and threaded it into the keyhole with a trembling hand. It didn’t take long to tumble the bevel on the crude, locally made lock. The handle clicked and the door swung open.

All the trappings of authority were here: the nameplate announcing position, the oversized mahogany desk and leather armchair, the expansive meeting table, the charts and maps plastering the walls, and outside the big bank of windows, Aden’s harbour shot across with the slimmest scar of moonlight. Almost out of time. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him. Reports and papers covered the desk: a geotechnical investigation for the expansion area,
completion details for the new Haya-4 well, reserve estimates for the Haya field, an order for drilling in the new Block 57 exploration leases, stacks of bills and invoices.

Then something caught his eye. A plain manila folder set dead centre on the desk. A handwritten tab said: Production Data. Clay picked up the file, stepped into the moonlight, flipped open the cover. Inside was a stapled sheaf of A4 papers. He turned the file on end, squinted in the semi-darkness. The top sheet was a graph – a broad cross, like the blades on a pair of shears; a solid line showing steadily declining oil production over the past year, and, starting in October of last year, a dashed line indicating a rapid increase in water production. He integrated under the curve, mentally tallying the slices. Just over 21 million barrels of formation water – the ancient brine locked away with the oil deep in the reservoir – had been pumped out of the ground in just the last few months. It was a hell of a lot of water. And oil production was way down. It must be costing them a fortune. No wonder they were pushing this expansion so hard. It was a losing game: the more formation water they pulled out, the more reservoir pressure declined, and the less oil they produced.

Voices from outside shattered his concentration. He replaced the file, crouched down and stole across to the window, pulse racing. One of the guards was standing next to the Land Cruiser, talking to Hussein. Clay looked at his watch. He had been inside too long. He walked to the door and stepped back out over the threshold, jumpy from the
qat
and a dawning realisation that he had just crossed another barrier. He was about to close the door, when something he had seen made him stop.

He stepped back inside, strode quickly back to the desk and scanned the piles of documents. The corner of a staple-bound sheaf of paper hung from midway down one of the stacks. It was dated 22 April. He peeled off the top two inches of the pile and peered down at the document. It was a laboratory report. He picked it up and angled it towards the moonlight. He scanned the columns of
chemical compound names and concentrations, memorised each figure. Everything he had specified. It was the original sample he had taken at Al Urush, the one the lab technician had said he’d spilled. He felt his stomach hollow out.

Twenty minutes later Clay was back at the guesthouse. He went straight to the communications room, punched Rania’s number into the sat phone. After ten rings, the line went dead. He tried again, let the phone ring. He’d let it ring all night if he had to. Finally, minutes later, a desk clerk answered, clearly annoyed. Clay asked for Rania’s room, waited as the line gurgled and hissed like antique plumbing.

‘
Allo
, oui
?’ Her dream-interrupted voice, faint, a thousand miles away.

‘It’s Clay.’

Silence. And then: ‘Claymore,
mon dieu
. It is the middle of the night.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

‘What do you want, Clay?’

‘I need to talk to you.’ There was so much he wanted to say. An avalanche.

‘I am listening.’

‘Not over the phone. When can I see you?’

She sighed, was quiet a moment. ‘It was a mistake, Clay.’

Clay stood staring down at the digital glow of the sat phone console, said nothing.

‘Clay, are you there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘I am sorry, Clay. It was my fault. It was wicked of me. I should never have …’ she trailed off.

‘I know mistakes, Rania. And that wasn’t one. Not by a long way.’

‘I am not blaming you.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Rania. There’s no blame here.’

‘I am defiled.’ Guilt dripped from her voice.

‘You can’t mean that, Rania.’

‘I do not expect you to understand.’

‘No, I don’t.’ He fought to control the anger welling up inside him.

She was crying now, sniffling. ‘Please, Clay. It is over. It never began. I need you to respect my wishes.’

‘Rania, please,’ he began, trying to soften his voice. ‘I promise you …’

She didn’t let him finish. ‘Go to bed, Claymore.’ The line went dead.

He dialled the number again. It rang twice, connected, and went dead. He tried three more times. Same result. He walked to his room, jittery, hands trembling, stripped off his clothes and threw himself onto the bed. His heart raged in an amphetamine-fuelled sprint. Could a heart rip itself apart? He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, tried to calm himself and push away a growing sense of dread. Then the boy was there – Mohamed – staring out at him from the deep black sockets of a misshapen skull. The skin was white, covered in dust. The boy’s mouth opened and closed, as if he were trying to speak. But there was no sound save the pounding in his head. He forced his eyes open. The harbour lights trembled across the walls. He swung his feet to the floor and pushed himself up. He stumbled to the armoire and fumbled in the dark for the bottle, collapsed back onto the bed and propped himself up against the wooden headboard. The vodka was warm but it went down like water until it was gone and soon oblivion overcame him.

Liberal Shit

A searing red light tore him awake. Pain engulfed him, shooting from deep within his skull out through burning eyes. He looked at his watch: 10:30. Morning. Jesus. He pushed himself up from the bed and tried to stand, but a wave of nausea buckled his legs and he slipped on the tile. His jaw met the floor with a sickening crunch. He lay where he had fallen and waited for the room to stop spinning.

The side of his face was bathed in a cold slick. He opened his mouth and licked his lips. The acid taste of vomit and the smell of it turned his stomach inside out and jerked him awake. He pushed himself up onto all fours but a stab of pain tore through his palm – a shard of glass had driven deep into the meat of his thumb’s abductor muscle. The floor was flecked with the shattered remains of the vodka bottle. He didn’t remember having dropped it, but he was pretty sure that it must have been empty when it hit the floor. Blood dripped from his face and his hand, swirling red and fractal in the puke. For a long time he watched it, fascinated by the mingling of the two semi-miscible liquids. It was almost beautiful.

A loud knock at the door broke him free. He sat up, leaned against the side of the bed. ‘It’s open,’ he croaked.

Atef stood in the doorway looking down at him. ‘Mister Clay …’ He closed the door, helped Clay up, sat him on the edge of the bed.

Clay pulled the shard of glass from his thumb. Blood welled thick and red from the wound. He leaned forward, jammed the wound down hard against his chest, let the chemicals spin through him.

‘I will call the doctor,’ said Atef.

‘No. It’s nothing. Thanks, Atef.’ Clay pushed himself to his feet, walked to the bathroom, turned on the shower, stood under the steaming water. The tub ran thin red. He could hear Atef scurrying around in the room, the plop of a mop in a bucket, and then the door closing.

When Clay emerged from the bathroom, the mess had disappeared, the room sparkled. A steaming mug of coffee stood on the bedside table, a plate of freshly buttered whole-wheat toast. On the bed was a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine, a large manila envelope. Clay dressed, sat on the bed, sipped the coffee, bound his hand, and opened the envelope. Inside were two dot-matrix printouts of accounts payable, covering the period from 3rd November to 30th December. Clay looked at the first printout, scanned the figures, awake now, lucid. Catering services, vehicle repair, parts, lubricants, office supplies, customs duties on imported pipe, workovers, everything you would expect from a company operating an oilfield. He ran his finger down the rows, found 30th November. He moved ahead in time. On 5th December, a round number: a hundred thousand US dollars. The string of zeroes ballooned out at him, glowed among a litany of sevens and forty-twos and thirty-eights. One hundred grand even, paid to Mansour for Import, Aden. He had never heard of them. He checked against the second printout. Same date. Ninety thousand paid to a numbered account in Cyprus. Ten to Mansour. Clay scanned up the list. There it was again. Another hundred grand. On the parallel list, again, ninety thousand to the same Cyprus account, the difference to Mansour. There were two other identical payments to Mansour, on 24th and 28th November, mirrored by corresponding payments to Cyprus the same day. Clay looked up, took a deep breath. Mansour was providing fake invoices, at a price. And someone was making a lot of money.

Clay pulled the Petro-Tex payroll records from the envelope, flipped through the papers, scanned the names, some familiar, some not: Karila, surprisingly underpaid, Dunkley, Parnell on a big
package, most of it offshore, Z. Todorov, start date 14th November. Clay folded the printouts back into the envelope, stood on uncertain legs. They’re on to you, Jim had said.

Clay found Atef in the kitchen.

‘Good, Mister Clay?’

Clay nodded. ‘Tell your cousin thank you. Who knows about the second set of accounts, Atef?’

‘My cousin is not supposed to know. They think he is stupid.’

‘Dunkley?’

‘My cousin thinks yes. And Mister Parnell.’

Clay showed Atef the accounts page, stabbed his finger onto the name Mansour for Import. ‘Can you check these guys out, Atef? It’s important.’

‘Trouble, Mister Clay?’

‘Just be careful, Atef. Please.’

It was gone midday when Clay reached the Petro-Tex building. His head was still swimming, and the events of the last days now seemed confused and twisted. Any earlier clarity had vanished. Halfway up the stairs he stopped and sat on a step and rested his head in his hands. He had to think.

Two days left. Four samples analysed, a clear upward trend in concentrations. Eleven murdered villagers. Mohammed dead. Al Urush water fifty times more saline than it should be. Hundreds of thousands of dollars syphoned from Petro-Tex operations to offshore accounts in Cyprus. Two million barrels of formation brine brought to surface in seven months. Thierry Champard blown to pieces in a car bomb. Too many unknowns and not nearly enough equations to solve them.

One of the Yemeni office boys appeared at the bottom of the stairs and started up the steps, a tray of steaming tea glasses rattling in his hands, then stopped dead and stared at Clay with his mouth open.
Clay tried to speak, to reassure the boy, but all that emerged was a strangled croak. The boy dropped his head and hurried up the stairs without looking back.

‘
Tammam
,’ Clay managed, pushing himself to his feet. ‘It’s OK,’ he said to the empty stairway. ‘It’s really OK.’

He climbed to the landing and walked past Karila’s office, down the hall to accounting. Dunkley was at his desk, a harried expression on his face. He looked up when Clay stepped in, gave him the up and down a moment and then shook his head.

‘Just no? Care to know the question first?’

Dunkley folded his arms. ‘Not really.’

‘That information about the 22nd April sample?’

Dunkley shook his head, went back to his papers.

‘How about the cheque Karila promised me?’

‘Like I said, Straker. No.’

Clay stood for a moment looking down at the top of the accountant’s head, the veins bulging under the skull-tight skin. ‘Be careful, Dunk. You’re not as good at this as you think.’

Clay spun around and went straight to Karila’s office. The door was open.

Karila was sitting behind his desk, face bathed in blue light from the computer monitor, the document mirrored digital in the lenses of his glasses. Parnell was slumped in a leather armchair facing the desk. Both men jerked their heads up as he entered, looked at him as if he had just emerged from an asylum.

‘Straker, what are you …’ blurted Karila.

Clay sat down and faced the two men. ‘We’ve got a problem.’ There was something different about Karila’s office, but he couldn’t place it.

‘You look more like caveman shit than usual, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘What the fuck happened?’

‘A day of reckoning,’ said Clay, dabbing blood from the cut on his jaw. He captured Parnell in his gaze, held him there. ‘Look, no bullshit, OK? Al Urush is dying. I was there yesterday.’

Parnell blinked twice, lids darting over dark beads, and took a deep breath. He hadn’t applied his eye makeup today, and the grafts on his forehead bulged hideously. It reminded Clay of Al Shams.

‘The PSO told me you were being interrogated,’ said Karila.

‘I was. Listen, damn it. People are dying out there.’

Karila tore his gaze away from the screen, plucked a smouldering Gitane from the ashtray with a bony thumb and forefinger, and inhaled deeply on the cigarette. ‘We have already discussed this. The matter is closed.’

‘It’s the water, Nils. But, of course, you know that already.’

Parnell and Karila exchanged glances but did not answer.

‘Where is it going, Nils?’

Same harried expressions.

‘All that formation water that started to come in a few months ago. Millions of barrels of brine. Where is it going, Nils? Tell me.’

Parnell leaned forward in his chair and shot him a prosecutor’s stare. ‘That’s confidential, Straker. How in the hell do you …’

Clay cut him off. ‘What are you doing with it all? It has to go somewhere.’

‘That is a production matter,’ said Karila. ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with your task – which may I remind you is to secure those approvals as quickly as possible.’

Parnell wheeled on his adjutant. ‘Goddammit, Karila.’

Karila fumbled with a dossier on his desk. ‘I don’t understand, Vance. I took the strictest precautions …’

Clay locked his gaze on Karila. ‘There’s a connection, Nils, between what is happening at Al Urush and all that formation water. The chemistry is similar.’

Karila looked over at his boss, then back at Clay. ‘I don’t know what you heard, Mister Straker, or how. But the fact is that we have expanded and upgraded the evaporation ponds. The system is performing according to spec. The water is not going anywhere. It is evaporating. Al Urush is more than five kilometres from the facility. There is no possibility that we are affecting them.’

Clay traced his finger across the map on Karila’s desk, from the facility down to a little green dot that marked the oasis. The colour of paradise. ‘What if the ponds are leaking? The rocks there are highly fractured. Contaminants move fast in a system like that. There could be all kinds of stuff in that produced water. Have you done any chemical analysis?’

‘Only the routine, just what our production engineers need for their designs.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. Just plain old formation water.’ Karila adjusted his glasses. ‘The ponds are lined, new. They’re not leaking.’

‘It can’t be coincidence,’ said Clay. ‘The water in the
ghayl
at Al Bawazir is also showing signs of impact. Salinity has increased.’

Karila’s eyes widened. ‘Bawazir? What were you doing there?’

Clay looked into the Finn’s pale eyes. ‘Taking samples. Something is happening, Nils.’

‘The water is being
e-va-po-rated
, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘Spelled like it sounds.’

Karila looked at his boss. ‘Besides, a small increase in salinity is not going to make people sick. You know that. It is a disease of some kind.’

‘How sure are you that it’s all evaporating?’ Calculations flashed in his head: daily flow rate, average temperatures, wind speed, pond dimensions. ‘That’s a lot of water. There isn’t enough surface area. Some of it could be percolating into the ground, finding fractures in the rock, migrating down to the oasis.’

‘You ain’t listening, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘You had better start,
now
.’

Clay ignored the remark. ‘Why don’t you deep well it? Put it back in the formation where it came from. That’s best practice.’

‘Don’t fucking well tell me how to do my job, Straker,’ barked Parnell. ‘I’ve been pumping oil out of the ground longer than your mother’s been whoring.’

Clay glared at the American. ‘
Fok
jou
, Parnell.’

Parnell jerked to his feet with surprising speed, stood quivering, fists clenched. Veins long submerged rose up and bulged in his neck. He took a step towards Clay.

Clay swivelled and faced the American, started setting a coil in his legs, bending his knees through a couple of outwardly imperceptible degrees. ‘Come on,
baas
,’ he said, flat. ‘Have a go. No bat this time.’

Parnell stopped dead, glaring up at Clay. For a long moment he stood locked to the tile floor, chest heaving, eyes darting back and forth between Clay and Karila and the open doorway as if he expected someone to come bursting into the room to back him up. Karila just sat there, smoke drifting up from the cigarette between his fingers. And then Parnell backed away. Just dropped his eyes, took three steps back, bumped into the arm of his chair, stumbled. He muttered something Clay couldn’t make out and reached for his inhaler.

‘Please, gentlemen,’ said Karila, intervening. ‘Mister Straker, we have approval from the Ministry of Oil. There is no other economic way to dispose of the produced water.’ The Finn sat impassive on the other side of the desk, the computer screen’s data flickering across the surface of his glasses, the smoke rising from the cigarette burning in the drill-pipe ashtray on his desk.