The Samurai Inheritance (44 page)

He nodded and as he walked off, Jamie could swear he heard the first few whistled bars of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Keith Devlin was in the meeting room, seated behind the big desk flanked by Joe and another bodyguard. Andy took the stranger’s place and the hard eyes told Jamie he wasn’t part of the team any more.

‘I thought I said we should be alone until we get the call?’ Jamie said.

‘So you did, son.’ Devlin’s lips twitched. ‘But I thought I’d make it clear who’s in charge right from the start. It’s easier all round if we understand each other.’

‘All right.’ Jamie could see there was no point in arguing. ‘But I hope you’ve complied with my other … request, or we might as well all go home.’

Devlin’s brows came together and his lips twitched in an entirely different way. He glanced at Andy, who shrugged. ‘We’ve searched, but we haven’t found anything.’

‘All right, son.’ The mining boss picked up a cell phone from the desk. ‘No need to get shirty. Everything’s just the way you wanted it. The girls are at the airport with tickets for the next flight out.’ He hit a preset button. ‘Joe? Get the lady on the phone.’

He passed the handset to Andy and the bodyguard tossed it to Jamie, who caught it with his right hand. ‘Fiona?’

‘Jamie, where are you?’

‘I’m back in Arawa. There’s nothing to worry about. We have a few details to straighten out. I plan to catch a later flight and meet up with you in Brisbane.’

‘But …’

Jamie glanced at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t you be boarding?’

‘We’re on board, but they say the flight’s been delayed for technical reasons.’

Jamie looked at Devlin and the tycoon’s grim smile told its own story. ‘I’m sure they’ll get it sorted out soon. Give my love to Lizzie.’ He handed the phone back to Andy. ‘The briefcase is hanging inside an empty cistern behind the old hospital.’

‘Get it,’ Devlin ordered.

They waited in silence until Andy returned ten minutes later with the briefcase under his arm. The security guard worked at the leather straps to open it and pushed it across the desk. Devlin’s face creased into a shark’s grin as he retrieved one of the papers, nodding as he read it. ‘Okay, Andy.’

Andy dialled a preset number. ‘Vern? The deal’s done, mate. You can let the plane go.’

Jamie’s legs almost gave way with relief. It was over. He looked to Devlin for some sort of acknowledgement, but the businessman continued to study the documents, frowning occasionally as he came across a symbol that tested his knowledge. With a glance at Andy, Jamie shrugged and turned away.

‘Not interested in what’s in here? It makes fascinating reading.’ Devlin was savouring the moment, basking in the spotlight of his cleverness. Here I am, the victor, and this is the mark of my genius.

‘I already know.’

The smile tightened. ‘Of course.’

‘What really interests me is what you’re going to do with it.’ Play the plucky loser, Michael had said. There’s nothing he likes better than crowing over the people he’s beaten. Spin it out. ‘I can understand it might be worth a great deal of money. But you can’t be certain what will happen when the world gets to know that Winston Churchill knew about Pearl Harbor a week before it happened and didn’t tell his friends the Yanks. Who knows what it will do to the economy? That sheet of paper might just be a smoking gun pointed right at your head.’

‘This?’ Devlin laid down the document he’d been reading and picked up the other piece of coated paper from the case. ‘You think it’s about this?’ He held it away from his body and pulled something from his pocket with his other hand. ‘But you’re right. We don’t want Bougainville all over the front pages and folks writing alternative histories about Yamamoto and Churchill, do we?’ Jamie heard the flick of a cigarette lighter and cried out as the paper disintegrated in Devlin’s hands with a bright flash. ‘Clever buggers the Japs. Way before their time. Paper impregnated with gunpowder to ensure complete destruction.’

‘I don’t—’

‘No, you don’t, son. You thought you had it all worked out, but Keith Devlin was way ahead of you. It’s a shame about old Doug,’ he shook his head in mock sorrow, ‘but he’d had his day and to be honest I was beginning to have doubts about him. Imagine getting to his age and suddenly developing a conscience. I’ll see he gets a decent send-off, but it’s better this way. We were worried they might have got you too and run off with the merchandise. Andy and the boys were around to pick up the pieces, but they couldn’t get near you for some rogue BRA outfit. Fortunately, good old dependable, go-the-extra-mile Jamie Saintclair delivered the goods.’

Jamie somehow managed to keep his thoughts to himself as he listened to the cynical dismissal of Doug Stewart and his half a lifetime’s service to the man behind the desk. ‘But it was all for nothing.’

‘Not for nothing, son.’ Devlin rose from his seat. Jamie waited apprehensively for his next move, but it was only to extract a cigar from a box on a side table. He lit it with the lighter and drew in two puffs before continuing. ‘For progress. When I was here back in the day, I was forever looking at stuff from the war. Jap bunkers. Crashed planes and that old Sherman on Tank Corner round by Buin. The local boys used to bring me things. Old rifles, bayonets, even a couple of live hand grenades. One day they walk in with a map case they’d found with the bones of a Jap officer, and lo and behold what was in it? That’s right, a letter from the lieutenant who recovered Yamamoto’s body saying he’d found a briefcase with the admiral, only some Boog native had pinched it, and by the way this is what was in it.’

‘If you knew all the time why didn’t you use it?’

‘Oh, I tried, son. I was a bushy-tailed idealist just like you in those days. I went to Canberra and spilled the beans to some po-faced civil servant. The next thing I know I’m locked in an office with a US State Department official who laughed in my face. And pretty soon I was laughing too.’ He blew out a big cloud of smoke from the cigar and Andy moved half a step away. ‘Why? Because they already knew. Why do you think the Yanks screwed the Brits into the ground after the war while they were pouring money into Japan and Germany and helping them rebuild their countries? In nineteen forty-six the UK was about to go bust, so Westminster sent a fella called John Maynard Keynes to Washington. Naturally, they expected the Americans to slap him on the back and send him home with a shipload of gold bullion with the thanks of a grateful nation for all their sacrifices.’ Keith Devlin laughed out loud at the notion. ‘Only by then the Yanks had found the other copy of the Yamamoto document in some Tokyo safe. Instead of rocking the boat with the New World Order by blowing the whistle, Harry S. Truman decided to make your countrymen pay blood money for those eight thousand sailors at Pearl Harbor. They reckon Keynes looked like he’d been kicked in the teeth when he heard the terms, but the Brits had no option but to pay up. They kept on paying until five years ago, and all that time they watched the world’s economies passing them by. Tragic, ain’t it?’

‘But there was something else in the letter you never mentioned to anybody.’ Jamie suddenly saw where the scenario was taking them.

‘That’s right, Jamie.’ He held up the second document. ‘By rights this shouldn’t exist. Sometime in nineteen forty-two the Japs sent a surveyor to Bougainville to check out the mineral deposits and he came back with a big fat blank.’

‘But the Panguna Mine has produced billions.’

‘Sure, he found copper.’ The Australian shrugged. ‘But it was in traces so small it was uneconomic to mine it using the techniques they had in those days. What a lot of people don’t understand is that BCL took a huge gamble when they opened that mine, but it paid off.’

‘Not for the Moroni and the other tribes up there.’

Devlin ignored him as if he’d never spoken. ‘Only there was something else that one of their top scientists must have noticed and thought the report was worth sending to Yamamoto. The surveyor found deposits of a metal so useless he didn’t even bother to name it, but when I read what he said that little Devlin alarm bell went off in my head. What’s the rarest and most expensive metal on the planet, son?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jamie admitted, happy to play Devlin’s games for now. ‘Platinum, maybe.’

‘Not far off, but the answer is rhodium.’

‘So that’s what this is all about?’

‘Bougainville Island is sitting on top of one of the biggest deposits of rhodium on Earth, enough to double the world’s output. Just a couple of years ago it was selling for ten thousand dollars an ounce, but with the new applications they’re developing for it in the weapons industry, that could double and double again.’

Keith Devlin studied Jamie with a knowing half-smile on his face and suddenly he wasn’t the only person in the room with an alarm bell in his head. By now Jamie’s was ringing off the scale, accompanied by a little voice that said Devlin was giving him too much information. There was only one way off the island for the man who knew this much, and it wasn’t in an Air Niugini Fokker. Jamie glanced at Andy and his partner. They looked relaxed enough, but their eyes never left him and he knew they were ready for him to try anything. Even if he somehow managed to evade them, there’d be more of Devlin’s bodyguards outside the door. He only had one chance and that was to play the game out to the last hand.

‘If this stuff is so valuable why hasn’t anybody found it before now?’ He let his curiosity show. ‘The island must have been crawling with geologists since before the mine opened.’

Devlin smiled. ‘Either they weren’t looking for it – the world only found a use for rhodium in the mid-Seventies – or they were looking in the wrong place. This document in my hand has the exact coordinates. Do you know what that means, Jamie?’ Jamie knew exactly what it meant, but he also knew it was one of those questions that didn’t need an answer. The tycoon’s voice took on that messianic certainty the Englishman had learned meant he was lying through his ten-thousand-dollar teeth. ‘It means that we can make a huge investment in the future of this island and its people and a huge investment in technology to make future mining operations more environmentally acceptable. Bougainville will be the showcase for the world of how industry and indigenous people can combine for the benefit of both. You’ve heard my vision for the island, Jamie. Tell me I’m wrong.’

Jamie let a smile play across his face, but his voice dripped with contempt even though he now knew for certain that every word was leading him towards an early grave. ‘Sure, Keith,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve heard your vision for the island, but the one I heard didn’t sound anything like that. The one I heard had a private army beholden to one man and ready to break the heads of anyone who speaks out. It had politicians bought and paid for by that same man on the island, in Port Moresby and even in Canberra.’ Andy came off the wall with his fists clenched and a killing look in his eye, but Devlin waved him back.

‘Let him finish,’ the businessman snapped. ‘He’ll find out the price of his little speech later.’

‘You didn’t mention the seven other mining concessions, every one of them just as big as Panguna, which are just the start as you turn this island into one big hole. Or the islanders who are going to lose their ancestral lands to make way for them. All those people whose lives will depend on the company store for everything, because their coconut groves have been ripped out and they can no longer grow their own food, or fish in rivers that will all go the same way as the Jaba. Do the Rotokas people, or the Lawunuia, or the Askopan, or the Ramopa,’ he listed all the tribes Michael had said would be left landless by Devlin’s plans, ‘know they’re all going to go the same way as the Moroni, Keith? Or that they’re destined to be worker ants for Devlin Metal Resources?’

Keith Devlin was still smiling, but the smile was frozen on his face. ‘The funny thing about worker ants, son, is that as long as you give them a roof over their head and food in their belly, they don’t even know they’re worker ants.’

‘It’s all true?’

‘Seems to me that old Doug’s been speaking out of turn before he croaked. I’m getting soft. I should’ve got rid of him sooner.’ If there was an Angel of Death his eyes couldn’t have been any bleaker than the ones now focused on Jamie Saintclair. ‘The rhodium’s the key. All the rest would have come my way in time, but with the rhodium I can buy every politician in the Pacific. Of course, it only works if nobody else knows about it.’

‘So I’m going to have an unfortunate accident?’

‘I’m afraid so, son.’

‘So I’m going to have an unfortunate accident?’

Devlin looked at Jamie as if he’d just grown another head and the Englishman was almost as bemused, because he’d swear his lips never moved. The words had the metallic flatness of a recording and came from the door behind Keith Devlin. As the tycoon turned in astonishment they were repeated again.

Andy and Joe moved fast for the door, hands going for the guns at their belts.

‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Two white men in T-shirts and jeans appeared from the balcony like ghosts. One ghost carried a machine pistol and the other a pump-action shotgun. Andy sensibly froze, but his partner turned with the gun rising to bear on the intruders. It was very brave, but also very foolish because the blast of the shotgun shook the whole room and Jamie thought he’d gone deaf as the bodyguard was smashed against the rear wall and bounced to land face down on the wooden floor. The door behind Devlin burst open and Michael appeared like an avenging angel holding a pistol in one hand and a badge in the other. Magda Ross followed him, her eyes wide with concern and only relaxed when she saw Jamie was safe. It had all happened so quickly that the sound of the shotgun still reverberated in the room as Michael pushed Keith Devlin back into his chair and placed the badge on the desk in front of him.

‘You’ve no right …’ the businessman spluttered.

‘Take a look at the badge, Mr Devlin. Will he live, Steve?’ This to the man leaning over the prone body of the bodyguard. The other covered Andy with the machine pistol, which was largely unnecessary because the security man seemed to have decided the whole affair had nothing to do with him.