Bloodland: A Novel (44 page)

He hasn’t been back to his hotel yet, not since he left it yesterday morning.

He needs to shower and change.

Last night he slept on Ellen’s couch.

Slept
.

He didn’t sleep. He was too wound up.

Too wired.

Having been followed and harassed for most of the day, they had a difficult time at the end giving reporters and photographers the slip. As a reporter himself, Jimmy was, and remains, uncomfortable with this.

But still, as the cab glides along Fifth Avenue now – the Flatiron just ahead – it all hits him again, the sheer scale of what has happened.

And the fact that a little over an hour ago he accepted a job offer.

Or, at any rate, a commission.

For a series of articles.

What he can’t help thinking is how pleased the old man would be. Jimmy sees him now, reaching up to a bookshelf, pulling down a paperback, studying the cover for a few seconds, as though re-acquainting himself with something, and then handing it over with the words, ‘Here, read this.’

This
being a primer, a window on a world, a form of code, an exhortation.

One of many.

The cab shoots across Fourteenth Street and Jimmy starts reaching for his wallet. He gets out at Eighth and makes his way over to Washington Square Park. It’s sunny and warm, with high blue skies. Was it only Monday that he sat here on a bench, facing uptown, trying to figure out what to do?

Three days.

It seems longer ago than that.

He sits on another bench now.

He still hasn’t figured out what to do, of course – not exactly. But he has a much clearer idea.

Just as he has a much clearer idea what direction his story for
Parallax
should take. It’s been forming in his mind for some time, coming into focus.

It’s a direct line all right, as he explained to Max Daitch, but one that goes far beyond the tawdry self-destruction of the Rundle brothers.

It’s a different route.

It’s the supply chain.

The blood-soaked motherlode.

Isn’t that what Susie Monaghan called it? In that last text she sent?

Which reminds him.

He takes out his phone, checks for messages – there are quite a few, with Maria at the top of the list.

He looks up, and gazes out over the square.

Where was he?

The supply chain. He needs to follow it. He needs to see where it leads. He needs to find out where the thanaxite ends up, who’s using it and what for.

Who has the most to gain.

There are other leads, as well. That third name, for instance – the old guy Dave Conway mentioned, and more than once. Who’s
he
? What was
his
role in what happened?

That’s definitely something Jimmy ought to chase up.

He holds out his phone, scrolls down for the number.

But first, before he gets down to work, there’s an important call he has to make.

*   *   *

Vaughan feels it already, creeping up on him as he opens his eyes, the post-nap crankiness – but today he has to fight it, keep it at an acceptable level, because Meredith is due back this afternoon. She’s been in LA attending a premiere, and she’ll be all sunny and starstruck, full of stories about celebs she met. The last thing she’ll want to encounter in her kitchen is a cranky old man whose idea of a movie star is John Garfield.

Not that he gives a damn, not really.

Vaughan was seventy-eight when they got married and she was twenty-six. He’d never been without a companion in his life, and at the time it had seemed like the right thing to do, affirmative, pro-active.

Or how about stupid?

It’s a vanity trap he’s seen plenty of other guys his age fall into – having a beautiful young wife on your arm when you’ve already got one foot in the grave. But then he went ahead and fell into the trap himself.

Trap
.

It’s not a trap exactly, it’s an age thing. She talks a lot, which grates on his nerves, not that he blames
her
for that, and she spends his money – mostly on real estate, décor and clothes. But at least she isn’t a monster, like Jake Leffingwell’s twenty-four-year-old, Lisa, who insisted on getting involved in the business from the start and has dragged Leffingwell’s staid old company through the mud with all sorts of expensive and high-profile litigation. It’s ironic, he thinks, poor old Jake has aged about ten years since he married Lisa.

Vaughan goes into the study. He sits at his desk, and looks at the computer, but decides not to turn it on.

He’s had enough. All morning, wall to wall.

He thinks of poor Hank Rundle.

Henry C.

Talk about dragging a staid old company – and a respected family name – through the mud! By the time this is over, Clark and J.J. between them will have undone a century and a half of dedicated brand-building.

Pair of jackasses.

But as far as Vaughan himself is concerned, the damage is significant. There’s no question about that. At least it’s contained, though, it’s private.

No one is tweeting about the Oberon Capital Group.

Nevertheless, he
will
have to make a few calls and set something in motion. Paloma Electronics are on target for the first-phase rollout of the BellumBot, but to maintain any kind of competitive advantage they clearly need a new five-year plan, and a new source of thanaxite, one that doesn’t depend so heavily on the good graces of a nonentity like Colonel Arnold Kimbela.

Vaughan looks at the phone.

Time and tide, as it were.

He picks it up and dials the number for Craig Howley at the Pentagon. After the usual song and dance, he gets through.

‘Jimmy, how are you?’

‘I’m good, Craig, I’m good.’

‘My God, have you been
following
this?’

‘I
know
, it’s horrible, isn’t it?’ He wanders from his desk over to the window. ‘Just horrible.’

‘I mean, what the hell makes someone flip like that?’

‘I don’t know. And I guess we’ll never know.’ Vaughan is gazing down now at the passing traffic on Park Avenue. ‘But in a roundabout way, Craig, that’s why I’m calling. We need to talk. I want to have another look at Logar Province.’

Afghanistan.

Southeast of Kabul.

Although the discovery here a few years ago of a substantial thanaxite deposit was omitted from a recently published geological survey of the region, Vaughan has been reliably informed that it’s there. The trouble with mining in Afghanistan, however, has always been the country’s woefully inadequate transportation infrastructure.

But it seems as if that might be about to change.

The Chinese have embarked on a long-term project to establish a new trans-Eurasian corridor, a sort of modernised version of the old Silk Road. Vaughan’s idea is to get in early, establish a foothold in Logar. Fly under the radar for a while and see what happens.

He’s learnt that you have to take a long view on these matters.

‘Sure, Jimmy, of course. I’m actually going to be in New York at the end of the week.’

‘Oh?’

‘You want me to swing by?’

‘That’d be great.’

They make an appointment for Friday afternoon.

As he’s closing his phone at the window, Vaughan sees a car pulling up below.

The driver gets out. The doorman appears.

Showtime.

A few moments later Vaughan is in the entry foyer, and feeling, almost in spite of himself, a flutter of anticipation. But not just for the next thirty seconds and his wife’s arrival home.

For something more than that.

For the future itself.

The elevator glides open and Meredith steps out, followed by the doorman, who is carrying her bags.

She is wearing a figure-hugging royal-blue pencil dress and black patent leather stilettos. Radiant and fragrant, she also has a new hairstyle, a bob, short and boyish.

Vaughan likes it, likes it all.

‘Darling,’ she says, opening her arms to embrace him, ‘did you miss me?’

ALSO BY ALAN GLYNN

Winterland

Limitless

(formerly titled
The Dark Fields
)

A
LAN
G
LYNN
is a graduate of Trinity College. His first novel,
The Dark Fields,
was released in March 2011 as the film
Limitless
by Relativity Media. He is also the author of
Winterland
.

Author Interview for

BLOODLAND

ALAN GLYNN

Given the complexity of the story, can you remember what your starting point was when plotting
Bloodland
?

Yes, I started with the idea of a helicopter crash on the Donegal coast. I wanted a shocking event like this to be the raw material for a conspiracy. The thing is, helicopter and plane crashes have been at the center of a surprisingly large number of conspiracies over the years, where politically or commercially “convenient” deaths occur—a classic case being that of Enrico Mattei, whose work in restructuring the Italian oil and gas industries posed a considerable threat to the international cartels. Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash in 1962. Officially, it was an accident, but no one really believed that. More recently, there was the Kaczynski crash in Russia, about which questions have been asked, about which theories abound. Of course, these things are enormously difficult to prove, making it one of the purest forms of conspiracy, and also one of the most horrific. In any case, unraveling the causes of my mysterious air crash, finding a nefarious justification for it, is what set the story in motion.

Did the idea for
Bloodland
come out of the global financial crisis, or were you already thinking about these ideas before that?

The global financial crisis is not central to
Bloodland
. It’s there in the background, all right, and it impacts directly on one character, but a lot of what happens in the story could have happened at any time. The scramble for resources in Africa is nothing new, corporate greed and malfeasance are nothing new, and the venality of politicians is certainly nothing new. Where the story is rooted in the present, I suppose, is in the area of America’s identity crisis vis-à-vis China. That feels like a huge drama that will be unfolding for quite some time to come. But as with [my novel]
Winterland,
any confluence between the book’s plot and current events is almost incidental as far as I’m concerned. What really interests me is the psychology, the interior life, of these people in positions of incredible power, people who seem to have no moral compass and very little awareness of the consequences of their actions.

Bloodland
is set in Paris, New York, Dublin, and Congo: how did you go about making the sense of place as authentic as it is?

And don’t forget Verona and London. I’ve lived in a few of these places and I suppose I drew on memory for much of the detail. With the places I haven’t lived in, I simply did research—but this then crucially gets filtered through whichever character is involved in the scene. So it becomes a sort of double act of imagination, this person in that place. It was something I was particularly aware of when writing the scenes set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For these, I was able to buffer my lack of direct knowledge with the densely layered perspectives of the characters, Tom Szymanski and Clark Rundle.

Bloodland
has the kind of plot where tiny details at the start lead to huge revelations by the end. How hard is it when writing a story like this to keep back secrets from your readers?

It’s not easy. I continually re-read, rewrite, and revise. At the same time it’s an organic process and the subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. A connection that in the context of the story might seem inevitable, something meticulously and very deliberately placed there by the author, will often in fact have occurred to me at the very last minute. Maybe it was there all along, waiting to be discovered, but the poor sap at the keyboard isn’t necessarily the first one to see it. But then when it all becomes clear, you have the luxury of being able to go back and rearrange stuff, to reweight and recalibrate scenes in the overall context of the story. As the writer, you just have to pay attention, which I suppose isn’t too much to ask. Another way of keeping secrets back from the reader, of course, is by not knowing them yourself, as you go along. No plan, therefore, no outline. It’s a good way of keeping things fresh and unpredictable, but it’s also fraught with danger. You can write yourself into a corner. Or fall off the tightrope.

Bloodland
follows in the footsteps of some great thrillers that have exposed corruption, from films such as
The Parallax View,
TV series such as
State of Play,
and novels like
The Constant Gardener
. Do you have any particular favorites in the genre, and did any in particular influence you?