Hungry as the Sea (40 page)

It was a porno movie, a French version of Deep Throat entitled
Gorge profonde
. The print was scratched and the French dubbing was out of synchronization. The cinema was almost empty, so they found two seats in isolation at the rear of the stalls. Lazarus stared unblinkingly at the screen, as he began the second part of his report. This was a detailed breakdown of cash movements within the Christy Marine Group, and Nick was again amazed at the man’s penetration.

He drew a verbal picture of the assemblage of enormous sums of money, marshalled and channelled into orderly flows by a master tactician. The genius of Duncan Alexander was as clearly identifiable as that flourishing signature with the flamboyant A and X which Nicholas had seen him dash off with studied panache. Then suddenly the cash-flow was not so steady and untroubled, there were eddies and breaks, little gaps and inconsistencies that nagged at Nicholas like the false chimes of a broken clock.

Lazarus finished this section of his report with a brief summation of the Group’s cash and credit position as at a date four days previously and Nicholas realized that the doubts were justified. Duncan had run the group out along a knife-edge.

Nicholas sat hunched down in the threadbare velvet seat, both hands thrust into the pockets of his trenchcoat, watching the incredible feats of Miss Lovelace on the screen, without really seeing them, while beside him Lazarus took an aerosol can from his pocket, screwed a nozzle on to it and noisily sprayed a fine mist down his own throat. It seemed to relieve him almost immediately.

“Insurance and marine underwriting of vessels owned by the Christy Marine group of companies.” He began again with names and figures and dates, and Nicholas picked up his own trend. Duncan was using his captive company, London and European Insurance and Banking, to lead the risk on all his vessels, and then he was reinsuring in the marketplace, spreading part of the risk, but carrying a whacking deductible himself, the principle of self-insurance that Nicholas had opposed so vigorously, and which had rebounded so seriously upon Duncan’s head with the salvage of
Golden Adventurer
.

The last of the vessels in Lazarus recital was
Golden Dawn
, and Nicholas shifted restlessly in his seat at the mention of the name, and almost immediately he realized that something strange was taking place.

“Christy Marine did not apply for a Lloyd’s survey of this vessel.”

Nicholas knew that already. But she has been rated first class by the continental surveyors. It was a much easier rating to obtain, and consequently less acceptable than the prestigious at Lloyd’s.

Lazarus went on, lowering his voice slightly as another patron entered the almost deserted cinema and took a seat two rows in front of them. “And insurance has been effected outside Lloyds.” The risk was led by London and European Insurance. Again, Duncan was self-insuring, Nicholas noted grimly, but not all of it. “And further lines were written by –” Lazarus listed the other companies which carried a part of the risk, with whom Duncan had re-insured. But it was all too thin, too nebulous. Again, only careful study of the figures would enable Nicholas to analyse what Duncan was doing, how much was real insurance and how much was bluff to convince his financiers that the risk was truly covered, and their investment protected, Some of the names of the re-insurers were familiar, they had been on the list of transferees who had taken stock positions in Christy Marine.

“Is Duncan buying insurance with capital?” Nicholas pondered. Was he buying at desperate prices. He must have cover, of course. Without insurance the finance houses, the banks and st’tutons which had loaned the money to Christy Marine to build the monstrous tanker would dig in against Duncan. His own shareholders would raise such hell – no, Duncan alexander had to have cover, even if it was paper only, without substance, a mere incestuous circle, a snake eating itself tail first.

Oh, but the trail was so cleverly confused, so carefully swept and tied up, only Nicholas’ knowledge of Christy Marine made him suspicious, and might take a team of investigators years to unravel the tortured tapestry of deceit. In the first it had occurred to Nicholas that the easiest way to stop Duncan Alexander was to leak his freshly gleaned suspicions to Duncan’s major creditors, to those who had financed the building of
Golden Dawn
, But he realized that this was not enough.

There were no hard facts, it was all inference and innuendo.

By the time the facts could be exhumed and laid out in all their putrefaction for autopsy,
Golden Dawn
would be on the high seas, carrying a million tons of crude. Duncan might have won sufficient time to make his profit and sell out to some completely uncontrollable Greek or Chinaman, as he had boasted he would do. It would not be so simple to stop Duncan Alexander, it was folly to have believed that for one moment. Even if his creditors were made aware of the flimsy insurance cover over
Golden Dawn
, were they too deeply in already? Would they not then accept the risks, spreading them where they could, and simply twist the financial rope a little tighter around Duncan’s throat. No, it was not the way to stop him, Duncan had to be forced to remodify the giant tanker’s hull, forced to make her an acceptable moral risk, forced to accept the standard Nicholas had originally stipulated for the vessel.

Lazarus had finished the insurance portion of his report and he stood up abruptly, just as Miss Lovelace was about to attempt the impossible.

With relief, Nick followed him down the aisle and into the chill of a Parisian evening, and they breathed the fumes that the teeming city exhaled as Lazarus led him back eastwards through the Arrondissement with those little dancing steps, while he recited the details of the charters of all Christy Marine’s vessels, the charterer, the rates, the dates of expiry of contract; and Nicholas recognized most of them, contracts that he himself had negotiated, or those that had been renewed on expiry with minor alterations to the terms. He was relying on the recorder in his pocket, listening only with the surface layer of his mind, pondering all he had heard so far from this extraordinary little man – so that when it came he almost did not realize what he was hearing.

“On 10th January Christy Marine entered a contract of carriage with Orient Amex. The tenure is ten years. The vessel to be employed is the
Golden Dawn
, The rate is 10 cents US per hundred ton miles with a minimum annual guaranteed usage of 75,000 nautical miles.” Nicholas registered the trigger word
Golden Dawn
and then he assimilated it all.

“The price, ten cents per hundred miles, tht was wrong, high, much too high, ridiculously high in this depressed market. Then the name, Orient Amex – what was there about it that jarred his memory?

He stopped dead, and a following pedestrian bumped him, Nicholas shouldered him aside thoughtlessly and stood thinking, ransacking his mind for buried items of information. Lazarus had stopped also and was waiting patiently, and now Nicholas laid a hand on the little man’s shoulder.

“I need a drink.” He drew him into a brasserie which was thick with steam from the coffee machine and the smoke of Caporal and Disque Bleu, and sat him at a tiny table by the window overlooking the sidewalk.

Primly, Lazarus asked for a Vittel water and sipped it with an air of virtue, while Nicholas poured soda into his whisky.

“Orient Amex,” Nicholas asked, as soon as the waiter had left. “Tell me about it.”

“That is outside my original terms of reference,” Lazarus demurred delicately.

“Charge me for it,” Nicholas invited, and Lazarus paused as the computer reels clicked in his mind, then he began to speak.

“Orient Amex is an American-registered company, with an capital of twenty-five million shares at a par value of ten dollars –” Lazarus recited the dry statistics.

“The company is presently undertaking substantial dryland exploration in Western Australia and Ethiopia, and offshore exploration within the territorial waters of Norway and Chile. It has erected a refinery at Galveston in Texas to operate under the new atomic catalyst cracking process, first employed at its pilot plant on the same site.

“The plant is projected for initial operation in June this year, and full production in five years.” It was all vaguely familiar to Nicholas, the names, the process of cracking the low-value high-carbon molecules, breaking up the carbon atoms and reassembling them in volatile low-carbon molecules of high value.

“The company operates producing wells in Texas, and in the Santa Barbara offshore field, in Southern Nigeria, and has proven crude reserves in the El Barras field of Kuwait, which will be utilized by the new cracking plant in Galveston.”

“Good God,” Nicholas stared at him. The El Barras field but it’s cadmium-contaminated it’s been condemned by –”

“The El Barras field is a high cadmium field, naturally enriched with the catalyst necessary for the new process.”

“What are the cadmium elements? Nicholas demanded.

“The western area of the El Barras field has sampled at 2,000 parts per million, and the north and eastern anticline have sampled as high as 42,000 parts per million.” Lazarus recited the figures pedantically. The American and Nigerian crudes will be blended with the El Barras crudes during the revolutionary cracking process. It is projected that the yield of low-carbon volatiles will be increased from 20% to 40% by this process, making it five to eight times more profitable, and extending the life of the world’s known reserves of crude petroleum by between ten and fifteen years.”

As he listened, Nicholas had a vivid mental image of the stylus in Samantha’s laboratory recording the death throes of a cadmium-poisoned clam. Lazarus was talking on dispassionately. “During the cracking process, the cadmium sulphide will be reduced to its pure metallic, non-toxic form, and will be a valuable by-product, reducing the costs of refining.”

Nicholas shook his head in disbelief, and he spoke aloud. “Duncan is going to do it. Across two oceans a million tons at a time, in that vulnerable jerry-built monster of his, Duncan is going to do what no other ship-owner has ever dared to do - he’s going to carry the cad-rich crudes of El Barras!”

Chapter 28

From the balcony windows of his suite in the Ritz, Nicholas could look out across the Place Vendome at the column in the centre of the square with its spiral relief made from the Russian and Austrian guns and commemorating the little Corsicans feats of arms against those two nations. While he studied the column and waited for his connection, he did a quick calculation and realized that it would be three o’clock in the morning on the eastern seaboard of North America. At least he would find her at home.

Then he smiled to himself. If she wasn’t at home, he’d want to know the reason why.

The telephone rang and he picked it up without turning away from the window. There was a confused mumbling and Nicholas asked, “Who is this?”

“It’s Sam Silver - what’s the time?”

“Who is it?”

“Good God, it’s three o’clock. What do you want?”

“Tell that other guy to put his pants on and go home.”

“Nicholas!” There was a joyous squeal, followed immediately by a crash and clatter that made Nicholas wince and lift the receiver well away from his ear. “Oh damn it to hell, I’ve knocked the table over. Nicholas, are you there? Speak to me, for God’s sake!”

“I love you.”

“Say that again, please. Where are you?”

“Paris. I love you.”

“Oh,” her tone drooped miserably. “You sound so close. I thought –”

Then she rallied gamely. “I love you too – how’s himself?”

“On the dole.”

“Who is she?”

“Welfare. The Dole is unemployment insurance –” he sought the American equivalent. “I mean he is temporarily unemployed.”

“Great. Keep him that way.”

“Did I tell you I love you, I forget?”

“Wake up. Shake yourself. I’ve got something to tell you.”

“I’m awake – well, almost anyway.”

“Samantha, what would happen if somebody dumped a million tons of 40,000 parts concentration of cadmium sulphide in an emulsion of aromatic Arabian crude into the Gulf Stream, say thirty nautical miles off Key West?”

“That’s a freaky question, Nicholas. For three in the morning, that’s a bomber.”

“What would happen?” he insisted.

T”he crude would act as a transporting medium,” she was struggling to project a scenario through her sleepiness, “it would spread out on the surface to a thickness of quarter of an inch or so, so you’d end up with a slick of a few thousand miles long and four or five hundred wide, and it would keep going.”

“What would be the results?”

“It would wipe out most of the marine life on the Bahamas and on the eastern seaboard of the States, no, correct that – it would wipe out all marine life, that includes the spawning grounds of the tuna, the freshwater eels and the sperm whale, and it would contaminate –” she was coming fully awake now, and a stirring horror altered her tone. “You’re macabre, Nicholas, what a sick thing to think about, especially at three in the morning.”

“Human life?” the asked.

“Yes, there would be heavy loss,” she said. “As sulphide, it would be readily absorbed and in that concentration it would be poisonous on contact, fishermen, vacationers, anybody who walked on a contaminated beach.” She was truly beginning to realize the enormity of it. “A large part of the population of the cities on the east coast – Nicholas, it could amount to hundreds of thousands of human beings, and if it was carried beyond America on the Gulf Stream, the Newfoundland Banks, Iceland, the North Sea, it would poison the cod fisheries, it would kill everything, man, fish, bird and animal. Then the tail of the Gulf stream twists around the British Isles and the north continent of Europe – but why are you asking me this, what kind of crazy guessing game is this, Nicholas?”

“Christy Marine has signed a ten-year contract to carry one million ton loads of crude from the El Barras field on the South Arabian Gulf to the Orient Amex refinery in Galveston. The El Barras crude has a cadmium sulphide constituent of between 2,000 and 40,000 parts per million.”